Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 1005

Chapter 1005: Aftermath

A kilometer of rock below the market square, Kaiden Grey had just brought the Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet down on the Kawanami dungeon’s core, and the first the surface knew of it was the light.

The violet glow drained out of the parted barricade between one axe-swing and the next.

Calypso’s blade was already committed, mid-arc into a shell-boar’s charge, and the boar simply was not there to receive it. Its legs had quit. It hit the flagstones on its chin, slid the last two meters into her shins, and did not get up, because nothing in the square was getting up anymore.

The horde died where it stood.

Hounds dropped mid-leap. Mantids folded off the barricade halves in rows, hook-limbs curling inward like burnt paper.

The wave that had been breaking against Alexandra’s wall of light for the better part of an hour sagged, knelt, and lay down, hundreds of bodies letting go of their own weight in one rolling hush that swept the square from the gate outward.

"Wha-" Luna’s Stormblade stopped halfway through a swing at an enemy that had stopped existing as an enemy. Then her eyes widened, heart drumming with mounting excitement. "He did it, didn’t he?!"

"Yes. The core..." Aria whispered softly from the barricade’s crown. "Kai reached the core."

Every person on those islands had heard the rule from the man himself, on this same feed, on the morning this undertaking began. When a dungeon dies, everything that ever walked out of it dies with it, wherever on this earth it happens to be standing.

The world was watching the rule come true.

Asakura gasped the same thing, her spear still leveled at a pack that was now a carpet. She said it again in Japanese, to her own squad, and the Twelfth’s shield line came apart at the knees.

Alexandra’s golden wall thinned, flickered, and went out. She stood in the middle of the line with her palms still raised, chest heaving, hair guttering back down from white to blonde, and stared at the quiet like she did not dare trust it.

"...Is it over?" she asked nobody in particular. "Can I stop?"

"You can stop, Lexi," Nyx said.

Alexandra fell forward, face first, onto the flagstones. She had spent every last drop of energy in her body, and the ground was right there.

"Lexi?!" Nyx crouched over her. "Are you okay?" 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Alexandra nodded weakly into the stone. "Just... resting..."

Bastet walked over, leaned down, and patted Alexandra’s head. "No one can call you a token Valkyrie any longer. You earned your keep, blondie."

Alexandra giggled into the ground, happy.

Under the awnings behind the shield line, the medic sat back on his heels and told Oda he could stop squeezing his hand now.

It was not entirely over.

Out on the open road, behind the carpet of its own dead army, the thing that had walled a town was coming apart in real time.

The tube-ridge along its spine spun down with a dying click.

Its mouth-bore sagged open, smoke curling off a barrel that would never cycle again. Then the plate began to leave it, slab after slab of borrowed boar armor sliding off its shoulders and cracking apart on the asphalt like pond ice.

The dungeon’s mana had paid for every graft on its body. The dungeon was dead, and everything it had ever lent was being called home.

Mantis-green blades dropped off its forelimbs. The grey-green mortar sealing its seams crumbled to powder and ran off it in streams.

What buckled to the asphalt in the middle of all that shed hardware was small, pale, and wrong-jointed, a runt the size of a large dog, made of nothing but the scars where its trophies used to attach.

"That’s it?" Calypso lowered her axe and squinted out at the road. "All that armor, and it was hiding that?"

"I’m sick of you. Begone."

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