Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 800: Dissatisfied Anomalies

Then she unleashed a torrent. A single breath. Whatever she commanded with her chest and outstretched hands unleashed a rolling wave of searing heat towards the lead boss in the Cavern. This torrent wasn't designed to halt the beast, as nothing she could conjure would impede a creature of that magnitude. Its purpose was to incinerate it as it advanced.

The boss’s lowered shoulder met the fiery wave head-on as it charged.

The Cavern erupted in blinding white light.

A crimson and gold flash enveloped the bottleneck, washing over every face in the front ranks, overwhelming their senses in pure overexposure.

The beast’s armored shoulder seared instantly upon contact. Its grey hide blackened and curled backward, creating a meter-wide crater that pierced through the plating and into the mountain's very bone beneath. Its four eyes squeezed shut against the intense heat. The low-tier cultivators directly behind it were incinerated by the fiery splash, their bodies turning to ash. The abyssal floor, beneath both Scarlet’s feet and the beast’s path, transformed into a ribbon of slowly cooling magma where solid rock had stood mere moments before.

The boss’s hide burst into flames across its right side, the inferno persisting, its mountain-bone igniting like a forge suddenly fed with fuel.

Then, the sheer mass of the beast carried it forward.

While heat could cook, it could not halt such momentum. The boss was wounded, its right side a raging inferno that refused to extinguish, yet its forward velocity had only slightly diminished. It continued its advance, its charred shoulder sinking deeper into the wave of furnace-like air with a resolute commitment that suggested it had endured worse and pressed on.

Scarlet’s heat wave held its ground for as long as she could channel her power into it. However, brute force against brute force remained a contest of mass, and she was at a distinct disadvantage.

"Gh!"

The impact sent her flying backward.

Her body launched from her stance, following the same arc as the beast's charge, fire still streaming from her shoulders as she ascended. The dome of radiant force surrounding her disintegrated into trailing ribbons that curled behind her tumbling form.

The onlookers lining the path gasped as Scarlet shot upward with a speed that should have ended with her slamming against the cavern wall. The wall of heat she had projected collapsed with her abrupt departure.

Nyx was already intervening.

Within the protective dome where the rest of the line stood, Nyx’s hands had already moved before anyone had even registered Scarlet's launch. Space itself seemed to fold along Scarlet's airborne trajectory. The air bent in a smooth curve, catching the Flame Monarch’s flight at its apex and decelerating her over a compressed distance of one meter. This transformed her into a controlled, rotating drift, preventing a high-speed collision with the cavern wall.

Scarlet hovered in mid-air, suspended amidst the shimmering heat haze. Her hair splayed around her face like molten orange, and a thin trickle of dark blood ran from her nose down across her smiling lips.

She licked it off.

"Ahh, this big boy’s got some spunk in him!"

Her grin remained undiminished. She showed no distress regarding the blood on her lower lip or the damage to her ribs. The fiery-haired woman was, inexplicably, relishing the moment.

The lead behemoth had also paid a price.

Its seared shoulder smoked, weeping thick, black ichor that hissed as it dripped. The exposed bone beneath continued to burn, showing no signs of abating.

The two combatants had truly struck each other. Scarlet was airborne, her ribs injured, held aloft by Nyx’s intervention. The boss monster was ablaze. Both remained fiercely engaged in the fight.

It was at this moment that Vespera sighed.

"Stop playing around."

The Shadow Monarch’s intricate lattice flared to life.

The shadows, which had been woven into every vertical surface of the bottleneck for hours, unspooled in a single, coordinated movement as she lifted her right hand slightly. Hundreds of shadow cables descended from above and behind, targeting the lead behemoth. These were woven into a hooked latticework that plunged deep into the seared wound Scarlet had inflicted.

The charred bone was driven deeper into the beast’s own torso under the immense pressure of the strike.

The lead beast roared in pain. Vespera intensified her push.

Despite its mountain-born mass, the boss monster was bodily shoved across the abyssal floor onto its heels by an unseen force erupting from within its own wound. This gouged the seared crater wider with every meter it was dragged. The lead behemoth’s backward momentum propelled it through the second and third heavyweights behind it in a cascading collision, forcing all three to stumble backward towards the column of low-tier cultivators advancing through the gate.

