Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 913: Yuna Park

Yuna Park saw the post four seconds after it went live, because she had notifications turned on for every Sinners account, and she was not embarrassed about this.

She was, however, sitting in the bathtub.

The water had gone lukewarm twenty minutes ago, but her phone was dry and propped against her drawn-up knees, and the midday soak had turned into the midday scroll as it always did. Bubbles clung to her collarbones in thin patches. Steam had long since stopped rising.

The notification hit, and the photo loaded first. Kaiden Grey grinning from a plastic chair in a construction tent, his women arrayed behind him like the world’s most dangerous family portrait, one of Pebble’s burning eyes peeking in from the edge of the frame.

She zoomed in on Luna, because she always zoomed in on Luna, and found the Storm Valkyrie throwing bunny ears behind Aria’s head with the grin of someone who’d been told to behave and chosen violence instead.

’WE’RE HIRING!’

”No way!!”

Her voice bounced off the tile and came back louder than she’d intended, and the phone slipped from her wet fingers in the same instant her stomach dropped.

It tumbled toward the bathwater in slow motion, screen flashing, and Yuna’s hand shot out and caught it two inches above the surface with superhuman reflexes.

She clutched the phone to her chest, heart hammering, water sloshing over the rim of the tub.

”Yuna?” Her father’s voice came through the door, concerned. ”Everything alright?”

”Fine! I’m fine! Don’t come in!”

”...Are you sure?”

”Dad, I’m in the bath!”

A pause. ”This girl...” came the dejected sigh only parents could release, alongside the sound of slippers retreating down the hall.

Yuna sank lower until the water touched her chin, cheeks burning, and held the phone above the surface with both hands like a holy relic she’d almost drowned.

She read the listing three times. Fighters of any tier. Operations, logistics, finance. Average salaries. A tent for a headquarters. A dog that destroyed walkways.

Her chest hurt by the second read, and by the third she’d locked her phone and set it face-down on her knee.

She was contracted. Signed, sealed, two years remaining on a five-year deal with Skyline Guild, a reputable mid-tier outfit that cleared C-rank gates and paid on time. Skyline was fine. Skyline was safe. Skyline’s guild leader remembered her name about sixty percent of the time and called her Yumi the other forty.

Eclipse was not safe. Eclipse was the guild whose leader had a cosmic horror tied to his class and a mother who made corporate executives and awakened combatants equally lose sleep. Eclipse was the future of the awakened world, and Yuna wanted to be part of it so badly her ribs ached.

She unlocked her phone and stared at the photo again. Luna’s purple hair. Luna’s complete refusal to be anything less than exactly herself, at all times, in front of anyone, on camera or off.

Yuna had watched every stream. She’d studied how Luna moved in combat, the flickering repositions, the speed that made B-tier monsters look like they were standing still.

She’d built her own fighting style around that fluidity, adapted for daggers instead of a sword made of storm, because she was an assassin and Luna was a speedster, but the principle was the same: be faster than the thing trying to kill you, and don’t stop until it’s done.

And the name thing. Yuna. Luna. One letter. She would take that coincidence to her grave before ever mentioning it out loud.

She scrolled past the listing to the application link, expecting it to be dead. It loaded. Slowly, straining under what had to be a million simultaneous visitors, but it loaded.

The form was straightforward. Name, tier, combat class, guild affiliation, contact, a brief statement of intent. Standard recruitment fare. She filled none of it in, just scrolled, because looking at a form wasn’t the same as filling it out, and she could pretend this was idle curiosity for as long as she kept her fingers off the keyboard.

Then she reached the bottom.

Below the submit button, in smaller text, sat a single checkbox.

’I am currently contracted to another guild and wish to explore options with Eclipse. Checking this box is not a breach of your existing agreement. Eclipse’s legal team will be in contact regarding transfer procedures if your application is successful.’

Yuna stared at it for a very long time.

Guilt arrived on schedule, quiet and familiar.

Skyline had paid for her training. Skyline had given her a team and a salary and a place to belong when no other guild had knocked on her door. Wanting to leave this badly made her a bad person, probably, and the speed of the wanting made it worse.

But the checkbox was there. And it was there for people like her.

The water had gone cold, but she hadn’t noticed.

She stood up, and the bathwater streamed off her in sheets as she stepped onto the mat, reaching for the towel rack without looking away from the screen. She dried herself with one hand and scrolled with the other, re-reading the checkbox text as if the words might rearrange themselves into a rejection she’d missed.

They didn’t.

Yuna caught her own reflection in the fogged mirror as she wrapped the towel around herself, and paused. Dark hair plastered to her neck and shoulders, flushed skin, wide eyes that looked younger than twenty-one.

She was lean and sharp in the way her class demanded, hips narrow, shoulders tight with the compact muscle of someone who trained for speed over power.

She wiped the fog away with her palm and stared herself down.

Assassin-type. S-tier on paper, level thirty in practice, because Skyline believed in safe growth and controlled environments and never, ever letting their investment fight anything that could fight back.

Twenty-one years old and stuck in a contract she’d signed at eighteen.

Yuna straightened. Squared her shoulders. Nodded once at the girl in the mirror.

Then she threw on a shirt and shorts, grabbed the phone, and was down the hall before her hair had stopped dripping, and her mother looked up from the cutting board, already reading the exact pitch of her daughter’s excitement.

”Mom.” Yuna held up the phone. ”Eclipse is hiring.”

Her mother set the knife down. ”No.”

”You didn’t even look at it!”

”I don’t need to, sweetheart. The answer is no.”

”It’s not your answer to give! I’m twenty-one!”

”Then why are you asking?” Her mother smiled at her, warm and maddening in equal measure, and returned to dicing onions.

Yuna’s father wandered in from the living room with a newspaper tucked under his arm, drawn by the pitch of his daughter’s voice as animals are drawn by distant thunder. He read the room in two seconds, glanced at the phone she was brandishing, and lowered himself into a kitchen chair, already resigned to how this was going to go.

”Eclipse,” he said.

”Eclipse,” her mother confirmed.

”Ah.” He folded the newspaper on the table. ”The guild built on promises and hype.”

”The guild that’s going to be the biggest guild in the world!” Yuna parked herself across from him and set the phone between them like evidence. ”Dad, look at them. They beat everyone at the rookie competition. The Association itself is bending rules to support them. This is it. This is where everything is going.”

”Nobody denies they’ll rise, Yuna.” Her father rubbed his thumb along the fold of the newspaper, as he always did when choosing his words carefully. ”The boy is extraordinary. So are the ladies surrounding him. But everything about him is strange, and strange attracts danger. That mountain thing and the thing in the sky happened because of him. Whatever comes next will come for him too, and for everyone standing near him.”

”That’s exactly why they need people.”

”That’s exactly why we worry.”

Yuna looked between them, her mother’s back at the counter and her father’s measured gaze across the table, and felt the argument slip out of reach the way arguments always slipped when her parents chose to be gentle instead of firm.

”Skyline is safe,” her mother said, still facing the onions. ”You’re valued there. Their only S-tier, they want to keep you no matter what. In Eclipse, you won’t even be among the top 10 most valued members.”

Valued. Yuna’s fingers tightened around her phone. Guild Leader Mercer valued her, alright.

He valued how she looked in her combat gear and on advertisements... And the running tally of training costs he kept in a spreadsheet he made sure she saw at every quarterly review. He valued scheduling one-on-one feedback sessions after hours, in his office, with the blinds drawn.

She’d never told her parents any of that. She was S-tier. She could handle it.