Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 1036: Pushover

Vespera looked at the captive’s face above the pistol.

Vespera’s killing intent struck the room hard enough to make Mara flinch behind the shadow lattice. Darkness surged beneath the pimp’s shoes and climbed her legs while she tried to drag her captive through the rear door.

"I’ll shoot her! I’ll-"

Vespera’s shadow clamped around the pistol and wrenched its barrel toward the ceiling. It fired as another tendril peeled the woman’s arm away from the captive’s throat.

A broad coil caught the captive around the waist and lifted her clear. Vespera set her behind the lattice beside Mara’s cage while the pimp screamed over the breaking bones in her gun hand.

Mara reached through the bars and caught the woman’s wrist.

"Here! Come here!"

Vespera drove shadow hooks beneath the pimp’s ribs and pulled them outward. "I’m truly treated as a pushover in this nation," the Shadow Monarch noted with a flat tone. "To think I’d stop because you took a hostage... I don’t even know her name."

Bone splintered through the human trafficker’s suit as her chest tore open, exposing her lungs between the broken ribs.

The woman choked on blood. Vespera crushed her head against the rear door with a coil of shadow, smearing brains across the wood before dropping her gutted body.

Vespera’s cables wound around the cage locks and ripped them free. Metal snapped along the row, and she pulled the doors open before letting her protective lattice sink back into the floor.

Mara kept hold of the rescued woman’s hand as daylight reached them through the rear doorway. Vespera was standing over the dead pimp, the darkness on her face retreating enough to reveal her eyes.

Mara tried to speak. She wanted to ask whether they could leave, whether anyone would stop them, but her throat closed before she could get the words out.

Vespera stepped through the rear door and dissolved into its shadow.

...

Rook’s teams reached the warehouse to find its entrance torn open and the guard’s head lying beside his body. Blood dripped from the ceiling lamps onto the casings strewn beneath them.

Ellen stopped beside a rifle cut cleanly through its receiver. Farther down the aisle, headless bodies lay piled against the loading doors, where someone had tried to hold off Vespera with a barrier.

"She went through all of them..."

The security officer beside her, a woman named Irena, looked from the broken weapons to the trail leading into the office.

"Come on. I heard someone."

They found women still sitting inside the open cages beyond the office.

Mara had made it as far as the doorway of hers. Beyond it, blood covered the route to the exit, and the guard’s torn-off arm lay beside her cage with its fingers still closed around the pistol.

When armed people entered from the office, she pulled her companion back inside.

"No, please..."

Ellen stopped beside the dead guard. She looked from the open doors to the women crowded behind them, then lowered her hands where they could see them.

"I’m Ellen. I’m with Eclipse, a newly formed guild. The woman who came through here is with us."

Mara understood enough English to catch that last part. She looked past Ellen toward the men following her.

Ellen turned to them.

"Could you cover the bodies? We need a path through here."

She crouched outside Mara’s cage while the cleanup crew unfolded their sheets.

"May I come closer?"

Mara nodded to her, still holding her companion’s hand. When Ellen offered a bottle of water, she took it but couldn’t make her fingers turn the cap.

"Here. Let me."

Ellen opened it and gave it back. Mara passed it to the woman beside her first, watching her drink with both hands wrapped around the bottle.

Farther down the row, another woman was speaking urgently in a language Ellen couldn’t understand. She pointed toward the office, repeating herself until a collector went to look.

He returned with a box of passports.

The women began getting up.

On the office computer, the collection team found photographs of the women arranged for buyers, with prices beside their names. They preserved the sale records and the messages from the people purchasing them.

Irena brought in keys recovered from the pimp’s pockets. She knelt beside the nearest captive and unlocked her collar, then moved along the row while the women held their hair out of her way.

"Rook, we need transport for survivors," Ellen said into her phone. "Clothes and interpreters too. I’ll send the languages as we identify them."

She listened, then looked toward the office.

"And somewhere else to take them out. They shouldn’t have to walk through the warehouse."

A security officer checked the rear alley while the cleanup team cleared the doorway. Ellen stayed beside Mara, helping her companion wrap a borrowed jacket around her shoulders.

