He checked the bond. Five won at the chokehold, each one alive and standing and carrying the sa XP windfall he was. The fusions had been running for over an hour of sustained combat.
...
Kaiden followed the retreating column’s path through the drained magma passage with Vespera’s shadow gliding beside him, the dry stone still warm under his boots where the river used to flow. The passage opened into the Safe Zone, and the girls were already coming through from the other side.
Seven won converged on the dungeon entrance from both directions, weapons lowered, blood drying. Luna stepped through the chokehold passage with a scowl, and when she saw Kaiden she gave him a dry look.
"So. They just... left?"
"They left." He stopped five ters from the gate and looked at it. The dinsional threshold sat in the Cavern’s mouth the sa way it had since the duel began, a faint shimr in the air with nothing coming through it. The silence on the other side was total.
Nyx spoke, wary of what her man might do in the next few seconds. "Don’t even think about walking through that, Kai. Outside your gate is its ground."
Then she looked wryly at her gremlin bestie, "You neither. I know you’re a very brash girl who’s high on adrenalin, but..." Luna offered her a middle finger, cutting the dialogue off.
"Wasn’t going to," Kaiden replied, looking at the gate, then at the group. "Anyone got a gadget for the job?"
"I knew it’d co in handy!" Scarlet sang happily and reached into the pouch at her hip and pulled out a compact artifact the size of a closed fist, a bronze sphere etched with surveillance runes and a lens set into its front face. A small handheld controller ca out after it, its display flickering to life when she fed both pieces mana.
Nyx looked at the artifact and then at the Fla Monarch with genuine surprise. "You brought a recon drone? You?"
Scarlet bead proudly, already syncing the controller to the sphere. "Doesn’t fit my image, right? True, normally I wouldn’t be caught dead with this nerdy stuff."
She tossed the drone from one hand to the other, testing its weight. "But when you get a call from Vespera Ashborn offering you a fortune to co fight for her children, you better believe you’re getting wrung for every penny’s worth. I ca prepared for the worst."
"That makes a lot of sense, actually..." Nyx giggled softly, a sound that had no business being this light thirty seconds after a battlefield went silent.
Scarlet sent the drone through the threshold with a flick and held the controller out so everyone could see the display.
The feed hit white.
Flat, featureless expanse stretching in every direction under a sky that held no sun but carried light from nowhere, the sa dinsionless void the battle dinsion had opened when the seal first dropped. The drone’s cara panned in a slow circle, and then it found the Claimant.
The thing sat in the white country, the sa body that had stood as a mountain range, four legs folded beneath a mass the cara had no hope of framing in a single shot, stone-slab flanks rippling in slow peristaltic waves that moved its hide like a living landscape. Its crown vanished past the cara’s upward range.
Six eyes, each one wrong in a way the lens couldn’t capture but every viewer who had seen the mountain broadcast recognized, sat half-lidded in the massive head and tracked the drone without urgency, each pupil moving independently of the others.
Around its base, an army.
Hundreds of templates arrayed across the white expanse in clusters organized by species and size, each group holding position at a different distance from the Claimant’s body.
The three elites that had walked out of Vespera’s kill zone bled openly as they approached the Claimant’s nearest flank, and when they reached the seams along its hide, the body opened for them.
The stone-slab plating split along invisible sutures and the three wounded creatures walked into the flesh without resistance, their forms sinking into the Claimant’s mass in a slow absorption that sealed behind them as if they had never been separate creatures.
It ate its own wounded, granting them refuge.
The drone circled and the Claimant let it.
Its gaze followed the bronze sphere in a slow arc, the pupils tracking the cara the way a cat watched a fly it could not be bothered to swat. It let the drone see the army.
Let it see the seams where bodies entered and exited the flesh. Let it see the scale of what was sitting on the other side of Kaiden’s gate, unhurried and carrying enough mass to bury his dungeon ten tis over.
It gave off a cocky air, despite being a giant, Kaiju-sized monster.
Then one eye closed, the lid descending over the wrong pupil in a slow gesture that had no biological function and every social one.
It winked at him.
The feed cut to static.
"Damn, the drone is gone," Scarlet sighed then tossed the controller aside.
Kaiden’s lips pulled sideways as his mind replayed the tape over and over again. "What a cocky bastard."
[Phase Ti Remaining: 40:38.]
Forty minutes. The Claimant was sitting in the white country with its army, content to let the tir burn because it had already gotten what it ca for in the first phase.
It expected him to wait out the clock, sit tight, and brace for Phase 2, or rush outside the dungeon and fight in the most disadvantageous field possible.
He looked at the ladies across the chokehold. At Vespera, who stood with her arms folded and her red eyes already running the sa calculations he was. At the dungeon behind him, his domain, his ground, forty minutes of uncontested ti on terrain he owned with a Dungeon Master interface he’d barely scratched the surface of.
The grin ca back. Wider this ti.
"You want to spend the rest of the phase sitting on your hands? Suit yourself, but don’t think I will too."
He turned from the threshold with a look on his face that made his girls stop where they stood.
"Girls, it’s ti for us to get even stronger," he decreed.
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