Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 998

Chapter 998: Only Getting Started

Kaiden dropped off the barricade with the greatsword already forming, and the market square gave him thirty meters of open flagstone to cross before the nearer pack reached the squad’s line.

He crossed it in four strides. The first hound reached his hip and lost its head without slowing him down. The second he ran straight through, the blade going in behind the shoulder and coming out with enough of the thing still on it to knock a third off its legs.

Calypso came off the wall a breath after him and took the other pack’s front rank in one horizontal.

When the last of them committed, the ranged fire stopped.

Behind the two of them the family stopped feeding the barricade and put all of it into the packs instead. The pack that had been thirty seconds from the medic stopped existing.

Kill notifications stacked down the edge of Kaiden’s vision, a tidy column he had no time to read.

Behind all of it, unwatched, the wall took back nearly all ten minutes of digging.

The thing poured off the roofline like spilled oil, hit the street behind the shopfronts, and was gone down a walled chute. Alice’s beam chased it half a block and lost it between roofs.

By the time the last spider-hound died, the square was silent and the town was pretending again that nothing lived in it.

On the joint feed, the world had just watched a monster shoot a man and leave.

The medic worked on Oda under the awnings with hands that shook so badly the onmyoji had to open her kit for her. The shoulder was a ruin, but it was a shoulder, and Oda was swearing in Japanese through gritted teeth.

Asakura crossed to Kaiden, bowed low, and stayed down. "Lord Grey. My squad cost you the wall."

Her English came slower than ever, each word carried separately. "You stopped cutting because we cannot survive this square. If we withdraw to the cordon, you will not need to stop again. I am ashamed to ask which you prefer."

Behind her, her fighters stood in a loose rank with their eyes anywhere but on the family.

"Captain." Kaiden let the weapon rest on his shoulder and gave the question the moment it had cost her. "How long does an undertaking usually run, out here? A gate like this one."

She blinked at the question. "...Days. For a deep gate, weeks."

"Weeks," he repeated. "We’ve spent only a few minutes, and these minutes already bought us a lot of information."

He nodded toward the barricade. "Those packs came out of the walled streets. It didn’t build this town a maze, it built itself covered roads, and it defends that wall like its life is on the other side."

"This told us that we were right. They don’t want us to enter here, and now we know we should be careful of ranged fire."

He smiled. "Long story short, your team is needed here."

Asakura straightened out of the bow. She looked at him, at the wall, at her medic elbow-deep in gauze, and when she spoke again her voice had its parade-ground level back.

"Then we stay. Thank you."

She did not move away at once. Her eyes stayed on the barricade, and she picked her next English words one at a time.

"Lord Grey. In ten years of gates, the boss sits on the core. It guards. It lets the small ones die and spawns more. They do not leave. It is the one law. Every diver on these islands puts their life on it. Mine also."

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