"We can go?" Mara finally asked.

"Yes. I’ll walk with you."

Mara stood, but her legs shook so badly that Ellen had to catch her elbow. She clung to the woman’s sleeve through the whole walk down the aisle, afraid to let go even after they reached the daylight.

Behind them, the collection specialists bagged the buyers’ records. Another crew began lifting the dead into body bags.

The first lead had been wrong. Vespera had come looking for the Blood Pact and torn apart an unrelated trafficking ring, killing the pimp who ran it before her people even reached the address.

Ellen learned that from the collection team’s report while she helped Mara into the waiting transport. The woman still had a fistful of her sleeve.

"I’ll be right here," Ellen promised, and waited until Mara could bring herself to let go.

Irena joined her beside the open door, carrying the last of the recovered passports. Through the windows, the freed women were finding their own faces in the little booklets, clutching them against their chests.

"She wasn’t even looking for them," Irena murmured.

Ellen shook her head, overwhelmed by what their employer had done almost in passing. The gunmen had filled the building with automatic fire. Vespera had walked through it, ripped their cages open, and left her people to bring these women home.

"God, I love that woman."

Irena laughed under her breath, her eyes bright with admiration as she looked back at the warehouse.

"Did you see the locks? She tore them out of the doors. All of them."

"I saw."

Ellen had to smile. Their lady was a terrifying force of nature, and she was proud beyond words to be one of the people following her.

From inside the transport, Mara reached for her again. Ellen took her hand and climbed in beside her while Irena went to help the next woman out.

...

The President was still on the phone with Rook when his security adviser placed a tablet in front of him.

A witness had filmed the warehouse from the road. Gunfire rattled through the recording, followed by a man’s scream that cut off so abruptly the person filming began backing away.

The President looked from the screen to his adviser.

"Ashborn?"

"Yes, sir."

Through the receiver, Rook continued explaining that Lady Ashborn was terribly occupied with administrative tasks to comply with all the audits Eclipse has been dealing with.

...

Vespera was already at another address on the list. Men were carrying cash cases and wrapped cocaine bricks toward the loading entrance when her shadow slid beneath it.

"Leave the bags! Get the guns!"

She rose among the packing tables. A man dropped a case of money and fired at her with both hands on his pistol, backing away as her black armor caught the shots.

Vespera rammed a shadow spike through his open mouth and out of the back of his skull. She widened it inside his head, bursting bone and brains over the cash before his body hit the case.

"FUCK! IT’S THE SHADOW CUNT!"

Rifles opened up from behind the stockpiles. Vespera advanced between the tables while rounds burst through the packages beside her, throwing white powder across the floor.

She dragged a shooter onto a packing bench with a shadow cable. Black hooks punched into his belly and ripped his intestines out while he screamed, then she folded him backward over the edge until his spine snapped.

His guts spilled off the bench into the cocaine.

"It’s Ashborn! It’s fucking Ashborn!"

The men at the loading entrance abandoned their weapons and tried to crawl under the shutter. Vespera’s shadows caught their legs, hauling them back across the floor while their fingers clawed through the powder.

"Please! You can take it! Take everything!"

"Blood Pact," Vespera spoke.

"Huh?" The men wore thoroughly confused faces.

"Thought so."

Vespera pinned their bodies with shadow and wound cables beneath their jaws. She ripped their heads off, trailing torn muscle and spinal tissue, then hurled them beneath the shutter into the yard.

Vespera sank into the shadow of a packing table, leaving bloody footprints across the scattered money.

Her collection team found the cash soaked red and the loading entrance clogged with bodies. They photographed the shipping labels and began sorting the records from the drugs.

The warnings spread through the city’s underworld. Men abandoned their businesses with cash stuffed into their coats, calling contacts who had stopped answering while Eclipse’s collection teams worked through the wreckage left behind.

Rook kept sending crews after Vespera. Their calls brought more requests for body bags, another safe to move, another building with its guards dead inside.

At headquarters, the President’s office called again.

Across the city, Vespera emerged beneath a streetlight long enough to check the next address. Then her body dissolved, and darkness swept down the pavement beneath the passing traffic.