Demonic Pornstar System - Chapter 798: Roar of Challenge

Chapter 798: Roar of Challenge

The threshold flexed wider, abyssal stone groaning along its frame as something on the other side stopped trying to fit through politely and started insisting. The seal shimmered hard. The frame bowed. And what came through it came through slow.

The first thing across was the shoulder.

A single shoulder, dark-plated and ridged with mountain-born bone, that did not belong to any creature the probe wave had introduced.

The frame of the gate widened to admit it, the dungeon’s own architecture giving up a fraction of its natural clearance because what was insisting on coming through had decided that the architecture would adjust rather than the body. The shoulder cleared.

Then the second one. Then the chest behind them, scaled in plating that ate the ambient glow of the Cavern and gave back nothing, ribs the size of structural beams moving once with breath that had not been moving when the gate first strained.

The head followed, four eyes set above a maw that ran most of the length of the skull, horns set wide enough that the thing had to angle its neck to clear them past the threshold. Abyssal stone groaned again as the horns scraped the frame on the way through.

It stopped at the edge of the Safe Zone.

Both feet planted, tail settled behind it with a weight the floor of the Cavern took in a low broad thump that traveled up through the rock and into the bones of every defender on the line.

Then it screamed.

The pressure landed before the sound did, low and total, hitting the chest of every person on the field. The ears caught up half a beat behind, to a guttural roll of register that did not belong to any throat humans had cataloged. The Cavern’s ceiling answered with falling grit. The abyssal stone at Kaiden’s feet vibrated against the soles of his boots. Aria’s silver hair lifted off her shoulders in the pressure wash before her moonlight steadied her in the air. Luna’s grin had not come back. Calypso’s axe had paused at the top of an arc and stayed there for a full second longer than her swing’s geometry should have allowed.

The whole line felt it in the bones, and the line had been built on bones that did not feel things easily.

“This is a boss monster from at least a B-tier dungeon, maybe even A-tier… And it must be at least level 150,” Scarlet said, and the easy amusement that had ridden her voice through the whole siege so far was gone.

The Flame Monarch had stopped joking.

“A-tier? Level 150?!”

Nyx’s voice cut from a step behind Kaiden, the strategic brain doing the math out loud, sharper than she usually let it sound.

“Kai, that’s far above anything we’ve ever engaged!”

Aria’s hand tightened in his, silent.

The line had felt the scream. Now it was reading the price tag, and it did not like the read.

Then Scarlet stepped past Vespera’s lattice into open ground.

Heat lifted off her shoulders in a slow visible curtain, the air around her going orange against the abyssal dim. Her grin came in lopsided, the cocky shape every combat-stream subscriber on three continents had memorized off her highlight reels, and she planted both palms on her hips, all swagger and ease. She had been waiting hours for exactly this excuse.

“Relax, younguns.”

Her voice carried easy, unconcerned, full Monarch register.

“I’ll dust the big bastard myself.”

Then she let it loose.

The slow visible curtain of heat that had been peeling off her shoulders escalated in one breath into an inferno.

The Flame Monarch’s body lit from the inside out, every reserve she had been holding through the entire siege uncoiling at once, and the orange haze around her exploded upward into a column of red-gold fire that climbed twenty meters off the abyssal floor and spread outward in a slow expanding ring. Her hair lit on fire, turning molten orange, and lifted as if caught in a whirlwind.

Her eyes lit from inside. The temperature against the Cavern’s ambient cool spiked into a wall of pressure that the line felt before they saw it.

Then she parted her jaws wide and screamed.

The sound that came out of her was not a sound that belonged to the woman who had let Nyx drag her around the cathedral by the wrist just a couple hours ago. It was guttural and animalistic, a long full-throated war-cry that tore out of a slim feminine frame and carried the weight of a true Monarch.

The cry pulled on the bones the way the heavyweight’s scream had pulled, except this one pulled in the opposite direction. The heavyweight’s had landed weight on every chest on the line. Scarlet’s lifted it.