The Shadow Monarch raised her other hand. Shadows detached from the bottleneck’s ceiling, transforming into hooked blade-shapes mid-flight. They raked across the beast’s exposed flank in a series of deep gashes, drawing long lines of black ichor in parallel. She then traced the same lattice pattern across the second beast’s shoulders. And then the third.

The Shadow Monarch had now joined the offensive.

Scarlet rotated gracefully in the heat haze, regained her orientation, and Nyx released her.

Behind the three formidable beasts that Vespera and Scarlet now confronted, the gate flickered once more.

Moments after the first three figures, two more silhouettes emerged, their lighter build suggesting swiftness, followed by a third with a more deliberate, heavier footfall. These were seasoned soldiers.

Kaiden had estimated these individuals comprised the majority of the Claimant's actual fighting strength, based on observations of the awakened combatants' streams as they battled the creature that was greedily absorbing the dungeons. They surged across the Safe Zone in long, powerful strides, converging towards the established defensive line.

The real confrontation for the two Monarchs had commenced, and the Claimant had deemed it the opportune moment to deploy additional forces.

Within the protective dome, the defensive line bore witness to the entire spectacle.

They observed the Flame Monarch rebound from an impenetrable barrier with a defiant grin. They saw the Shadow Monarch emit a single, resigned sigh before commencing a brutal assault, carving through a boss monster on the Cavern floor with shadow-imbued attacks that drew genuine blood.

They witnessed some of humanity's most formidable warriors, individuals at the absolute zenith of human achievement, finally engaging in a true battle against equally matched adversaries, and they saw precisely what that looked like.

A shared sensation, a primal hunger, settled simultaneously in the chests of everyone manning the line.

It wasn't fear. It wasn't envy. Nor was it simple gratitude, though that sentiment was present beneath the surface. What resonated was something deeper, more ancient, and undeniably more voracious. They had remained subordinate for far too long.

Aria's silver eyes turned unnervingly still and cold. Luna's playful grin flattened into a determined line. Bastet's twitching tail ceased its movement. Nyx's fingers clenched into rigid, white-knuckled fists at her sides. Calypso's chest heaved rapidly, the demoness already experiencing the brewing emotion before she could articulate it. And within the halo adorning Kaiden's head, Alice's inner light intensified by yet another significant degree.

The feeling was uniform, identical, across every single one of them.

Kaiden felt its profound impact within his own chest.

Objectively speaking, their current mindset was utterly irrational.

Merely three months prior, Kaiden Grey had been an F-tier awakened, struggling to defeat slimes and wolves, desperately accumulating points for his next level-up.

Three months. Less than a hundred days had passed since his awakening to now standing on the front lines of a Dungeon Master Battle, a conflict being broadcast to an audience of thirty million and rapidly growing.

At this very instant, every researcher on the planet was meticulously dissecting the data pertaining to Kaiden's group, yet finding themselves utterly incapable of providing an explanation. The observed growth metrics defied any known progression model.

Conventional awakened individuals typically required years to ascend from the lower tiers. Even the most exceptional prodigies needed months. The Awakened Association maintained dedicated observation programs across three continents, solely focused on tracking developmental anomalies, and Kaiden's cohort had simultaneously shattered every established benchmark on every available chart. Official reports classified their progress as 'anomalous,' 'statistically improbable,' and 'requiring extensive further investigation.'

Unofficial theories, however, ranged dramatically from speculations about the 'Ashborns being an extraterrestrial bloodline' to assertions that 'Kaiden is the reincarnation of a divine being.'

By all conventional human metrics, Kaiden's group represented superstars of rapid development, anomalies, and phenomena that existing data struggled to comprehend.

Yet, by their own internal standards, they were still a considerable distance from their ultimate objective.

Witnessing two Monarchs sustaining injuries against entities that their own group would have been forced to flee from, tails tucked in apprehension, was not a moment of sheer admiration for them.

It served as a stark benchmark. And that benchmark was perceived as an affront.

The time had come to rectify this imbalance.