Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 950: Welcome Aboard, Flame Monarch

Four hundred people were still gawking on Kaiden’s gravel, and they had been gawking since the moment he told the Flame Monarch there was a spot left on his roster.

It showed no sign of stopping. Recruits who had spent the previous minute too frightened to breathe were spending their voices freely now.

Kaiden put his hand out.

The lot dropped into silence fast enough that the scaffolding netting three stories up became the loudest thing on the compound, because the whole crowd had just worked out what they were about to watch.

Scarlet looked down at the offered hand. She had come out of the sky ready to be haggled with, and the plain open palm in front of her took a full second off her.

”I know the contracts aren’t signed yet, but... Welcome aboard, Scarlet,” Kaiden said.

Her grin came back all at once, and it was enormous.

She took his hand and shook it hard enough that he felt it up in his shoulder, which took some doing, and she held on a beat past where the handshake ended.

Then the lot blew open.

Whatever had come out of those recruits the first time had been shock.

This one was theirs, and it was louder, and men and women who had been Eclipse for all of two days stood on a construction site howling at the sight of two hands shaking.

The noise ran well past the point where it should have died, because these were people who had thrown in with a guild that wasn’t a week old, with no roof over half of it and no record whatsoever, and all of them had spent the days since fielding the same question from relatives and old teammates about what exactly they thought they were doing.

They had just been handed the answer.

They were part of the greatest guild that would ever exist.

Individual voices started getting out of the noise after that, none of them coordinated and most of them landing on top of each other.

”FLAME MONARCH!”

”DO IT AGAIN!”

”SIGN MY GAUNTLET!”

Eugene Wexler had not lowered the salute he’d thrown at Scarlet when she climbed out of the crater, and now he had a reason to keep holding it, so he kept holding it, until Vanessa Sloan reached over without looking and pushed his arm down for him.

Brittany was still sitting on the gravel where she had gone down. Trisha crouched beside her and patted her shoulder without once looking away from the redhead.

Then one voice got out ahead of all of them, high and cracking and completely unashamed of itself, from a girl three rows into lane two with both hands cupped around her mouth.

”WELCOME TO ECLIPSE, LADY SCARLET! I LOVE YOU!”

Scarlet let go of Kaiden’s hand.

She turned around on the glass she’d made of his parking, planted one boot forward, threw both arms out wide, and let go of every scrap of fire she had been politely keeping to herself since she landed.

It went up off her in a column that cleared the scaffolding and put orange on the underside of a cloudless morning. The heat that rolled off it arrived warm, which was a choice she had made, and every person on that gravel felt her make it.

”NO!” she roared back down the length of it, and the fire roared with her. ”I LOVE YOU!”

The girl in lane two went down like a dropped coat.

The two recruits beside her caught her under the arms and hauled her upright without either of them looking away from Scarlet.

Under the north scaffolding, six amber eyes came up off the recruits and locked on the column of fire, held there for as long as it took him to decide it was showing off rather than shooting, and went back to sweeping the perimeter. Pebble had made up his mind about the new one.

What came out of the crowd then had no words in it for about a second, and then it found some.

”WELCOME! WELCOME! WELCOME!”

Nearly all of the four hundred recent arrivals were stamping it into the gravel, on the beat inside of three repetitions, because a crowd finds a rhythm faster than any single person in it ever would.

Scarlet let them have three rounds of it before she cut back in, and the flames went up her arms again with the shout.

”THANKS FOR HAVING ME!”

The whole southern half of the lot broke out grinning, teeth everywhere, because it turned out that getting shouted at like that by somebody they had only ever watched through an interface was its own kind of gift.

Kaiden stood at the edge of it with his hand still warm from the shake, and thought about his mother.

Two SSS-tiers. Two Monarchs, one of shadow and one of flame, each of them sovereign over an element and famous enough that people who would never meet either of them held firm opinions of both.

But when Vespera Ashborn walked into a space, the space corrected itself. Voices went out and postures arrived, and nobody had ever cheered his mother, because cheering did not occur to people standing in front of her. What she got instead was a straight spine, a lowered voice, and the sudden desire to be doing the job properly.

Scarlet had been on this compound under two minutes, and his rookies were chanting at her hard enough to be heard out at the perimeter gate, with one of them unconscious in the third row.

Same tier, same weight of name, and completely opposite weather.

’Flame and shadow. Truly,’ Kaiden thought, shaking his head.

Scarlet dropped back to a conversational volume, the fire going out along her arms like it had never been on them, and jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the racket she’d started.

”Now that’s a reception,” she said. ”Take notes, golden boy. Your ’morning’ and ’there’s a spot left, I suppose’ need work. A lot of work.”

”That’s not my style, sorry,” Kaiden grinned. ”Always been a Vespera fan.”

”Did you just call yourself a mommy’s little boy?”

”Of course not.”

Doug reached them somewhere in the middle of that, moving faster than anyone on the compound had ever seen him move, tablet clutched to his chest and his face doing something close to rapture.

”Miss.” He had to say it twice to get over the noise. ”Miss. Congratulations. But none of this is real yet.”

Always a hard worker, Doug was almost salivating at the mere thought of signing the Flame Monarch. Naturally, he jumped at the opportunity instantly.

Which was how Scarlet was reminded that she had not so much joined Eclipse as begun the paperwork for it.

”Paperwork,” she said, with open disgust, when Doug walked her through what the rest of her afternoon looked like. ”I flew here. Do you understand what I’m telling you? I came at nine hundred kilometers an hour and the actual bottleneck is a woman in a blazer with a briefcase in a Camry.”

Because that was how it worked, and she knew it as well as he did. An SSS-tier signing to a guild meant transfer filings with the Association, tier verification, and insurance riders that had to be written from scratch because no underwriter alive had ever written one for her.

Then tax residency, and a personal services contract that Ms. Rook took away to read line by line, with the closest thing to appetite anybody had ever seen on her.

Scarlet’s own assistant, the sharp-eyed woman in the pencil skirt, cleared the perimeter checkpoint forty minutes later with a case of documents and a flat look that said she had done every mile of the driving in this partnership and had never once been consulted about the flying.

Kaiden left them to Doug and looked at the roster still hanging open at the edge of his vision.

The count still read four hundred and seventy-six, and near the top of it there was room for a second SSS beside his mother’s.

He could see it there already, exactly where it was going to sit and exactly how the rest of the list would read underneath it, and somewhere in the middle of picturing it he laughed out loud on his own gravel, because the thing he’d been stuck on all morning had gone and answered itself.