Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 923: Greatly Desired

Yuna Park came through the front door at quarter to ten with her shoes in one hand and her mask in the other, and her mother looked up from the kitchen doorway, read her daughter’s face in a single glance, and said nothing.

Her father was on the couch with the television on low.

”Interview,” Yuna announced, dropping onto the cushion beside him. ”Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock. Eclipse called.”

He lowered the volume another notch. ”You spoke with them already?”

”Their HR guy, Doug. He’s scheduling one-on-ones.” She pulled her knees up and hugged them, still buzzing from the bus, still grinning behind the fading adrenaline of two phone calls and a day that had rearranged her entire life. ”He said Eclipse’s legal team handles the Skyline buyout if all goes well tomorrow.”

Her mother appeared with three cups of tea and settled on Yuna’s other side. She studied the bruise on her daughter’s throat with practiced calm, pressed two fingers to the purple, and nodded once when Yuna winced.

”The healer got most of it,” Yuna said.

”Most of it.”

Her father accepted his tea. ”Show us something of theirs.”

Yuna had a fan compilation pulled up on the television before the sentence was finished.

Some guy on YouTube had stitched together the best parts of every public appearance, press clip, and combat footage of the Valhalla’s Sinners available on the internet into a twenty-minute highlight reel with fourteen million views. The three of them sat on the couch and watched Kaiden Grey’s life play out in brutal chaos.

Pebble walking toward the dungeon to claim it. The press conference where Kaiden told the cameras he was on humanity’s side. Luna flipping off a reporter who asked if she felt safe working with monsters. Calypso waving at a news helicopter with her tail, grinning, while Kaiden tried to finish an interview behind her.

Her father laughed at that one. Her mother had to set her tea down during a clip of Aria fixing Kaiden’s collar on live television while he was mid-sentence, completely unbothered, as if adjusting her man in front of millions of viewers was simply what one did.

”They’re certainly entertaining,” her mother said, in the specific tone she reserved for refusing to admit she was having fun.

”Yeah...” her father nodded.

He watched the screen for a long moment.

”But at least they clearly take great care of each other,” he said quietly. It was the closest thing to a blessing he’d given since the kitchen conversation, and Yuna pressed her cheek against his shoulder and let him have the silence.

...

Her alarm went off at four-thirty, far too many hours before the most important meeting of her life, and the work began.

Hours were offered as sacrifice to the bathroom mirror.

Yuna slapped both cheeks with her palms, hard enough to sting, and watched the color bloom. Alive, awake, presentable. The bruise hadn’t faded overnight. She fitted a choker over it, careful and precise, because if Kaiden was there she was not going to be the girl with a throat bruise shaped like his hand.

Eyelashes took two attempts. The first ended with a lash glued to her finger instead of her eyelid, and she peeled it off, swore quietly, and started over.

Hair had to be down. Professional, feminine, frame the face, cover the choker for good measure. But not TOO styled, because this wasn’t a date, and she was not going to think about Kaiden Grey’s hands around her throat in any context other than near-death experience.

She flat-ironed the curls back out.

The outfit crisis consumed every remaining minute. Nine combinations, eight vetoed, a brief return to the second, a crisis of faith, a detour through the fourth, and a pass through the hallway that ended at her mother.

”You looked fine three outfits ago,” her mother said.

Navy blouse, dark slacks, low heels. She checked the mirror one last time, chin up, collar high, foundation holding.

Survivable.

A black SUV pulled up outside the house at eight o’clock sharp.

”Wait, what?” Yuna stared at it through her bedroom window.

The car was clean, large, and entirely too expensive for the street, and the man who stepped out of the driver’s side wore a suit that fit like it had been born on him. A second figure emerged from the back, a woman in muted grays with a slim tablet in the crook of her arm and a posture that could have cut glass.

Doug had texted her last night: ’Transport will collect you at 09:00. No need to arrange your own.’ She’d pictured a sedan. Maybe a nice one.

Not this. And it was only 08:00, not 09:00! What if she didn’t wake up at dawn to start preparing?!

Her father appeared at the window beside her, coffee in hand. He looked at the SUV, then the two professionals waiting beside it, then his daughter.

Then he set his coffee down, and said nothing, and it was the most approving silence of his career as a parent.

He’d been worried Eclipse would treat his daughter as a run of the mill girl due to their stacked roster, but seeing this, his worries had been alleviated.

Just a tiny bit.

Her mother arrived in the doorway behind them, took in the scene over their shoulders, and exhaled a breath that carried three years of quiet worry about whether her daughter’s employers gave a damn about anything besides her combat rating.

