Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 949: A Promising Recruit

Four hundred heads went up together, and what they found was a point of fire coming down at them out of a cloudless morning, growing, and the growing was the part that broke them.

The whole southern half of the gravel came apart at once. Squads shredded, evaluators lost their lanes, and a hundred people who had signed their contracts two days ago in the belief that the dangerous part came later discovered they had been mistaken.

Brittany’s flames were already up her arms, and Trisha had a hand fisted in the back of the nearest recruit’s shirt, hauling him behind her while she shouted at her squad to get down.

Under the north scaffolding, Pebble’s head locked level. He did not stand, and not one of his four building-sized legs moved out of the dirt they were parked in, but all six amber eyes came off the recruits at the same instant and fixed on the falling thing in their staggered crown while his entire armored body settled into a stillness the lot had never once seen on him.

Kaiden didn’t move, and he didn’t look up, so the six eyes drifted back down to the recruits and the disaster on four legs went back to work and let the sky do as it pleased.

Then the newcomer came down four feet from Kaiden’s boots.

The crack of it went through the lot hard enough that everyone felt it in their teeth, and somebody howled behind Kaiden.

The blast rolled out from the impact in a flat ring, took the front two rows of recruits off their feet, and flipped Tessa’s water table end over end. People were on their knees coughing forty meters out. A squad slip went up into the air, caught at one corner, and came back down as ash.

Kaiden’s arms were still loose at his side, his coat still settling, when the gravel around his boots finished fusing into glass. He stood at the rim of a fresh crater with his hair blown back off his forehead and four hundred people screaming behind him.

Flames peeled off the woman inside it in sheets and burned away to nothing. Red hair, no armor worth mentioning, one hand rolling her shoulder like she’d slept on it wrong, and every ungodly curve of her lit from underneath by the pit she was standing in.

The Flame Monarch stepped up out of her own landing site onto the glass and cracked her knuckles without so much as glancing at the four hundred people staring past Kaiden’s shoulder at her.

”Th... that’s...” A recruit somewhere behind Kaiden lost the rest of the sentence, and Vanessa Sloan finished it for him, flatly, because somebody had to. ”That’s Scarlet.”

Eugene Wexler’s salute snapped up at the water station, aimed square at Scarlet, and stayed there.

Brittany’s flames died on her arms without her deciding it. She stayed exactly where she was with her hands still up and open and nothing burning on them, staring into the crater, and whatever the A-tier pyromancer had privately believed about the ceiling of her own element got renovated in front of her entire squad.

”That’s not fire,” she said, to nobody, sounding offended. ”That’s not what fire does.”

Both of Trisha’s hands came up over her mouth, and the woman who had spent six years being photographed for a living made a sound like a kettle. ”That’s the Flame Monarch. She’s on the list with Vespera Ashborn. What is she doing on our gravel?”

”Morning,” Kaiden said.

”Morning?” Scarlet stopped a pace short of him with her hands going to her hips, and the grin she showed him could have started a second fire. ”I drop out of the sky like a comet, in front of your whole rookie farm, and I get morning. Is that any way to treat your superstar, golden boy?”

”...You melted my parking,” Kaiden replied.

Scarlet’s teeth came out. ”You didn’t have parking. You had gravel and hope.” She jerked her chin at the crater. ”Now you’ve got a landmark. Auntie’s improved the property. Bet the price doubled just now.”

Out on the gravel, four hundred people were discovering that the most terrifying entrance any of them had ever witnessed had been performed by a woman who was currently being sassed about paving.

”Did she just,” somebody whispered.

”She called herself his superstar,” somebody else confirmed, awestruck. ”Does that mean...”

That was when it clicked.

The hills, the morning after the Claimant, Aria sprinting across the camp at him and the whole Eclipse cluster turning to watch it happen. Luna glancing up from her handheld. Bastet’s ears swiveling.

And Nyx, coming back to him from the far edge of the group, from a conversation with Scarlet he had noticed at the time and filed away behind a dozen other things.

Nyx had been over there with this woman, talking just out of everybody’s earshot, and had never once mentioned it since.

Kaiden’s smile went devilish.

”Nyx.”

Scarlet’s hand came up, thumb cocked, finger pointed at his chest.

”Bingo!” She fired it at him. ”Took you long enough. Your pink gal has been working me ever since, and I want it on the record that she is a menace. She sends footage. Of gates. Of your battles. Of what might be to come. All with her glorious little notes, hyping it all up.”

Her hand dropped, and the grin stopped being a performance, and what was left under it looked an awful lot like hope. ”So. Is there a spot on that roster of yours for little old me?”

The lot was silent enough to hear the scaffolding tick as it cooled.

No one in the world had ever managed to put a name on this woman.

She had been offered everything: the great guilds, the smaller ones desperate enough to hand her majority ownership, governments that arrived with recruitment packages and left with nothing.

Contracts, titles, equity.

She had taken jobs from all of them and belonged to none of them, walking into other people’s disasters for a fee and walking out with a major grin if the job was fun. For as long as anyone had been paying attention, the Flame Monarch had been the one asset on the board that nobody owned.

She was asking a twenty-something with no roof if he had room for her.

”There’s a spot left, I suppose,” Kaiden said.

The lot came apart. Four hundred people who had spent the last minute afraid to breathe made one sound together, and somewhere in the middle of it Brittany sat down on the gravel with her hands over her face.

”Good.” Scarlet exhaled, then a strange light emerged in her always fierce eyes. ”Now, first clause of my contract: make the pink gal only message me in business hours. I’m begging you.”

...

Far from that gravel lot, at the bottom of a corridor longer than the building above it had any right to allow, in a chamber no blueprint had ever recorded, the woman on the throne turned the last page of the dossier and closed it.

”Well,” she said to the dark. ”That took some reading.”

She had told Viktor she would finish the rest later. Later had taken its time arriving, as it tended to with her, and this room had held nothing but the woman and the folder for the whole of that interval.

Her nail came to rest on the cover, over the place where she remembered a photograph sitting a few pages in. The tall building of dark carapace with its six burning eyes, standing guard behind a boy in the sun.

”You poor child...” The fondness in her voice was genuine, which was the unsettling part of it. ”You smelled the kitchen and put your whole head in the oven.” Her mouth curved without troubling the rest of her face.

The candle flames leaned toward her and stayed leaning.

”You were not wrong, little one. You felt the door and could not wait for it. So you bravely went out while the world was still soft enough to live through you. If only you’d waited for me...”

She turned the dossier over in her lap and did not open it, and for a moment the oldest thing under that city simply sat with what it had missed.

Her voice stayed low and unhurried, and the patience under it had begun to fray. ”Instead you went out alone, and you were beaten by children. Now you lie in the dirt with a leash on and a name that weighs six grams. They dare pet a majestic being like you. They don’t even understand what they’re looking at.”

She was quiet for a while after that. The luminescence pulled back from the walls and left her the middle of the room.

”I won’t make your mistake, though.”

She said it gently, still speaking to a photograph she could not see through the cover.

”You ran the moment you felt it. I have felt it far longer than you ever did, and I have never once run. The hour is not mine to move yet.”

Then she opened the folder again, all the way back to the first page, where a young man caught mid-grin burned too bright to notice how many things were looking at him, and she looked down into that grin for a long, still moment.

”This one will still be here for the second knock. And when it comes, little one...”

Her lips drew back off her teeth, and the candlelight found two sharp, unnaturally long fangs.

”Soon,” the Vampire Queen whispered, and her eyes began to swirl dangerously. ”I shall make you my pet, human.”