Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 795: Stranded Outside

The transition to white was not gentle.

In a single blink, the staging ground transformed into a warzone. A mountain thousands of meters tall plummeted from the heavens onto the plain. Every awakened warrior unleashed their remaining Qi in a final, unified assault. Helicopters maneuvered out of the Kaiju's flight path, while reporters at the treeline began their immediate retreat.

The very next moment, the sky abruptly halted. The horizon froze. The trees ceased their movement. The mountain, too, stopped its descent.

Where Kaiden’s dungeon gate had been, where the colossal Kaiju was moments from impact, and where the Chairman's second pressure-blade was completing its deadly arc, now lay an untouched expanse of ground. A sealed boundary, invisible from this side, had materialized.

The Kaiju had vanished.

So too had the dungeon, its gate, the staging chamber Eclipse had erected around it, the Shadow Monarch holding her position a hundred meters away, the Flame Monarch laughing under a falling sky, and the nine individuals within the threshold who were on the verge of discovering the true nature of a Dungeon Master Battle.

In their place, only an empty plain remained.

Sound gradually returned, in fragments.

First, the wind, finding the void left by the seal and rushing in. Then, a cacophony of voices, radios, and equipment erupted simultaneously, every channel that had been holding its breath exhaling as one.

"...Holy shit. Holy shit, are you seeing this?! The- the gate, it’s- it’s just GONE, are you-"

A reporter's voice, overwhelmed, burst into the air, unable to form a coherent sentence.

Another voice cut in a beat later, an Eclipse handler with a comm device clipped to her shoulder.

"Where did they go?! Someone get eyes on the seal! I need a scryer, I want a reading on what’s beyond that boundary!"

"Ma’am, there is no boundary to peer through..."

"It’s as if the gate ceased to exist entirely..."

Further on, a medic was assisting a runner who hadn't moved in ten seconds.

"Hey! Look at me, kid. You're standing on an active plain. Do you want to stand here, or do you want to get behind the cordon? Move."

The runner blinked at the medic, his mouth agape. A second medic shoved a water bottle into the young man's chest from the side.

"Drink. Walk. Whatever you need to do, because we’ll both lose our jobs if you faceplant on camera."

Somewhere to the right, an artifact, still keyed to its original target, sputtered and died against nothingness. The technician kneeling beside it slapped his palm onto the inert casing.

"Oh, for fuck’s sake. The lattice is retracting."

Further along the treeline, a streamer, who had been narrating in rapid Mandarin moments before, had fallen completely silent for the first time in his broadcasting career. His camera remained fixed on the empty ground. When his voice finally returned, it was a hushed whisper.

"...The gate is gone. Kaiden Grey is gone. I am- I am going to continue streaming, everyone! ...But there is nothing else to stream."

The Chairman of the Association lowered his hand.

He had held it aloft since the second impact. The immense pressure he had been preparing to unleash into the Kaiju's exposed ribs still gathered along his palm. He now allowed it to dissipate with a slow exhale, the air above his fingers shimmering and releasing its potential.

His coat was stained with ash and a fine dust kicked up by the artifacts when they failed.

Grace approached him.

The Chairman's secretary held her tablet in one hand, her awakened interface displaying a cascade of alerts along the edge of her vision. Every notification was pinging simultaneously.

She studied the unwritten sky for another moment.

Then, she spoke.

"...So that’s a Dungeon Master Battle."

"The beginning of one..." the Chairman sighed.

"How utterly foreign."

Grace's gaze shifted sideways to him. He hadn't moved, his attention fixed on the spot where the gate had vanished, observing with the same unhurried focus he had directed at the Kaiju just moments earlier, when the colossal beast had been a tangible threat.

"I wager we won't gain entry until one Master is defeated."

"Well, we will certainly attempt it. However, my hopes are not high."

She released a breath from her chest. It was not quite a laugh.

"The fate of humanity may very well be on the other side of that gate right now."

The Chairman did not reply immediately.

His pause was brief. Just long enough for her statement to hang in the air between them, for the aides who had drawn near to register her words, and for the medic who had yelled at the runner to lower his voice and glance over.

Then, he turned his head.

