Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 682: Online

The feed came online.

The number of viewers surged rapidly. From one thousand to seven thousand, then twenty thousand in the blink of an eye for Sarah, as the digits raced upward in a blur—Valhalla’s Sinners resuming their stream after an hour of quiet sparked a frenzy, rippling through alert networks like an explosive pulse.

Yet the viewer figures held no real importance.

The display itself did.

Kaiden’s broadcast displayed his viewpoint. The lens recorded his gaze, revealing a shadowy stone depression deep below, teeming with activity. Beasts. Scores of them, with jointed forms and razor-edged appendages swarming the basin’s base in a flood of exoskeletons.

And lurking behind, an enormous entity. A monster as vast as a substantial edifice, armored in crystalline layers, featuring six eyes, pounding the terrain with power that cracked fissures across the rock. Each footfall it made excavated craters into the soil underneath.

"What’s happening?" Emilia cried out.

Sarah’s gaze darted across the scene. The shot’s position, the elevation, the angle gazing below—Kai perched on an overlook, elevated far above the chasm, observing it as if viewing insects from a high perch.

Suddenly... her eyes grew wide.

"Hold on, there are people below!" Sarah exclaimed. "Those are combatants! Are those... is that New Dawn?!"

"The fools!" Leia’s tone cut sharp and swift. She bent closer, her seat groaning. "That’s the teams of those two close allies! They’re all trapped in the basin with those... what in the world are those creatures?"

The chat exploded into motion. A torrent of words raced by at impossible speeds, with tens of thousands of watchers flooding in, all responding to the identical sight: Kaiden Grey, positioned over a warzone where his foes were encircled by beasts, simply observing.

The identical question crossed the thoughts of all who viewed the stream.

'Why is he merely observing?'

One hundred thousand spectators. The tally kept rising without pause since the broadcast began, and each newcomer encountered the unchanged view: turmoil in the depths, calm on the heights, and the mounting, nauseating awareness that the calm was intentional.

Then Kaiden uttered words.

"My beautiful angels."

His words emerged via the stream’s sound, soft and affectionate, like the inflection a leader employs when filled with pride for his companions. The view adjusted as he pivoted to speak to his women, and briefly the depression vanished, substituted by a flash of Luna’s smile, Calypso’s tail, and Aria’s silvery locks reflecting dull illumination.

"Our fellow awakened combatants face a desperate survival struggle." His delivery stayed even, resembling a speaker outlining a communal obligation. "We must assist them."

Sarah felt a chill race through her veins.

For she recognized that timbre.

"Oh my god," Leia whispered. "Oh my god!"

The lens swung back toward the depression.

Kaiden adjusted his posture, and the broadcast’s sound captured an element that silenced the audience instantly.

A noise akin to the atmosphere ripping apart, a deep vibrating drone that intensified in pitch. The borders of the image distorted as mystical power flooded the area near the lens, runes seeping purple and ebony into the borders of Kaiden’s sight.

His companions aligned with him. The feed failed to convey the complete magnitude, yet the sound narrated it: the snap of Luna’s Storm, the profound rumble of Calypso’s Carnage, Aria’s lunar glow tinting the edges silver, and underlying everything, a golden throb from overhead that flooded the whole stream in dazzling brightness for an instant.

The chat froze in place.

Hundreds of thousands of watchers collectively paused their breathing.

Kaiden lifted his arms toward the depression, and via his perspective, observers beheld the slaughter zone sharpen into view. Chinedu’s lance slicing through monsters as his group fell apart nearby. Ash flailing chaotically, blood staining his features, yelling at warriors who couldn’t catch his words amid the monsters’ bellows.

His target spared no one.

"Let’s start blasting."

The stream flashed brilliant white briefly.

Upon the feed’s recovery, the depression echoed with wails.

Kaiden’s mystical orb had exploded right in the heart of the carnage site, and the explosion’s reach ignored all obstacles. The packed energy burst forth in a circle of purple devastation that tore apart Slashers and demolished defensive spells with impartial fury, flinging forms in all directions, shells and metal scattering over the debris.

Three members of Chinedu’s team snagged the blast’s fringe and soared upward, their plating folding inward under the shock, appendages flopping limply as they crashed onto rock twenty meters away from their prior spots.

Ash endured the harshest impact.

The shock front struck him at torso level and propelled him rearward against the rock he’d leaned on. His fractured chest guard exploded upon collision, shards of magical metal piercing his sides and shoulder, and the noise he emitted upon striking was damp and conclusive. He slumped down the stone and stayed down at first, crimson flowing from his lips in a constant flow, gaze broad and unfocused with the bewilderment of someone whose chest had newly met his backbone.

Luna’s Storm slammed into the depression’s surface moments after.

Purple bolts burst from the overlook in a sprawling network that zapped the closest Slasher and branched out, jumping from slick exoskeleton to slick exoskeleton, from fluid-drenched ground to the iron footwear of a warrior in the improper pool.

Brittany screamed as the electricity tore up her limbs and felled her, twitching, her magical leg guards channeling the surge directly past the safeguarding fabric into the tissue below. A Slasher just two meters away absorbed the identical strike and suffered more, its nerves frying within its shell.

Stacy snared a branching jolt via her weapon arm and released her hold, the sword dropping with a clang as her digits clenched into a fist.

Aria’s ray descended from the sky. A gleaming shaft of focused lunar light that sliced through a group of four Slashers and continued, slamming into the earth where Chinedu’s supporter attempted to renew her shields. The lady hurled herself aside and the ray passed her by under a meter, but the heat wave from its path burned the flesh on her left side and cheek, and her focus broke. The shields she’d upheld over three injured warriors wavered and vanished.

Bastet’s input stayed subdued yet more devastating. The earth under one of Chinedu’s side guards burst open, a column of intensely heated rock thrusting up through the wreckage and striking him in the midsection. His protection endured for a split second before the temperature burned through the bottom sections, and his cry pierced every other noise in the depression. He toppled laterally from the column, surviving, but his left flank became a wreckage of charred alloy and bubbled flesh.

Calypso eyed the depression, then her weapon, then the depression once more.

"I’m not great with ranged attacks," she declared to nobody specific, "but let me try!"

She heaved the axe high in a double-grip swing and let go at the peak. The tool spun tip over tip across the sky, leaving a helix of shadowy Carnage power, and lodged into a Slasher forty meters down with power sufficient to cleave the beast along its length. The Carnage power burst from the divided remains and infected two nearby Slashers, corroding their shells in mere moments.

The axe remained embedded in the terrain.

Calypso stared. "Ah. I didn’t think that through."