Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 997

Chapter 997: Strategic Monster

It was slow, and it cost. Each rotation left the scars wider than the healing could shut, but the mound did not get tired and they did.

"It’ll take an hour," Nyx judged, watching Calypso wind up again. "Two, if we’re taking a more conservative approach."

The work settled into a rhythm, heavy hitters rotating on the mound while the rest held the square.

Asakura’s squad spread onto the perimeter the moment the rotation formed.

Shields faced outward down the three chutes the blocked streets had left open. The medic and the onmyoji took the shade of the market awnings, and Oda covered the dead shopfronts along the square’s north face.

Alexandra stood with the screening line, exactly where Kaiden had asked her to be. His guardian belonged where the armor was thinnest, and the thinnest armor in the square was on an escort squad a world below the family’s weight.

Off rotation, people got comfortable. Bastet found intact shade at the end of the stall row and lay down in it, head toward the north face, eyes not quite shut.

Luna spent ten minutes trying to make the vending machine in the mound dispense something, and returned with a can of cold coffee she refused to explain.

The onmyoji taught Alice a paper-folding trick. Alice’s halo folded it back at four times the speed, and the onmyoji sat down.

The sun crossed the river. Arm-deep bite by arm-deep bite the mound got smaller, and the silent town watched them work.

Calypso’s axe rang off the wall again, the gong of it rolling out over the dead market.

Oda was watching the north shopfronts when the fish shop’s glass went wrong.

He had bought fish under that window once a week his entire life, and his eyes had crossed it a hundred times since the perimeter formed. On this pass, the dark behind the glass had depth.

He never did work out what he saw in it. His body skipped the question, drill turning him with the spear already rising.

A thin pressure-whine leaned against the square, like a kettle three streets away deciding to scream.

The window never moved. The roofline two floors above it fired.

The round crossed the square ahead of its own sound. It met Oda’s rising spear, blew the haft apart in his hands, and the deflection turned a shot aimed at his chest into a shot that tore through his shoulder.

The impact threw him a full car-length back into a stall frame, and the crack of it arrived late and rolled around the square twice.

Oda heard himself screaming before he understood he had been hit. There was an arm lying against his ribs and nothing in his shoulder to feel it with.

"Contact!" Asakura was moving before her own shout finished. "Somewhere north!"

Alice’s halo whipped a beam of light onto the rooftop above the fish shop. "There!"

It stood low against the ridgeline on four legs, long as two cars, and none of it matched.

"What the fuck is that?!" Luna shouted.

Plates of different monsters lapped over its frame in different colors, stitched at the seams with the same grey-green carapace that mortared the mound.

Its head had hinged open in two directions at once, the halves peeled back around a dark bore that was still smoking.

Then the ridge of tubes along its spine shivered, and began to cycle with a wet clicking.

The ridge fired a stream of rounds, stitching across the flagstones toward the stall frame where Oda lay in his own blood.

Alexandra came off the screening line at a dead run and put herself between Oda and the roof, a large projection shield forming in her arms.

"Get behind!"

The burst hit the shield and broke there, round after round bursting white against the curve, and the light rang under it like an anvil that refused to crack. "Gh..." the blonde woman grunted, and refused to be moved backward.

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