Kaiden exhaled once.
’System.’
The overlay pulsed at the edge of his awareness.
’Couldn’t you have warned me that this was coming?’
[All Dungeon Master Battles manifest differently. No two dimension seals look alike.]
Kaiden stared at the text for a full breath.
’...Great.’
Around him, his women were still coming back to themselves. Aria’s silver eyes were wider than he had ever seen them, fixed on the gate. Nyx had turned slowly in place, her gaze crossing the sky that wasn’t a sky.
When she spoke, she said it mostly to herself.
"This is just fucked up."
Calypso was louder. Calypso was always louder when the tension broke.
"Did you all see that?!"
The demoness’s axe tapped the stone once in rhythm with her volume.
"He just tore the earth from under your mom’s shadow! And took those giant chunks with him!"
"Muscle-brained demon," Bastet said from the other side of her, ears twitching once, slow, "stop being excited about our enemy’s overwhelming might."
"...Mmn. Fair point. But I can’t help it!"
Alice’s halo re-lit above Kaiden’s head, gold settling back into its steady cadence. Dual vision handed him the cathedral’s interior feed in the same breath.
<Big brother, stop listening to the broads and move! We can’t stay at the threshold.>
"..."
Four Skyfiends dropped out of the Cavern’s ceiling haze as he took his first step, broad wings beating down the span, hooves clacking against the staging stone in formation as the mounts knelt and tucked their wings tight.
The girls swung up without direction. Aria behind him on his mount because she was already there. Luna vaulting onto her own because Luna was never behind anyone, unlike Nyx, who hugged her tightly from behind, eliciting a lot of grumbling when two heavy somethings landed on her shoulders. Bastet settled sideways on Calypso’s saddle because Calypso had shouted at her to.
Vespera and Scarlet were moving in their own direction. The two Monarchs had peeled off along the Cavern wall, tracking toward the first defensive chokehold, set deeper in, where the dungeon’s first monster line was already staged to hold it down. From that position the gate would still be in their sightline across the Cavern’s open span.
The Skyfiends launched.
...
The stream was going apeshit.
The feed ran along the lower edge of his peripheral vision, muted to a ghost-ticker that reported its own state without asking for his attention.
The counter at the top was doing something obscene.
Every other lens at the coordinate was now pointed at a sealed gate with nothing else going on around it, aside from some awakened peeking behind the small gate to see if the mountain-range-sized enemy was there.
It wasn’t.
The streamers who had been covering the defense from the cordon, the news crews who had set their rigs along the treeline, the commentators who had been narrating the buildup in a hundred languages, all of them were on the wrong side of the seal now, watching the same dead threshold the rest of the world was. Kaiden’s was the only feed still broadcasting from inside. The planet was migrating to it by the refresh.
[Viewers: 11.4M ↑]
[Viewers: 16.8M ↑]
[Viewers: 21.3M ↑]


VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Demonic Pornstar System