Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 1002: Pushing Through

Kaiden hauled the greatsword out of the skull without breaking stride. The hounds that had chased him for two levels came over the bull’s back after him.

Gluttony drank what was left in the animal through the soles of his boots as he crossed it, and the gouge along his ribs pulled itself half-closed somewhere on the next switchback. Half-closed was what he got.

The stance had been drinking every time he called it up and it was still losing, because this dungeon was spending him faster than he could earn himself back.

By then his own blood had stopped being an event. The calf, the ribs, a hole punched through his left forearm by a mantid he’d used as a doorstop, a shoulder gone stiff, his scalp opening again every time sweat found it, and a boot that squelched on every stride.

What nobody watching could process was that he never once slowed down.

Five wounds deep, with the road closing behind him and refilling in front of him, he came down those switchbacks at the pace he had started at, swapping stances on the move.

He took Wrath where the road opened and the heat could detonate through a pack. Gluttony where the press got thick, so everything that touched him paid for it in blood he kept.

Pride when the road ahead went solid with bodies and he wanted it hollow. Glyphs carved themselves out of the air on intent alone, violet-white and sharp-edged, twenty at a time, and volleyed down that tunnel ahead of him in ranks.

Arcane fire hammered the corridor wall to wall. What came out the far side of it was a lane, and he ran down the lane before the dust in it had settled.

One flat Pride glyph slammed shut across a side gallery like a bulkhead door when something in there woke up hungry, and he was past it before whatever it was reached the other side.

One stance at a time, clean, no seams.

Twice the road offered him something it clearly wanted him to try.

The first was a smell, wet iron and old acid rolling up out of a flooded gallery, and under the smell, hanging motionless in black water, a shape longer than a river ferry.

<Don’t go in the water.> No play left in her at all. <We need to find another path!>

’Already moving.’

This dungeon had to obey the same law his own did. More than one road ran to the core.

Kaiden had to find the one he could survive, not the one that got there first.

He took the dry fork and paid for it, forty meters of tunnel that climbed before it dropped again, hounds up his back, no room to turn and clear them properly. The thing in the water shifted its weight once as he passed. It did not follow.

The second sat in a bone midden two levels down, feeding, its back a ridge of plates nothing else in that dungeon had grown. It heard him coming through the mantids and lifted its head.

Kaiden did not slow down. He went over the midden wall at a run with the mantids still coming after him and killed the two that followed him down into the creature’s floor space. It watched him go by without ever getting up.

Everything smaller than those two kept trying. The kill column never stopped climbing, tens of thousands of XP a window with DMP riding under each one, and he did not read a single one of them.

They were for later. They were for whoever came out of this hole.

...

Above ground, everywhere except the square his family was holding had gone quiet.

The joint feed’s international chat had run like a waterfall all battle. Now whole moments passed between messages, and half of them were the same message.

’He’s still going’

’How is he still going??’

’That’s blood in his boot’

In the control room on the cordon, Kira had stopped calling shots between the door-line feeds and Kaiden’s.

Rika, who that same morning had screamed at her sister to cut the bare-handed catch into four formats before lunch, sat with her headset half off and clipped nothing. Clipping meant picking a best moment.

Three months ago this feed had been rookie content, a curiosity the veterans opened once and closed.

Some of the people watching tonight had watched that same man fumble his first loot window and celebrate a level like a kid on his birthday.

That man came down a switchback with his scalp bleeding into his collar, split a plated mantid taller than he was from crown to thorax, and stepped over it while the kill notification was still stacking.

He never once looked at what he had done.

’I used to watch this guy strategize for the weakest dungeons.’

...

<Left wall. Two mana signatures I don’t recognize. New types of monsters.> Alice’s beam lanced past Kaiden’s ear and cracked the first one’s skull plate open before it finished committing. He killed the second on his way past the body, and it died still working a mouth that unhinged in three segments.

<Ribs update. You’re at half-closed and it’s not getting better. Stop catching mantids with your arms, please.>

’It worked.’

<The mantid put a hole in your arm!>

’It bought two seconds.’ He dropped a shoulder, let a crawler break itself against the wall behind him, and put the greatsword through it without turning or slowing. ’I’d trade the arm for two seconds.’

The halo made a sound the feed’s viewers had never heard from it, something between a chime and a growl. Inside the link, where only he could hear her, Alice was quieter.

<...I can feel every one of them, you know,> she said. <Through the Conduit. Every cut. You know I’d never ask you to stop. Just... I’m keeping the list. Every single one of these is going on the after-bill.>

’Headpats?’

<Not every crime can be atoned for with headpats and waffles, big brother...>

’Sounds ominous.’ He rounded a pillar of mortared bone into the next gallery, read the wave already flooding it, and shook the blood off his sword hand. ’How’s the outside?’

Alice paused, half a heartbeat, while she pulled the thread of the other feeds through the link.

<Holding. Alexandra’s still standing, and the wall between her palms hasn’t broken yet. Calypso’s not laughing for once. The thing keeps trying the flanks, and it keeps finding them shut.>

<It’s spending everything it has to get back in here, Big Brother. Whatever’s down that road matters more to it than its whole army.>

’Of course it does. That thing is a fellow Dungeon Master, after all.’ The heat rose through him as Wrath answered, and the wave found out what the last nine waves had found out. ’That’s why we’re not slowing down.’

Every minute down here was a minute Alexandra spent eating artillery with her arms spread. Every wave he waded through instead of around added thirty seconds to a bill his family was paying in the open square above him.

That, more than the core, more than the tally, was the clock he was actually running on.

<Big Brother.>

The numbers Alice was reading had changed. He could hear it in her before she got any of it out.

<Big Brother, the mana ahead of you...> She stopped, and started over, and the work voice was gone out of her completely. <We’ve reached the inner part. The monsters ahead are on a different level.>

Then the dark ahead of him screeched.

"SKREEEEEEEEEE!!"

It came out of many throats at once, high, layered, and wrong.

’...’

Kaiden kept running.