Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 699: Regret

Brittany and Trisha walked in silence for the first thirty seconds.

The mountain path was narrow enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and the cold had sharpened into the kind that bit through armor gaps and settled into joints. Around them, the competition grounds were winding down for the evening. Medics moved between tents. Officers cataloged damage. The distant sound of a helicopter’s rotors faded south.

Trisha spoke first, and her voice was barely above a breath.

”She’s really dead.”

Brittany didn’t answer.

”Britt.”

”I heard you.”

”She’s really dead. Stacy is dead.”

The words landed like they had the first time, and the second time, and every time since the notification had appeared on their interfaces an hour ago. Competitor death confirmed. Team member removed from active roster. Status: Deceased. The hologram interface had reduced Stacy to a line item while her blood was still wet on the basin floor, and no amount of repeating it made the sentence feel real.

Brittany’s throat worked. ”I know.”

”We trained with her every morning for the past three years,” Trisha said, and her voice cracked on the last word in a way she clearly hadn’t intended. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm and kept walking. ”Every single morning, she was right there. She was always right there, and now she’s just gone, and for what? For what, Britt?”

”Keep your voice down.”

”For points?” Trisha’s whisper turned ragged. ”For footage? For Ash’s rankings?”

”Trisha. Lower your voice.”

Trisha swallowed hard and pressed her lips together. They walked in silence for another few steps, boots crunching on loose gravel, and the path curved around a supply depot where two Association techs were dismantling a sensor array without looking up.

When they were past it, Trisha spoke again.

”This was a mistake.”

Brittany’s jaw tightened.

”All of it,” Trisha continued, quieter now but no less certain. ”The guild. The content. The contracts. We signed up because they told us we’d be set for life if we were willing to throw our dignity away, and now Stacy’s dead and Ash is in a holding cell screaming for his mommy, and we’re walking to answer a summons from his mom like we’re the ones who did something wrong.”

”We’re too deep now for regrets,” Brittany decreed, and the flatness of it surprised even her. ”We signed. We filmed. We did everything they asked. You can’t just walk away from that.”

”I know we can’t walk away! That’s what I’m saying.” Trisha’s voice dropped further. ”We’re too deep to leave and too smart to pretend this is fine. So what are we?”

Brittany felt the sting behind her eyes and blinked it away.

It didn’t work.

The tears came anyway, quiet and hot, rolling down her cheeks before she could stop them. She wiped them with the back of her gauntlet and the metal scraped her skin and she didn’t care.

”I sold my body,” she said. ”On camera. For metrics. My father can’t look at me. My mother pretends she doesn’t know. How can she not? I’m the awakened slut who moans on camera despite being an A-tier fighter. Even her old neighbors know.”

Her voice buckled. ”I told myself it was worth it because we were building something, because the money was real, because Ash had a plan and the guild had structure and it was all going somewhere, and now Stacy’s dead and it’s all falling apart and I can’t even mourn her properly because we have to go answer a business call from the woman who put us here.”

Trisha was quiet for a moment.

”At least we got paid,” she said, and the bitterness in it was so complete that it circled back around to exhausted acceptance. ”Seriously. The money’s real. It’s sitting in your account right now. You could retire if you wanted. Walk away, buy a house, never think about any of this again.”

Brittany’s head snapped toward her. ”I don’t want to retire! I’m an awakened fighter with a bright future! I could become one of America’s strongest beings! And what, now I’m supposed to knit scarves for the rest of my life?”

The words came out louder than she meant them to, raw and furious, and she caught herself and looked around to make sure no one had heard.

Trisha watched her with eyes that were red-rimmed and tired and far too understanding.

”No,” she said quietly. ”We’re not awakened fighters.”

Brittany stared at her.

”We’re awakened celebrity prostitutes, Britt.” Trisha said it flat, looking her dead in the eyes. ”Harem bitches of a loser who cried for mommy after getting arrested on live television. That’s what the internet calls us. The forums. The clips. The compilations. Three hours of it, and you know what the worst part is?”

Brittany’s lips trembled.

”They’re not wrong. We sold it all for easy gains.”

Her vision blurred again, worse this time. Brittany pressed a hand to her mouth and kept walking because stopping meant falling apart and she couldn’t afford to fall apart right now, not on this path, not with cameras potentially still recording, not with a summons waiting at the end of it.

Trisha put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, and they walked the rest of the path in silence.

...

The command tent was larger than the field tents, reinforced canvas stretched over a portable frame with the Ashbound family crest stitched into the entrance flap. Two guards flanked it, both of them staring straight ahead with the professional blankness of men who’d been told not to react to anything they heard inside.

Elias, Brittany’s childhood friend, was waiting near the entrance, the way he always waited, slightly apart from everyone else with his spear resting against the crook of his arm. When he saw them approaching, he straightened.

His eyes found Brittany’s face immediately, and whatever he’d been about to say died on his lips.

”Hey.” His voice was careful. ”How are you holding up?”

Brittany looked at him. Her eyes were swollen. Her cheeks were streaked.

”I can’t,” she managed. ”I can’t talk right now, Elias.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and the quiet defeat that always lived behind his eyes deepened into grief with no outlet. He stepped aside without another word.

Brittany and Trisha pushed through the tent flap.

The interior was sparse and functional. A folding table. Two chairs. A portable holographic display mounted on a tripod. Maps and logistics overlays pinned to the canvas walls. The space belonged to someone who valued efficiency over everything else.

Maeve Ashbound stood behind the table.

She was a tall woman, sharp-featured, with silver-streaked hair pulled back so tightly it looked painful. She wore the Ashbound family’s formal grey, a high-collared jacket cut in clean military lines, and the crest pinned to her lapel caught the light from the holographic display. Her posture was the kind that made rooms feel smaller.

She did not greet them.

Her eyes moved from Brittany to Trisha and back, and the expression on her face had frozen past anger into cold arithmetic, the flat stare of a woman calculating losses rather than mourning them.

”Sit,” she said.

They sat.

Maeve placed both hands flat on the table and looked down at them with the measured patience of someone who had already decided what this conversation would contain and was simply waiting for the formalities to catch up.