Her gaze did not leave the boss monster.

She stared straight at it across the Cavern’s open span, head tilted slightly downward, gaze locked, and the column of flame around her took on the focused shape of a directed challenge.

The fire did not reach the monster, however. The Safe Zone’s hundred-meter rule held the heat back at the perimeter, the same rule that protected the gang’s targets from any harm inside the bubble.

Scarlet’s outburst slammed against that invisible line and stopped there, but the veil itself answered the impact. The seal blazed alive along its full perimeter in a rim of red-gold light that lit the abyssal stone for thirty meters in every direction, the system’s own architecture singing under the load of holding back a Monarch’s full release.

“Step over the line, bastard.”

Her grin returned, brighter than ever.

“I’m right here.”

A breath before Scarlet’s outburst, Vespera had already moved.

A single dome of shadow rose off the abyssal stone in one clean motion, woven from the Shadow Monarch’s own braid in the time it took her to angle her wrist a degree, and it closed over the gang as a perfect curve of darkness that cut Scarlet’s heat off cleanly an inch from skin and protected their eyes from being blinded by the flash.

The temperature inside the dome dropped to room, the light dimmed to comfortable, and the wash of pressure that had been about to start cooking everyone on the line disappeared as if it had never been there at all.

Inside the dome, Nyx’s composure broke.

“Oh my god…!” Both her hands had clamped against her own cheeks, the cool space babe register entirely gone. “That’s her aura release, I’ve watched the clip like sixty times and the stream cannot translate this, you cannot tell what it actually feels like in person, look at her hair, look at her HAIR!!”

Luna had let out a low whistle that pitched up halfway through and ended in an outright cackle.

“I’m liking this chick more and more!”

Calypso’s tail had snapped up behind her into a tight curl, and she rocked forward on the balls of her feet with full Carnage in her grin.

“She’s speaking to me using a language I understand better than anything…”

Past the dome, Scarlet’s column of flame held steady against the Safe Zone’s veil. The boss monster’s four eyes had finally moved. They tracked her without blinking, the body itself still planted at the edge of the Safe Zone. The two of them held the stare across the boundary the system had drawn between them.

The tension that had landed in every defender’s chest under the scream eased back by a measurable fraction. Scarlet had read the heavyweight at level one fifty out of an A-tier dungeon, and Scarlet was not afraid of it.

Kaiden’s gaze flicked sideways to Vespera. Her red eyes had returned to the gate the moment Scarlet had stepped forward, and her shadow lattice had not so much as twitched. But he knew she had felt the look.

Of every staffing decision Vespera had made for the family across the years, bringing the Flame Monarch onto this line was about to top the list.

He turned back to the gate.

Behind the thing, the probe wave broke after the monster’s – and Scarlet’s – scream.

The retreat order had not been spoken in any language the dungeon could parse, but the surviving low-tier monsters caught it the way a school of fish catches a current. The ones that had still been in the kill zone past the Safe Zone’s edge were already dead, cooked into the abyssal stone they had been standing on the moment Scarlet’s column let go.

The survivors were the latecomers, the ones still inside the bubble who had pooled in behind the boss and had not yet crossed into the open. They retreated.

Every striding, slithering, flying body still inside the Safe Zone turned around and regrouped toward the gate rather than press forward into a Cavern that had just demonstrated what was waiting on the other side of the line. The looming visitor did not look at any of them. They flowed around its planted feet and back through the threshold like water around a boulder.

The probe was over.

The system rendered the verdict against the corner of his vision in clean flat type.

[Phase 1 progress check.]

[Phase Time Remaining: 01:53:42.]

[Dungeon Ground Held: 100%. Enemy Forces Eliminated: 1%.]

Kaiden read it twice.

Six minutes and change. The Claimant had taken six minutes and change to study his line, decide it was real, recall its fodder, and commit. The Phase 1 clock had nearly two full hours left on it, and the second wave was already loading.

His eyes dropped to the second number.

One percent.

’Fuck…’