Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 811: Going to War

The force of it launched him sideways, airborne for one horrible second, and he hit the ground rolling and came up coughing, chest on fire, and the Wrath still cooking through every cell because he could not afford to drop it.

<BIG BROTHER!! Let me spend mana to help you properly!>

Alice’s healing bloomed across his torso. He felt the mana drain spike through their link, felt her reserves dip from the cost of repairing broken bone while the Dominion Convergence was still running, and the math in his head came up red.

’Healing on the ribs, nothing else. I need you to have mana for later.’

<But->

’Trust me. This is... nothing.’

With a weary heart, the little sister listened. The healing focused on the three breaks, bone knitting back together in a warm pulse that cost her exactly what she could afford and nothing more. His shoulder stayed fractured. His mouth stayed bloody.

The lead Ruinwalker came at him again. The spine-club descended in a vertical strike aimed at the top of his skull, and Kaiden stepped into it instead of away.

He caught the shaft of the club between his blade and his left forearm, the chitin-covered weapon grinding against the harvested blood along his edge and the broken bone underneath his jacket, and the pain was blinding and total and it did not matter because Gluttony was pulling from the Ruinwalker’s body through the contact point.

Mana. Heat. Life. The siphon reached through the chitin where his blade had cracked it and drank.

The Ruinwalker staggered. Its grip loosened by a fraction.

Kaiden’s blade came free and he put it through the open palm before the green energy could charge, Wrath detonating inside the three-fingered hand and blowing it apart from the inside. The Ruinwalker reeled.

Its remaining hand gripped the club and swung blind, and Kaiden was already past it, his blade driving into the cracked knee from behind and widening the gap he’d made on the first pass until the joint separated and the Ruinwalker dropped to one leg with a sound that shook the basin floor.

He climbed the falling body.

Both feet on its lowering back, then the spine, then the shoulder, and his blade came down on the crown of its head from above with every remaining ounce of Wrath charge he had in his frame. The chitin split. The skull underneath split. The brain underneath that cooked inside the casing as the detonation went off inside the head.

[You’ve slain invading Ruinwalker (Level 110). +2,120,000 XP. +2,000 DMP.]

Kaiden rode the body to the ground and pulled blood from the cooling corpse before the system finished its notification, the Gauntlet drinking deep from the kill, his reserves jumping back from empty to a quarter in one long pull that lit both vambraces bright.

Four left.

The two on his flank had not stopped. They hit him on the way down off the corpse, both clubs swinging in converging arcs that caught him mid-air and left him no angle to dodge.

He ate both hits.

The left club caught his hip and the right caught his upper back and the combined impact sent him into the ground hard enough to bounce, his body carving a trench through the Mire floor for three meters before friction stopped him.

Blood flooded the back of his mask and the Gauntlet drank it before he could choke on it, the seal pulling the liquid back through the construct faster than it could pool.

His lower spine screamed at a pitch he’d never felt before and his legs went numb and distant for one horrifying heartbeat before Alice’s healing slammed into the site and pulled him back from the edge of spinal damage.

Her mana dropped hard. He felt it through the link like a door slamming shut on a room that had been full a minute ago and was now half-empty.

<Don’t you DARE tell me to save it! You almost lost your legs!>

He didn’t argue.

Kaiden stood. Bloody. Shoulder fractured, ribs reknit but screaming, lower back singing with residual fire, face mask cracked again, and the Wrath still burning through it all because the alternative was lying down in a poison biome while four elite monsters stood between him and the exits his column needed to protect.

Vespera’s voice came from somewhere deep in the column’s front, carried across the basin by a shadow that peeled off the lattice and delivered the words to his ear. "Good job."

He spat blood sideways. "Thanks."

The stream ticker pulsed again.

— Thirsty247: Some helpful motherly encouragement in the midst of hardship, what a caring mom!

— TouchGrass: bro is fighting level 100+ monsters at his level, this is insane...

— NyxWorshipper: alice hold your big bro together pls pls pls

— PrincelessPrincess (mod): He’s taking too much damage. The healing can’t keep up with this.

— Kaiden’s Wife (mod): I’m so worried!!

— Lady Leia (mod): Don’t worry. He’s harvesting too. Girls, cheerleader mode!

— KaisBicep: GO KAI GO KAI GO KAI 💪💪💪💪💪

— MoonlitSinner: 🩸⚔️🩸⚔️🩸⚔️ BLOOD KNIGHT BLOOD KNIGHT

— xo_valkyrie: KAI FIGHTING!! 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶

— SinfullyDevoted: PROTECT OUR PRINCE!! EVERYONE SEND ENERGY!! 🙏🙏🙏

— KaisBicep: 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪

Leia was right.

The blood was not going to waste, not even his own. The Gauntlet was pulling it back in as fast as it left him, recycling the damage into fuel, and every hit the Ruinwalkers landed filled his reserves a fraction more than the last because his own blood was richer than anything the monsters bled. He was turning their offense into his ammunition.

The four remaining Ruinwalkers came again.

And somewhere between the third hit and the fourth, between the club that caught his already-fractured shoulder and the palm-strike he rolled under by less than an inch, between the blood he lost and the blood he reclaimed, between Alice’s frantic perception calls and his own body’s stubborn refusal to go down in front of his little sister and his mother and forty-six million people, something changed.

The stress left.

It did not leave gradually. It went out of him like air from a punctured lung, one exhale, and what remained behind it was rhythm.

The rhythm of the Paragon of Sin going to war.