Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 996

Chapter 996: Weird Terrain

Nothing answered.

Kaiden held the reach anyway, standing in the dead shrine street with the onmyoji’s spent talismans still cooling in the gutter, his want aimed at the three empty slots of his seven Sin Stances.

In three months he had not once wanted something at this size and been told no, and the silence coming back felt like a room with nobody in it.

<Big brother.> Alice arrived on the private channel, giggling. <Your face looks like you just ate a lemon.>

’It is not.’

<It is. The halo can see your face. It’s my halo.>

He grinned, let the want go, and filed it away for later. The system had said unlocking the final stances was up to him now, but it didn’t become an all-you-can-eat buffet.

...

Kaiden and the group walked two districts closer to the river, and Kawanami changed on them.

The kills dried up first. Storefront bursts and rooftop mantids, the rhythm the edge of town spent teaching them, simply stopped, and they walked blocks of dead settlement without swinging at anything.

"Okay, this is giving me the creeps," Luna muttered, flickering up a light pole and back down. "Rooftops are clear. Everything’s clear."

There were no bodies either. A town that had hosted an overflow this long should have been floored with old kills, monster on monster, and the streets were swept bare down to the stains on the asphalt.

The squad felt it before the family did, because the squad knew what the streets were supposed to look like.

"Something is wrong," their pointman said at an intersection, turning in place. He was Kawanami-born, and he was misreading his own house. "This alley connected through to the fish market. There was no wall here."

The wall in question filled the alley mouth to the second floor, rubble and two car bodies packed into it. Farther on, another lane ended the same way, and another, until the town had no side streets left to offer and the main road ran between blocked shoulders like a chute.

Asakura checked her map twice, and then she stopped checking the map.

"Control, Twelfth Garrison," she said to the cordon. "No contact past the middle school."

The radio took a moment. "Twelfth, confirmed. Feeds show nothing moving in the town heart."

Asakura keyed off without replying, and two of her fighters turned to face back down the road behind them.

The main road bent with the river ahead, one last block from the market where the gate had torn open. The town had gone so silent that seventeen sets of footsteps sounded like a parade.

Then the pointman took the corner first, and his hand went up to halt the column behind him before he had any words for why.

...

Oda was the pointman’s name. He had bought fish in the riverfront market once a week his entire life, and what he was looking at now made so little sense that Kaiden asked what was wrong before he managed to report it.

The market square opened wide to the water, stalls long dead under their awnings. In its center, where the file put a dungeon gate, rose a mound the size of a house.

"That is what’s wrong..." Oda finally said.

Cars, masonry, riverstone and torn slabs of the market’s own flooring had been packed into it, along with a delivery bike and a vending machine standing upright in the mass with its front glass unbroken. Whatever Kawanami had owned and left behind was in there somewhere.

Each seam between the pieces was filled with ribs of grey-green carapace, grown through the wreckage like mortar squeezed from a tube, and the mass sat fused into one piece. Only at its edges, low along the ground, violet gate-light leaked out in thin lines.

The dimensional gate was still there. But something had built a wall over it.

On the joint feed, the world watched a raid group stand in silence around a sealed door.

"Is that... construction?" the squad’s medic finally asked.

"Barricade," the spear-user said, then heard his own word, and turned to his captain. "Captain. The monsters built a barricade over their dungeon’s entrance."

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