His grin pulled flat against the corner of his mouth, and the math started working in his head before his next breath finished.
One percent of what?
The probe wave had been forty in the front rank and forty behind, plus the pups and serpents that had pooled in after them, plus the fliers above them. Call it a clean two hundred bodies through the gate during the probe. The gang and the magma path between them had already cleaned up most of those.
If the system was reading kill count as percent of total enemy headcount, then one percent ant the Claimant’s full roster sat sowhere around twenty thousand bodies, and what had walked through the gate in the probe had been a rounding error, a sample.
Or the system was reading percent of enemy combat power, in which case the math went the other direction. Twenty thousand low-tier templates would have read as a great deal more than one percent of the Claimant’s force if the tric was raw count.
One percent on a power scale ant the absorbed roster had a very different shape underneath the disposable surface. Tens of heavyweights. A hundred. The probe wave had been the thinnest peel off the top of sothing whose real bulk was an order of magnitude denser.
He did not know which reading the system was using.
Either way the news was bad.
If the Claimant had twenty thousand monsters on its roster, the gang was going to spend the next two hours killing without rest.
If the Claimant had a hundred heavyweights, the gang was about to be tested on whether they could put down a creature like the one currently standing in the Safe Zone, repeatedly, before the Claimant ran out of them.
Or, worst case, both.
The Kaiju had watched the probe. It had read the woman dropping crescents on a precision lattice in the upper air, the speedster detonating its serpents through the front rank, the queen pinning its strikers to the floor without lifting a hand, the demoness eating axe-strokes for fuel and laughing through it, the man in the middle of all of them carrying two greatswords. The Claimant was committing.
Kaiden’s mouth pulled inward at one corner as he flicked his attention sideways, into the 3D map he had left open at the edge of his peripheral, and pulled it forward.
The dungeon rendered in the air, translucent. He moved the view down the kill route, past the magma exit, into the channel.
The magma channel was burning brighter than usual.
The ambient glow of his molten rivers sat at its usual orange burn against the basalt walls, but the brightness ca from the enemies that had committed down that path during the probe wave and had not yet died, and from the brood that was unmaking them.
The Claimant had sent sothing down the spiral. Several sothings. The map showed cooling spots where bodies had ended, and through the rendering of the channel itself Kaiden could see what his magma roster was doing to anything that had committed past the sli-coated approach.
Path B was doing its intended job, that is, being untraversable.
Kaiden let himself appreciate it for a beat, then he closed the magma view and pulled the main interface up.
The DMP balance hung at the top corner.
He and his girls had fard across the probe wave. The number sitting against the dark was a working pool, and given the math he had just run, every point of it was about to matter.
He pulled the roster and the shop forward in the sa motion, then started spending.
The system confird each tap with a clean pulse. The roster ticked. New unit markers blood at the throne in the Verdant, far end of his domain, dim at first and then settling into their colors as the spawn completed. They began to walk.
[Reinforcent deploynt: confird.]
[Units spawned at Core. Manual traversal required.]
[Estimated arrival to chokehold: variable.]
The "Manual traversal required." line was new but he understood. With hostiles inside the domain, the system did not let him drop new bodies wherever he pleased.
Every purchase spawned at the Core, the throne at the far end of the Verdant, and walked from there. Cavern reinforcents had a corridor and a Sink to cross. Magma reinforcents had the burrow tunnel to file through, single-body width for the wyrms. None of it was going to land in the next few seconds.
If the rule had been otherwise, Master Battles would not have been battles. He could have spawned a Quakelord behind the enemy lines and dropped its hamr into the heavyweight’s spine before the creature finished its next step.
He could have stacked a Gorefiend onto the ceiling six feet over its skull and let the talons handle introductions. He could have, theoretically, spawned a fresh Maulfiend inside the heavyweight’s own chest cavity and scored an instakill on geotry alone.
The dungeons did not allow it. The system governing this strange entity and battle insisted on sothing resembling a fair fight, well, as fair as a fight between two Masters with utterly different toolkits and power levels could ever be. New bodies entered at the Core. They walked.
Whatever he bought now was a deeper bench for the long fight ahead, and the long fight was the only kind this was going to be.
He closed the interface.
The Cavern’s air had not stopped vibrating from the scream that the two monsters - boss and Monarch - released.
Behind the boss monster, the gate strained again.
Twice.
A second beast cleared the threshold a beat later, lighter than the first but built the sa in the shoulders, mountain-born bone and gray plate, mouth deeper than its skull’s geotry should have allowed. A third followed.
The Safe Zone began to fill with weight the way it had filled with bodies during the probe wave, except now the weight ca in mass instead of numbers, each new arrival heavier than anything the probe had offered.
Behind the three of them, a fresh push of low-tier started filing back into the Safe Zone, the Claimant’s roster reading the heavyweights as cover and committing more bodies under their shadow.
The gang was about to face a real wedge.
Kaiden lifted both blades right before the second wave hit the kill line.
The lead beast accepted Scarlet’s challenge.
Its four eyes had locked on her the mont she’d planted both palms on her hips at the Safe Zone’s edge and dared it to step over the line, and the boss monster was, for all its mountain-born mass, not the kind of creature that ignored a challenge.
It charged.
Forty ters of closing mountain at full bipedal velocity, plated shoulder lowered, eyes fixed on the redhead at the other end of the kill line.
Scarlet saw the hulk of muscle and gray plate barreling at her and her grin ca in slightly manic. Battle maniac, fully unmasked. She had been waiting hours for an opponent worth firing at properly, and the beast on the other side of the Cavern had just told her that it was down to play.
"Hell yeah! Let’s dance!"
She did not brace for impact. Bracing was what physical fighters did, and Scarlet was not a physical fighter. She had a slim feminine fra with fitting stat distribution that, by the brutal arithtic of mass against mountain, would have been pulped on contact with this thing if she had tried to et its shoulder with hers. The Fla Monarch’s body did not hold lines. It set the air around it on fire and let the fire hold the line for her.
So she let it loose.
The orange aura curtain that had peeled off her shoulders during her opening battle cry ca back, harder. The air twenty ters around her in every direction lit up.
Visible heat distortion ran outward from her body in concentric waves and the abyssal floor at her feet went orange and started to shimr, dry stone going liquid in a slow ripple that crept outward as her body decided what temperature it wanted to be tonight.
Her hair lifted off her shoulders and turned molten, every strand a thread of running fla, the column of red-gold fire above her head climbing thirty ters into the Cavern’s vault and folding back down across her in a do of pure radiant force.
The Fla Monarch was in the register she fought in when the contract was top-shelf and the caras did not matter, raw and wild and burning at a temperature human bodies were not supposed to reach.
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