Around him, the girls had already caught it. Aria’s fingers tightened once in his before letting go. Luna’s grin ca in wide. The rest of the line ca in on the sa frequency a breath later.
Scarlet’s lower lip pushed out.
"That’s the second ti today! You know I’m not built for holding back!"
Her red-gold lance smoked at her palm in protest but then one more look from Vespera snuffed it out.
Across the Cavern’s span, the first scavenger had loped halfway to their line, four eyes tracking the distance as it closed and then scread.
The sound broke from the hooked mouthpart, half screech and half bell-clang, and the whole gathered Safe Zone swarm answered at once.
A hundred throats opened in layered chorus across the stone. Wings snapped out from flanks and backs and spines where folded mbrane had sat flat a breath earlier, thin sheets on the scavengers, ragged bat expanses on the striders, coiled feathered collars flaring open from the serpents’ hoods. Half of the swarm lifted off the ground on the first wingbeat.
The other half charged.
Kaiden’s Monolith rank shifted to et them, Quakelords rolling their mauls up onto their shoulders. Further back, the Skyfiends pushed off their perches with wings wide, Gorefiends unfurling out of the ceiling and Nightshrouds already seeping darkness into the corridor’s upper air.
Kaiden raised a hand.
"Step back, guys. We got this. Take this chance to study the enemy." Indeed, his minions were not dumb. Abyssal creatures, especially his new and upgraded ones, had the intellect to observe and think for themselves.
The Monoliths arrested mid-step and the Quakelords let their mauls settle. Overhead, the Skyfiends folded back onto their perches while the Gorefiends recoiled into ceiling cover and the Nightshrouds pulled their darkness back in. His monster rank held where it stood, waiting on the next command.
Every head on the line turned toward the oncoming horde, and the studying began. Monolith horns lowered against the ground charge while Gorefiend jaws parted behind ceiling cover, recurved teeth reading angles on the fliers.
His line was committing the Claimant’s first wave to mory with the calm of predators who were here to extinguish anyone who dared move into their territory.
Kaiden stepped forward.
His won stepped with him.
Aria on his right, moonlight already shaping between her fingers.
Luna on his left, Stormblade live with red lightning.
Bastet half a pace behind his right shoulder, bare feet on abyssal stone, gold eyes fixed on the swarm with the sadistic grin still sitting on her face.
Calypso past her shoulder with her axe in both hands and orange heat running through red skin.
Nyx a step further back, coral-pink haze folding along her fingers.
Alice’s halo burned gold above his crown, brightening another notch.
Seven figures against the horde.
The Paragon of Sin stood at the center, his six Sin-fused champions arrayed around him, every one of them carrying a Sin Fusion the world had not yet seen.
The horde charged.
Kaiden’s line moved back instead of eting it.
The first wave crossed the Safe Zone boundary at full speed and found open Cavern ahead of it and no steel waiting yet. Twenty ters of bare abyssal stone. Thirty. The ground surge accelerated into the space the defenders had left open on purpose, and the fliers spread into the upper air above them. The horde committed deeper into the Cavern before any clash occurred.
Forty ters in, the line moved.
"Daring to invade my Kaiden’s ho..."
Aria was the first off the ground. Her moonlight caught under her boots and lifted her in one silent pull straight up into the flier wedge’s path, silver hair streaming behind her, Sovereignty-violet already live in her irises. A dozen crescents rendered around her at her altitude, hanging motionless with their edges angled outward.
Her voice dropped, from serene to harsh and hateful.
"Die, filthy mongrels." The sentence has been passed.
The front line of the flier wedge ran itself onto the points and died there, wings pierced through, their montum driving the rank behind them into the sa blades. What had launched at her as a wedge broke apart on a grid the Sovereignty fusion had fixed in her airspace.
Luna was already gone by then.
"Look at the sadist coming through! We can’t have her hog all the spotlight!" she laughed and threw herself into the midst of it all, becoming a red streak through the ground wave one heartbeat and through the upper flier column the next, a lightning crack landing in place of her every ti she vanished.
Every Stormblade swing detonated on contact with a sound the Cavern had never carried before. Striders and scavengers ca apart in her wake, and a flier dropped mid-wingbeat onto the ones below it. The fusion had turned every cut into demolition.
A column of gold light lanced up past her from the halo above Kaiden’s head a second later and carved a corridor through what was left of the flier wedge’s middle, fifteen ters of wings and torsos disintegrating where the Radiant Sovereignty beam passed, the violet undertone biting deeper than Alice’s own previous work.
"Ti to farm levels and protect our ho, Besties~"
Nyx was folding space around the stragglers. Her coral haze closed on four fliers at once and compressed them, and the Spatial Drain fusion siphoned the mana out of each in the sa motion, her own ters ticking back up as the four crumpled.
"Ahh... I can finally hurt monsters directly?" Her cheeks suddenly turned pink, breath coming out hot. "This is amazing!"
Bastet did not move an inch, standing where she had stepped. The Cavern’s floor cracked in a slow radial around her ankles, and every serpent that had crossed her periter found itself pinned under a weight the Divine Dominion fusion did not bother letting off once it had pressed them flat. The stone beneath them groaned under the load it was being asked to carry.
"Ahahah! After all the hours of painful waiting, the fun begins!"
Calypso laughed once and threw herself into the heaviest knot of the ground surge. The first strider cut her across the ribs before her axe had swung. The wound closed halfway and smoked, and the strider’s next blow slowed mid-arc. Carnage Feast had landed its first feed. She ca down on the thing’s skull a heartbeat later, already the second kill she had taken the buff out of.
Kaiden’s greatsword ca out of blood on his right forearm in one clean pull, and the weight of it hit his grip the way the stat window had promised.
The buffed numbers had abstracted into his bones, and the bones were doing what numbers like that were built to do. The first strider in his lane closed on him in a bipedal charge that would have forced his pre-fusion self to brace.
His greatsword ca around in one arc, and the strider split from its left shoulder to its right hip without either the arc or the swing asking him for effort.
The two halves landed on either side of his boots as his montum carried him into the next.
’Huh.’
The stat window’s math had understated it.
’Defending my ho with my girls by my side, XP numbers piling, stream going nuts... If this isn’t living life, what is?’ he thought as he swung, a giant shockwave exploding out from the arc.
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