"The loss of two Monarchs and the anomalous group of youngsters would represent a devastating blow. I will not deny that. However, the United States of America has never been defined by the setbacks it has endured throughout its history. We have overcome every disaster placed before us. Plagues. Wars. We persevered through each one, and we shall persevere through this."

He allowed his declaration to settle for a moment before continuing,

The plain held its breath around the words.

Two of the aides who had been edging back toward the cordon stopped their movement. One of them, a young coordinator who had been on this staging plain less than three hours and had spent the last thirty seconds of it watching a mountain fall out of the sky, straightened her shoulders without thinking about it. The medic put one hand to his comm and turned it off because whatever the runner was saying could wait. Even one of the Eclipse veterans further out, who had no business hearing the Chairman from where he stood, lifted his head.

Grace caught the shift around her.

’What a nice speech. Very patriotic, sir,’ she giggled inwardly. Verbally, she just said,

"...You’re right. I spoke out of line, sir."

The Chairman let her have the apology without comment, his eyes dancing with hers, both fully aware that he had to deliver that speech thanks to his station.

Grace flicked her interface back open.

The numbers were doing something obscene.

She stared at the viewer counter for a full two seconds.

Then she scoffed under her breath.

"Well... I guess at least they can stream from in there, wherever ’in there’ is."

The Chairman’s gaze had returned to the empty ground.

"If they don’t get consumed," she continued, half to him and half to the interface, "they’ll come back legends. The whole planet is soon going to be on this feed."

The number ticked higher as she watched.

Then her eye caught a strange curiosity in the feed.

"Oh? And would you look at that..."

Her voice took on a chirp that did not belong on this plain.

"Kaiden and the rest of the gang just got even more powerful. Just randomly~"

The Chairman’s eye did move this time, one slow lateral track to her, and the look he gave her was one he had handed hundreds of subordinates over the years for taking liberties with the register he expected on duty.

"Stop messing around. We are not in a casual setting."

Grace turned her face toward him with the deadest possible neutrality.

She did not say anything out loud, but her own look, fully composed and completely flat, conveyed the sentiment: ’you literally assigned me to watch their pornographic content as part of my official duties, sir, but go off.’ She held it long enough for him to register it, then she let her interface cover the bottom half of her face again.

The Chairman, for his part, ignored the look entirely. He had been ignoring looks like that from her for a great many years.

Grace exhaled through her nose and accepted the situation for what it was.

"...Orders, sir?"

"We prepare for the worst case."

The Chairman turned his back on the empty ground and started walking toward the Association cordon with the same unhurried pace he had used to approach it.

"If they lose in there, the Kaiju likely will come back out of it onto this coordinate, and I’d wager it’ll walk out of it stronger than it walked in. We do not get a second chance to set the line. Pull every reserve we did not commit to this engagement. Call upon all our notable guilds to partake and recall the S-tiers from the Pacific deployment. I want a welcoming party staged on this plain that makes the one we just put together look like a scouting line."

Grace was already moving, her interface unfolding into a working pane in front of her as she fell into step.

"Yes, sir."

"And get me a continuous read on the seal. The instant it shifts, I want to know."

"Yes, sir."

Grace lagged half a step behind him for the length of three paces, time enough to glance once more at the corner of her interface where the stream feed still ran, muted, ticking past 27 million viewers and still climbing.

Inside the seal, the feed had cut to a wide angle. Kaiden’s greatsword was coming out of a strider’s body in one clean arc, a shockwave radiating outward across the abyssal stone, his Sin-fused women at work in the Cavern’s open ground around him.

The camera she had been watching panned past a flash of silver that was Aria mid-air, past Luna’s red lightning trail, past a coral haze where Nyx had compressed four fliers into the ground.

And then, at the edge of the frame, the chokehold.

Two figures in overwatch behind the line.

The redhead. The shadow.

Grace’s eyes lingered on the second one a fraction longer than the first.

Vespera stood with her hands lowered and her cloak settled, watching.

’Good luck,’ Grace thought toward her. ’And please bring our little stars back home safely.’

She closed the secondary pane and pulled up the cordon roster.

The Chairman was already three strides ahead.

Grace caught up.