Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 721

Chapter 721: Consumed

Kaiden’s mana pressure swelled. The crimson deepened at its edges, and the stone around him splintered. The air on the mountainside grew heavy in a way that had nothing to do with altitude.

His eyes were fixed on Selena. The crimson in them had stopped flickering. It was solid now, consuming the white, and the irises burned like coals pressed into his skull.

Cassian’s face went white. Calix took a half-step backward.

The crimson mana pouring off Kaiden’s body had turned visible, a haze of dark red energy that clung to his frame and seeped outward from his skin. The stone beneath him groaned. Small rocks lifted from the ground around his feet, suspended in the field of his fury, trembling.

"Kai, stop!" Aria’s voice cut through from above, raw and desperate.

When he spoke, his voice was wrong. Deeper. Layered. As if something behind his vocal cords had woken up and was speaking alongside him.

"She curved that attack." The doubled voice carried across the mountainside, quiet and certain. "She aimed it at the monsters and bent it toward Nyx."

His hands were shaking. The knuckles had begun to split, and crimson light seeped through the splits.

"If the Association watches that footage and decides I’m the problem, then they can come and get me."

Tears welled in the Moon Valkyrie’s eyes as she shook her head. "I don’t care about any of that now! I just want you to not leave us behind!"

Then it went wrong.

Calypso’s head snapped toward Kaiden and the color drained from her face, because the demoness recognized what was stirring inside him before anyone else could. She had been there when he turned into a body of fire and horn and hatred.

"No," she whispered. Then louder, her voice climbing. "No, Darling, no!"

The girls were no longer concerned about prison, weren’t arguing about the Association or the competition or the broadcast.

"The Wrath is eating Darling!" she screamed at the others. "It’s not like last time! Something is wrong with it! It’s going to swallow him whole!"

Last time, in the longhouse, the transformation had been triggered by a stranger’s cruelty. A chieftain who meant nothing to him beyond the offense. The Wrath had been clean in its own terrible way, a fire lit with purpose, aimed at a target, contained within a domain.

This was different.

This was his own blood. The sister he’d idolized. The brothers who’d tugged on his sleeve and asked him to read to them. The family he’d loved so desperately that their rejection had hollowed him out and sent him fleeing to a college dorm with nothing but an economics degree and a broken heart.

The Wrath feeding on that kind of wound was poison. The fury and the grief were tangling together inside him. The transformation consuming his body couldn’t tell the difference between rage and agony as it was trying to burn through both at once.

His back arched. A sound escaped him that started as a groan and descended into something guttural, something that vibrated through the mountain stone and made the monsters in the stampede behind stumble and whimper. The crimson light bleeding from his knuckles spread up his forearms, and the veins beneath his skin turned black and swelled, and his shadow on the stone behind him grew too large and too dark and began to move independently of his body.

<Big brother, stop!> Alice’s voice in his mind was raw with a terror that went beyond the fear of prison or consequences. She was bonded to him. She could feel what was building from the inside, and what she felt was her brother being swallowed. <Something is wrong! You have to stop!>

His spine cracked.

The sound echoed off the rock face, a wet splintering that had nothing to do with injury and everything to do with the thing beneath his skeleton demanding more room. His shoulders widened and the armor across his chest groaned and split at the seams. Horns pushed through his skull, splitting the skin above his temples in twin lines of dark blood that ran down his face and mixed with the crimson mana bleeding from his pores.

The darkness at Kaiden’s edges pulsed outward. The mountain groaned. The halo above his head cycled between gold and a deep, ugly red as Alice’s fury fed into Kaiden’s and the two signatures tangled together.

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