Demonic Pornstar System

Chapter 804: Disaster

[Phase Time Remaining: 01:42:18.]

[Dungeon Ground Held: 53%. Enemy Forces Eliminated: 3%.]

Kaiden read it twice.

Then a third time, slower, because something had to be wrong with the rendering.

"...Fuck."

’But how...?’

His line had not moved a meter. His Monoliths were holding the chokehold. The second wave’s casualties were piled in the Safe Zone at the gate, smoking.

He had not lost a single foot of ground that he could see from where he stood.

But the tracker said he was down to half.

His grin flattened, and his pulse exploded.

He swiped the map view down the kill route, past the chokehold, past the corridor, past the Sink, right into the magma channel.

The rendering came up in his peripheral and his stomach dropped for the first time since the gate had sealed.

The magma was dark.

The molten rivers that had been burning bright orange against the basalt walls when he had checked the channel ten minutes earlier rendered flat gray now, the ambient glow extinguished along the entire spiral. The slime-coated approach his Salamawyrms had been holding sat empty. They were further down the spiral now, engaging the column the Claimant had pushed through and dying as they fought it.

Whatever the Claimant had sent down the spiral was eating through his line and his magma both, and his evolved magma dwellers were trying to hold a channel that no longer played by the rules it had been built for.

The column had pushed Melty’s pod back across most of the kilometer the spiral covered. They were contesting the final bend now, almost at the bottom of the channel. The burrow tunnel exit, the one that fed into the Virulent Mire’s high wall, was meters from being in enemy hands.

Then he pulled the notification stack forward.

It had been climbing in his peripheral throughout the engagement at the gate, the routine cadence Path B was supposed to generate when it was working. Incursion at the slime-coated approach. Dreadwyrms engaging. Hostiles eliminated, sector 1. The standard back-and-forth of an ambush line doing its job at the entry sector against an enemy that was supposed to be dying in the medium it was wading into. He had registered each entry the way a Master registered confirmation. Glance, file, return to the line.

Then only a couple dozen seconds ago, when the fight was really heating up with the invading level 100+ monsters, the cadence had broken.

[Path B alert: anomalous magma volume loss detected.]

[Named unit critical injury: Melty (Dreadwyrm). Mandible fracture along fusion seam.]

[Path B alert: hostile column advancing past slime approach into sector 2.]

[Path B alert: Pyremother brood production at zero. Brood-pool drained.]

[Dreadwyrm casualty: Path B, sector 2.]

[Path B alert: magma volume loss accelerating across sectors 2 through 4.]

[Magmashaper alert: terrain abilities offline across upper spiral. Shaping medium below operational threshold.]

[Dreadwyrm casualty: Path B, sector 3.]

[Path B alert: magma volume below combat threshold along upper spiral.]

[Path B alert: hostile column advancing on burrow tunnel exit.]

[Path B alert: Virulent Mire downstream defense projected to fail on breach.]

All of it red. All of it stacked into the last forty seconds.

The system had given him exactly the alerts a working channel was supposed to produce for the first ten minutes, and seconds ago the cadence had turned red.

His teeth set against each other for the first time in the engagement.

’What a stupid blunder...’

He had had eyes on the gate the entire time, though. If some giant anti-magma beast had passed through and waddled toward Path B, he would have seen it.

’So how...?’

The dungeon spoke the answer to him.

The bond at the back of his skull pulled taut and the channel’s last ten minutes folded into him in one compressed pulse, raw memory dumped wholesale through the Master’s link to his brain.

He absorbed the entire event in less time than it took his pulse to bump twice.

The column had crossed the slime-coated approach in formation, dark-hide quadrupeds reading on the overlay as low-tier scavengers in the mid sixties, disposable templates the gang would have shredded in passing on the front line. The pack instinct in the template had read the slip-grip on the first stones and most of them had kept their footing.

The smallest creature, however...

A runt-sized thing lost its footing on the slime ooze and slid over the edge of the approach. The body had dropped ten meters down the slope into the molten river along the bend.

Melty had been on it before it cleared the surface.

His only named monster had come up out of the magma the way she had been bred to come up out of magma, breaching at full velocity with her jaws open, her Dreadwyrm instinct firing exactly the way her ecosystem had been engineered to fire.

A falling body in her river. Her bite had closed around the runt’s torso at the apex of her breach with the crushing load that should have rendered a body that size apart on contact, and then she dragged the thing into the magma.

However, the runt had not come apart. Instead, it had opened its mouth.

The magma around its body had begun to move, running in a directed flow into the runt’s open jaws, and the little nothing-tier scavenger had started drinking the river around itself the way a thirsty man knocks back a beer. Its body had distended in seconds, the flesh inside Melty’s jaws bloating outward against the inside of her bite, and the river around both of them had begun visibly lowering as the runt fed.

Melty’s bite had held. Melty did not let go of kills.

But the runt had grown even wider.

Melty’s jaw geometry had reached its load tolerance, exceeded it, and her lower mandible had cracked along the fusion seam and torn open outward in a wet unhinging of the plate that had armored her face since evolution.

She had come off the runt with half her face missing.

But the runt had not stopped feeding.

The same mass that had broken Melty’s jaw had lifted the runt out of the river. It rose in one slow buoyant motion, swelling as it cleared the surface, the magma still streaming into its open jaws but now in a directed arc that pulled the river upward into a ribbon across open air. No drop spilled.

The runt floated above the bank.

What had been a small scavenger fifteen seconds ago was now a body the size of a delivery truck and still growing, hide gone cherry red to white at the core, magma running molten through every visible vessel of its flesh, glowing from inside with the volume of river it was swallowing.

It was drinking from a distance.