”Well.” She pulled Yuna into a hug, firm and sudden. ”Good luck, sweetheart.”

Yuna hugged them both at the same time, one arm around each, résumé folder crinkling between them, and held on for a moment that was worth every hour she’d spent on her eyelashes.

Then she was through the front door and down the steps with her heels clicking.

”Good morning!” She stopped at the curb, slightly breathless. ”This is... a lot. For me.”

The woman with the tablet looked up from it. She was tall, sharp-featured, and carried the specific calm of someone who’d been approved by Vespera Ashborn herself.

”Miss Park. Good morning. Eclipse Operations.” Her voice was polite, cool, and exactly as warm as the job required. ”We’re here to take you to Eclipse headquarters for your ten o’clock interview. You’re an hour early, so if you need more time to prepare, we’re happy to wait.”

They had arrived an hour early. For her. And were offering to sit in her street and wait.

”I’m ready,” Yuna said, climbing into the back seat before the woman could finish gesturing toward the door.

The interior smelled like leather and fresh coffee. A paper bag sat on the seat beside her, and she peeked inside to find pastries, a thermos, and two bottles of water. A small card tucked into the bag read, in precise handwriting: ’Compliments of Eclipse HR. - Doug.’

The SUV pulled away from the curb, and Yuna pressed back into the leather seat and watched her parents’ house shrink through the rear window, her mother and father standing side by side on the front step.

’I’m coming back,’ she thought. ’Just different.’

The woman from Operations sat in the passenger seat with her tablet balanced on her knee, already working.

”Miss Park, if I may. The drive is roughly forty minutes. Eclipse headquarters is located on private land outside the city. A standard taxi would not have clearance to enter the compound perimeter.”

’Oh,’ Yuna thought. ’That’s why the car, not...’

Wait. Compound?

”Eclipse has a compound?” she asked, and regretted it instantly, because of course they did, the job ad had mentioned construction, but hearing the word COMPOUND applied to the place she was about to work made the entire morning suddenly very real.

”Under construction,” the woman confirmed, not looking up. ”You’ll see scaffolding. The main building is partially operational. The Guild Leader works from a field tent on the side, which is where your meeting will take place.”

A tent.

THE tent?!

Yuna pressed her lips together very hard and looked out the window and did not scream.

...

The compound was louder than the exam had been.

The SUV cleared a perimeter gate flanked by two Association checkpoints, rolled down a gravel road between rows of construction vehicles, and stopped at a stretch of packed dirt where scaffolding climbed three stories of poured concrete and exposed rebar. Construction crews moved across walkways with steady rhythm.

Somewhere behind the main structure, something enormous shifted in its sleep, and the ground vibrated once through the soles of Yuna’s heels as she stepped out of the car.

She knew that vibration.

’Pebble is HERE!!’ she thought, and her professional composure took its second casualty of the morning.

The woman from Operations led her across the site to the east side of the ground floor, where a patch of shade held a tent she recognized from a photograph with fourteen million views.

Two plastic folding tables, mismatched chairs, a power strip, and a tangle of extension cords running to the nearest generator. This was where the photo was taken, the one with all the girls grinning and Pebble’s eye peeking through the flap. This was where Kaiden Grey had clicked ’upload’ on the job ad that rearranged her life.

She was inside it. She was inside the tent.

’Play it cool, Yuna. You are a professional. You are NOT going to take a selfie.’

”The Guild Leader is currently unavailable,” the woman said, checking her tablet. ”Your meeting is at ten. I apologize for the wait, Miss Park.”

”No, not at all! I was too early,” she spoke up quickly, then murmured, ”I’m happy to wait...”

”Noted.”

”Umm... Can I watch the construction while I wait? Or is all this...?”

”If it were restricted, you would not have been permitted to be here at all.”

Yuna smiled at that, and the woman gave her a nod that might have been warmth in another language, then walked back toward the SUV.

She had dozens of minutes, a paper bag of pastries from Doug, and the best seat in the world.

Yuna perched on one of the folding chairs, pulled the thermos from the bag, and watched Eclipse get built through the tent’s open flaps.

Welders threw sparks across the second floor. A forklift reversed through a gap in the scaffolding with a load of concrete panels. Two workers argued over a blueprint while a third held a level and waited for them to notice it was crooked. Somewhere behind the main structure, the ground vibrated again, and one of the workers glanced over his shoulder, shrugged, and went back to his drill.

Just another Tuesday at the kaiju office.

The pastry was still warm. The coffee was better than anything she’d ever made at home. For fifty minutes, Yuna Park sat in the most famous tent on the internet and watched the future take shape one concrete panel at a time, and there was nowhere else she would rather have been.

She heard Doug first.