Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 996: Weird Terrain

Nothing answered.

Kaiden held the reach anyway, standing in the dead shrine street with the onmyoji’s spent talismans still cooling in the gutter, his want aimed at the three empty slots of his seven Sin Stances.

In three months he had not once wanted something at this size and been told no, and the silence coming back felt like a room with nobody in it.

<Big brother.> Alice arrived on the private channel, giggling. <Your face looks like you just ate a lemon.>

’It is not.’

<It is. The halo can see your face. It’s my halo.>

He grinned, let the want go, and filed it away for later. The system had said unlocking the final stances was up to him now, but it didn’t become an all-you-can-eat buffet.

...

Kaiden and the group walked two districts closer to the river, and Kawanami changed on them.

The kills dried up first. Storefront bursts and rooftop mantids, the rhythm the edge of town spent teaching them, simply stopped, and they walked blocks of dead settlement without swinging at anything.

"Okay, this is giving me the creeps," Luna muttered, flickering up a light pole and back down. "Rooftops are clear. Everything’s clear."

There were no bodies either. A town that had hosted an overflow this long should have been floored with old kills, monster on monster, and the streets were swept bare down to the stains on the asphalt.

The squad felt it before the family did, because the squad knew what the streets were supposed to look like.

"Something is wrong," their pointman said at an intersection, turning in place. He was Kawanami-born, and he was misreading his own house. "This alley connected through to the fish market. There was no wall here."

The wall in question filled the alley mouth to the second floor, rubble and two car bodies packed into it. Farther on, another lane ended the same way, and another, until the town had no side streets left to offer and the main road ran between blocked shoulders like a chute.

Asakura checked her map twice, and then she stopped checking the map.

"Control, Twelfth Garrison," she said to the cordon. "No contact past the middle school."

The radio took a moment. "Twelfth, confirmed. Feeds show nothing moving in the town heart."

Asakura keyed off without replying, and two of her fighters turned to face back down the road behind them.

The main road bent with the river ahead, one last block from the market where the gate had torn open. The town had gone so silent that seventeen sets of footsteps sounded like a parade.

Then the pointman took the corner first, and his hand went up to halt the column behind him before he had any words for why.

...

Oda was the pointman’s name. He had bought fish in the riverfront market once a week his entire life, and what he was looking at now made so little sense that Kaiden asked what was wrong before he managed to report it.

The market square opened wide to the water, stalls long dead under their awnings. In its center, where the file put a dungeon gate, rose a mound the size of a house.

"That is what’s wrong..." Oda finally said.

Cars, masonry, riverstone and torn slabs of the market’s own flooring had been packed into it, along with a delivery bike and a vending machine standing upright in the mass with its front glass unbroken. Whatever Kawanami had owned and left behind was in there somewhere.

Each seam between the pieces was filled with ribs of grey-green carapace, grown through the wreckage like mortar squeezed from a tube, and the mass sat fused into one piece. Only at its edges, low along the ground, violet gate-light leaked out in thin lines.

The dimensional gate was still there. But something had built a wall over it.

On the joint feed, the world watched a raid group stand in silence around a sealed door.

"Is that... construction?" the squad’s medic finally asked.

"Barricade," the spear-user said, then heard his own word, and turned to his captain. "Captain. The monsters built a barricade over their dungeon’s entrance."

Asakura walked the mound’s perimeter once, spear level the entire time, and returned to Kaiden without offering him the map.

"Lord Grey." She picked the words one at a time and lost to some of them. "Monsters come out, we go in. That is all a gate... that is all a gate is. In the files there is no gate ever shut. Have you met something like this before?"

"Can’t say I have. Alice, can you see what’s behind it?"

The halo above his head flared once and swept the mound, and Alice chimed out loud for the group, her voice echoing with conduit resonance. "The gate’s open behind the wall. Mana is flowing normally. But something is weird... I don’t feel any monster’s signature from the inside."

The halo tilted. "For a dungeon that already broke, this is..." She didn’t finish the thought. "I’m not sure what I’m looking at, Big brother."

"An empty dungeon?" Nyx said slowly, frowning at the seams.

"If it’s empty, then barricading the entrance makes sense," Alexandra added.

"But where are the monsters, then?" Bastet muttered.

Then she crouched and traced one carapace rib with her eyes, down to where it met the flagstones.

"Master. Look at the joins. The rubble is stacked leaning inward, against the gate. You brace a wall from the side you’re standing on." She looked up at him. "Which means something stood about where we’re standing to build it. Out here. Not in there."

"It had a town’s worth of material and all the time it wanted, and it spent both walling off every street but this one," Kaiden sighed. "That is something building the ground it wants to fight on."

He walked the mound with the gauntlet’s read on living blood open wide, the sense that found each beating heart for blocks in every direction, and it handed him back a blank.

On the world feed, the chat slowed to a crawl of the same question in a dozen languages.

Kaiden rolled his shoulder and woke the gauntlet. This time, instead of a greatsword, he formed a giant pickaxe, dark blood sheeting into the tool’s shape.

Standing around being unsettled would not open the door, and the job at the bottom of that gate had not changed.

Either kill the boss monster or reach the core. If there were no monsters inside, then they just had to take this barricade off and the job was finished.

"Caly." He tipped his head at the mound. "Let’s open this thing up."

"With pleasure, Darling!!"

Calypso’s axe came around in a full-hipped horizontal that would have halved a train car.

The mound rang like a temple bell. The axe head rebounded, a wedge of carapace and fused stone the size of a dinner plate spun away, and Calypso stood looking at a scar that a swing like that should have turned into a doorway.

Then the scar’s edges softened, crawled, and closed, and the mound was unmarked again.

"...It heals." Calypso’s eyes narrowed. "Darling, the wall heals itself!"

"Anyone who can dent this thing, come help me bring it down," Kaiden said. "The rest of you keep eyes on those streets for me."

They hit the wall.

Aria’s heaviest lances fell from directly above and left glassed craters that filled themselves back in.

Bastet took three steps toward the mound with her hands still at her sides, and her dominion arrived ahead of her. The carapace ribs groaned like ship timbers under the weight of it. It held anyway.

The cuts sealed behind Kaiden’s giant pickaxe before he finished the follow-through, a forearm deep and gone.

The cut faces were what stuck with him. None of it was stacked in there. Stone, steel, shell: all of it ran through everything else in a single grain, as if the mound had been grown in one piece with the town for a seed.

Then Nyx got tired of watching it knit. The next time Calypso’s axe opened a scar, Nyx folded the space inside the wound so its two faces could not reach each other, and held it that way through extreme strain.

Bastet’s dominion came down on the pinned edges. Calypso put the axe into the gap while it was still a gap, and the mound took its first crater that did not close.

"There!" Calypso bellowed, spitting dust. "Nyx, hold it again!"