Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 770

Chapter 770: Final Day

The morning had the feel of a victory lap.

Kaiden walked through the Eclipse wing with his girls trailing behind him in various states of readiness, and every room he passed had someone who stopped what they were doing to smile at him. Real smiles, the kind that came from people who’d been looking at the standings and had started to relax.

They’d basically won the rookie track. The gap between Eclipse and second place was the kind of number that made pundits on awakened news networks stop pretending there was drama left in the competition. One more day of grinding, and then a closing ceremony that would make it official.

"Good luck today, Kaiden!"

Brittany was sitting in the lounge, her hair pulled back in the practical bun she wore when she was tending to administrative matters. She lifted a coffee cup in a toast as he passed. Trisha was beside her, reviewing something on a tablet, and she looked up long enough to give him a smile that held every bit of the gratitude she carried for him.

He smiled back and kept walking, rounded the corner into the main atrium, and nearly ran into Vaelira.

The A-tier stopped dead. She stared at him, her eyes going wide, her lips parting around a word that never actually made it out. "Something important..." She didn’t even finish her excuse before she pivoted on her heel with the kind of athletic grace only an A-tier could manage and walked briskly in the exact opposite direction of wherever she’d been going.

Very briskly.

Kaiden watched her go and grinned inwardly.

’What a well-behaved young lady,’ he mused. ’Though leaving like that was kind of rude... Still, a major improvement in attitude compared to the snarky fox who ridiculed me.’

Kaiden shook his head and kept walking.

...

The day’s work opened the way every day had opened for the past week.

They rode up into the deep range, Alice settling into her Conduit halo above Kaiden’s head with a happy hum, and by mid-morning they were carving through the mountain face like a well-oiled machine. A nest of Boulderjaws came apart under a combined barrage from Aria and Bastet before Kaiden’s greatsword finished the stragglers. A pack of Glasswing Darters tried to swarm them in a narrow canyon, and Nyx welcomed the entire swarm with a maelstrom of boulders, alongside Luna who introduced several thousand volts of lightning.

A small and weak Venomfang Stalker, a juvenile, broke from cover and tried to paralyze Calypso on the approach; she laughed at the slow attempt and buried her axe in its skull.

The kills stacked, the points climbed, and the stream chat scrolled fast.

Kaiden checked his notifications between engagements. Another level. Another thirty stat points.

By the time the sun crossed overhead, they’d banked enough points to widen the gap past the point of parody. Aria drifted down from her perch on a ridge, delicate and lethal with her silver hair catching the light, and wordlessly reached for Kaiden’s hand the way she always did when she wanted a minute of warmth between fights.

He took it and pulled his beautiful moon in close.

Then the screech hit.

It came from somewhere deeper in the range, from a direction none of them could immediately place, and it arrived as pressure before it arrived as sound. A wave with a voice wrapped around it, rolling across the mountains with a force that vibrated the bones of Kaiden’s skull and clapped his hearing into a high, whining silence.

Birds dropped from the sky in a radius he couldn’t see the edge of. Somewhere below the ridge, a tree split down its trunk and folded sideways.

Everyone on the ridge staggered. Calypso’s ears started bleeding, Luna caught herself on a planted Stormblade, and the rest of them rocked back with hands pressed to their heads.

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