Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 729: Live

Emilia almost smiled. Almost.

The chat in her moderator overlay was still scrolling at a speed that made reading impossible. She caught fragments as they flew past.

Theories. Arguments. Clips of the kiss being analyzed frame by frame. Someone had isolated the moment Vespera’s expression shifted after touching Kaiden’s face, the instant before she stood and turned on the siblings, and was running it in slow motion with annotations. The post had eight thousand comments.

A new thread was climbing the trending tab. The title was just three words: ”Vespera is gorgeous.”

Emilia blinked.

She tapped into it. The thread had exploded in the last ten minutes, thousands of comments from men who had apparently never seen Vespera Ashborn from closer than a press photo. The replay’s first-person perspective had put her face inches from the camera when she’d knelt in front of Kaiden, and for the first time, millions of viewers had seen the Shadow Monarch without the distance, without the terror, without the shadows eating half the frame.

Just a woman’s face, up close, her hand on someone’s chin, her lips pressed to his forehead.

And she was stunning.

The comments were shameless. Paragraphs about her bone structure. Entire essays about the way her hair fell. One man had written four hundred words about her eyes and was getting roasted for it in the replies, which hadn’t stopped the post from getting six thousand upvotes.

Emilia scrolled down and found the women.

They’d arrived like a wall.

”The men are all just now noticing? She has been the most beautiful woman in the awakened world forever.”

”Men will watch a woman crack mountains in half and not notice she’s gorgeous until she does something soft. Unbelievable.”

”I have been a Vespera stan since I was fourteen years old. Where were all of you when I was getting called a masochistic lesbian for it?”

Emilia understood the women. Vespera’s fanbase had always been small but ferocious, almost exclusively made up of women, and it had nothing to do with finding her warm or likeable. It was simpler than that.

Vespera Ashborn was simply a force of nature who answered to nobody. She walked into rooms and the rooms emptied. She made decisions and the world rearranged itself around them. Every woman who’d ever been talked over, ignored, patronized, or told to wait her turn looked at Vespera and saw the version of themselves that never had to ask permission for anything.

Just like the men, most women feared her. But the ones who loved her wished they were her. Men tended to prefer women such as Scarlet, the Flame Monarch, who was everything Vespera was in terms of raw power while she smiled kindly and spoke charismatically.

Unlike ’someone,’ she didn’t make you feel like your next breath was a privilege she could revoke.

The thread was devolving into a gender war about whether fear cancelled out attractiveness, and Emilia closed it before it gave her a headache.

Then her interface chimed.

Her hand froze. Through the phone, she heard Leia scream and the crash of her chair tipping backward, followed by Sarah’s sharp intake of breath.

The replay feed in Emilia’s vision flickered once, twice, and the REPLAY tag in the corner of her interface vanished.

Replaced by a single word.

LIVE.

”It’s live,” Emilia whispered. ”It’s live, it’s live, it’s live!”

”I SEE IT!” Leia screamed from the ground. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get back up.

The frame was empty.

No Kaiden. No mountain. No monsters. Just a bare space, lit brightly, with what looked like a wall behind it and nothing else. The kind of shot that said someone had started the broadcast before anyone was ready.

”What...” Sarah started.

Then the shadows came.

They bled in from the edges of the frame, pooling across the floor, climbing the wall, eating the light from the corners until the brightly lit room went dim and cold. The air in the feed shifted, the way footage of a freezer looks different from footage of a living room, a visual chill that the viewers could feel in their eyes if not on their skin.

Vespera Ashborn stepped out of the darkness.

She materialized the way she had on the mountain, the way she always did, as if the shadows had been holding her shape and simply let go. One moment the frame was empty and the next she was there, standing in the center of the feed, her hair moving in a wind that existed only for her.

Vespera looked into the camera.

The silence lasted three seconds. Three seconds where millions of viewers stared at the face of the Shadow Monarch filling their feeds, up close, in sharp detail, and waited for whatever was about to come out of her mouth.

”My name is Vespera Ashborn.”

Her voice was flat and clear and carried no warmth.

”Kaiden Grey is my firstborn son.”

Leia choked.

It was a real, physical choke, the kind that happens when saliva goes down the wrong pipe because the body forgets how to do two things at once. She was still on the floor from the chair, and now she was coughing and sputtering and hitting her own chest, and through the phone it sounded like someone had shoved a cat into a garbage disposal.

Emilia’s legs gave out.

She plopped down on her butt on the kitchen floor, back against the cabinet. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed it. Opened it again. Nothing.

”He’s... she... that’s...” Sarah’s voice came through the phone in fragments, each one starting a sentence that her brain refused to finish. The crunching had stopped dead. ”Kai is... Vespera’s... he’s her...”

A clatter. The Nutella jar hitting a hard surface, or possibly the floor.

On the feed, Vespera stood in the silence of her own declaration and offered nothing more.

Then footsteps sounded.

A low, deep chuckle rolled through the stream audio, warm and easy and so fundamentally out of place next to Vespera’s cold presence that it sounded like it had wandered in from a different broadcast.

”Mother.” Kaiden’s voice carried the grin before he entered the frame. ”You really need to learn a thing or two about fanfare.”

Vespera’s eyes moved to him.

”I was efficient.”

Kaiden shook his head in exasperation. ”You just told several million people that you’re my mother and you delivered it like a tax announcement.”

”I respect people’s time.”

He was in the frame now, walking toward her, and the laugh was still in his voice when he stepped behind her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. Kaiden rested his chin on the top of her head and looked into the camera, and the smile on his face was the most genuine thing any of them had ever seen on his stream. ”Please excuse her. She communicates best through violence and property damage, words are a work in progress.”

Vespera’s eyes narrowed into slits.

”So, yeah. This wonderful woman...” Kaiden continued, and his arms tightened around her shoulders, ”is the one who brought me into this world.”

The words left his mouth, and the room instantly brightened.