A red streak blew past his left shoulder, laughing.

"Dual-wielding, are we now, Kai?! Can’t wait to see the replay!"

Luna’s Stormblade carved a strider on the diagonal as she flickered through, and she was gone again before the body fell, lightning jumping two ranks deeper into the horde.

Calypso landed beside him on the next beat, bouncing on the balls of her bare feet like a cheerleader who’d just spotted her boyfriend in the crowd, tail whipping a happy curl behind her demonic curves.

"Darling~❤️ You’re making it hard to focus over here!"

Her red eyes lit up with full adoring force, lips puckered into a perfect bow.

Then her face broke open into the Manifestation of Carnage.

"I might not have two axes like my badass husband, but..."

The cheerleader was gone in a single blink, and what came back through the same skin was the demoness who had ruled a Low Tier dungeon at Level 100 before kneeling to him of her own will.

She came down on the closest strider with both hands on the haft and the full weight of her frame riding the swing, and the axe caved through the strider from collarbone to pelvis in one wet split that opened the body into two halves at her boots.

The Carnage Feast buff stacked another notch as blood sprayed up her arms and across her ribs, and she laughed like a woman who had been waiting all afternoon for permission.

She dove past Kaiden into the heaviest knot the strider had been part of, axe already rising for the next.

Above them, Aria’s silver crescents lit a precision wall along the horde’s flank, and her voice carried down sharp with worry, watching her man and her speedster gremlin friend commit to a front line.

"Kai, please don’t take stupid hits! Let Cali handle them! Luna, do NOT bite anything!"

"Hah?! I’m not a dog!" came the shriek from somewhere deep in enemy lines.

Alice’s halo brightened above his head. Telepathy came in dry.

<Big brother, I love you more than anything, but your off-hand form is appalling.>

<Thanks...> Kaiden chuckled dryly.

<Honesty is a sign of love!>

His right blade detonated a strider’s chest on the next beat. His left, cleaner this time, came up under a flier’s wing-joint and opened the bird from sternum to spine on the rising arc.

He, too, knew that he wasn’t a skilled dual-wielder, of course. But he didn’t need to be when facing down a horde of charging monsters coming right at him. His stats and his gauntlet were doing the work his technique was not.

Strength heavy enough to drive a wide swing through mountain-born bone. Agility quick enough to recover from the blade’s drag and bring it back around for the next target, as well as use velocity to add even more devastating force behind his strikes.

Furthermore, the blades themselves were not toy weapons. The Blood Monarch’s Gauntlet was a Legendary-tier artifact, the centerpiece of a set.

The greatswords it shaped from his harvest cut the way high-tier edges were supposed to cut. Mountain-born hide opened. Dense muscle parted. The kind of armor that should have stopped a conventional greatsword cold did not stop these.

Wrath charged every impact, and every impact detonated.

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 64). +102 DMP.]

[You’ve slain invading Flier (Level 71). +78 DMP.]

The chat was no longer typing words.

— Thirsty247: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

— LapdogOfTheEmpress: ⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️⚔️

— TouchGrass: 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

— NyxWorshipper: 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

[Dungeon Master Points: 3,600.]

Past three thousand.

A smile started at the corner of his mouth, but it did not last long because the math in his head, the actual math, was a great deal less smug than the counter wanted him to feel.

He ran it as he walked into the next strider knot, his blade leading on the opening swing.

The Kaiju had eaten twenty dungeons.

He did not know the upper bound on how many monsters a dungeon’s worth of consumed mass represented, as he had not been allowed to see the Claimant’s roster.

But Calypso had ruled a Low Tier dungeon at Level 100 and had carried somewhere in the low hundreds of Salamawyrm-grade monsters and Nightclaw swarms in the field she actually deployed, plus reserves she had never deployed at all.

Twenty dungeons, even if half of them had been disposable templates like the probe wave currently dying at his line, was a roster in the thousands. And the strong end of that roster had not been committed yet. He had not seen one of the heavyweights with his own eyes, and he was already bracing for the moment one walked through the gate and did not die to a casual swing.

Thousands of strong monsters, templates the Claimant had absorbed from twenty separate ecosystems and recompiled into a roster designed to invade.

Against that, his current deployment was: the chokehold rank he had set, the Verdant fallback Taigi was holding, the magma channel his Salamawyrms were running, and what he could summon while the fight was still going.

He was going to need an army.

The DMP rolling in was the only resource that could buy that army on the timetable he had.

Every kill was a brick. Every kill the girls landed was a brick. Every flier Aria dropped on her grid, every body Luna detonated through, every serpent Bastet pinned flat under her zone, every cluster Nyx compressed, every gold beam Alice tracked across the upper air, every laughing axe-swing Calypso took into the heaviest knot, every one of those was an entry on his counter, and his counter was the only thing standing between him and an empty dungeon when the heavyweights finally walked through the gate.

The probe wave was a gift.

The Claimant had paid him in DMP for the privilege of testing him.

Kaiden took the gift with both hands.

His blade came around again and split a strider clean down its centerline, and as the body separated, Wrath-charged blood erupted out of the wound and lanced sideways into the next two striders in the same lane, anchoring both of them mid-stride for the half-second his swing needed to reach them.

Three kills on one swing.

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 65). +106 DMP.]

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 67). +118 DMP.] 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

[You’ve slain invading Strider (Level 64). +102 DMP.]

The counter ticked.

[Dungeon Master Points: 5,900.]

His next swing met empty air where there should have been another strider. He felt the absence in the same heartbeat the threshold registered something else.

The gate flickered.

It was the kind of pressure flicker a doorway gave when something on the other side of it had decided to stop fitting through politely.

The seal between the white country outside and the Abyssal Cavern inside shimmered along its edge, the way air shimmered above a desert highway, and then it did something it had not done across the entire probe wave.

It strained.

The threshold flexed inward by a fingerwidth and held there, and the abyssal stone around its frame groaned under the load. Whatever was on the other side was bigger than the gate’s natural clearance, and whatever was on the other side had decided to come through anyway.

Across the cavern, the rampage paused.

Luna’s red streak slowed for the first time since the wave began. Calypso’s laugh cut off mid-note. The rest of the line stilled with them.

They had all felt it.

Kaiden’s grin returned leaner as he watched the gate strain.

’It begins now, huh?’