Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 951: Still The Same

Behind him the chanting had come apart into something looser and considerably worse, and somewhere inside it Scarlet was signing a recruit’s gauntlet and telling him it was worth more scratched.

The veterans had all run the same calculation, and their math had been sound. Wait a year or two.

Eclipse would be a corpse or a stable guild by then, and there was no version of the second one where a guild that young turned away an A-tier with a hundred and twenty levels behind him.

So Voss could sit at home with the wife, the kids, and the mortgage, and lose nothing at all by it. The door would still be open whenever he got around to knocking, and the people opening it would be grateful he had finally come.

That was the assumption sitting underneath every polite non-answer he had read that morning. Eclipse would still be the one asking.

Doug’s voice came from the folding table, explaining tax residency to a woman who was very obviously not listening to a word of it.

Then the Flame Monarch dropped out of a clear sky onto a compound with no roof over half of it and asked him for a spot.

No guild on earth had ever gotten that woman’s signature. She had looked at a gravel lot full of three-day-old recruits and asked to be on it, out loud, in front of every person he had on the payroll and however many live feeds were running.

He still wanted the high-tier professionals, and that part hadn’t changed at all. What changed was that he no longer had to be pleasant about getting them, because the moment that signature dried, Eclipse stopped being the guild that needed an A-tier and turned into the guild any sane A-tier wanted to get into.

Pulling the SSS-tier eternal mercenary bought him that.

Gareth Lyons had told a table full of laughing colleagues that he’d think about it in a couple of seasons, once the paint was dry. The paint was going to be dry, and Kaiden was going to have thoughts about Gareth Lyons.

Kaiden looked at the empty space under his mother’s name. ’Maybe I’ll even get to be picky about high-tiers now.’

Behind that thought, the forum boards were already coming apart.

Commander Voss had his answer pinned to the top of every thread on the awakened social interface, forty thousand reposts of him explaining very reasonably why nobody sane goes near Kaiden Grey, and directly beneath it, a clip of the Flame Monarch landing on Kaiden Grey’s construction site and asking him for a job.

Somewhere under that, a reply with nine thousand agreements: ’so is Reyes still employed or’

Kaiden turned around.

Nyx was twenty feet behind him at the lip of the crater, off to one side where she always put herself, and she was already looking at him. She had been looking at him all morning. That was the recording.

Forty thousand reposts of the Flame Monarch coming out of a clear sky, and every frame of it was tagged with her name, and not one of them had noticed that the woman running the feed never once pointed it at herself.

She also looked destroyed. The dark under both her eyes had gone deep enough to see from where he stood, because she had not slept, and when the last door in that building closed politely on her a little after nine that morning she had not gone to bed over it. She had come out here to stand in the sun and keep him in frame.

And she was grinning at him. Wide, delighted, no attempt whatsoever at putting it away, and not one of those forty thousand people could see it, because the only thing on that feed was him.

That was the whole of her, right there. She had found the hole in his roster before there was a roster to put a hole in, spent days quietly closing it, produced the single largest signing any guild could ever dream of, and then stood at the edge of the lot and aimed her own eyes at somebody else so the world could watch him have it.

There was a question people had been turning over since the day Eclipse got its license, asked a hundred different ways and never quite put plainly.

Was the streamer who destroyed the media, the leader of Valhalla’s Sinners, going to survive the guild leader of Eclipse?

Was Kaiden Grey going to remain the guy so many fans fell for?

Days of intake and inspections and compliance filings had been answering it steadily, and the answer had been trending toward no. Flashy about his new role, exciting about it, and still a man who spent his mornings on occupancy permits and squad rotations with a camera pointed at him the whole time.

Kaiden crossed the gravel.

She watched him come the whole way, and somewhere around ten feet out the grin faltered, because the strategist only needed one look at her man to know what he was about to do.

Nyx Cosmos knew precisely how many live feeds were pointed at this lot. She had built most of them.

”Kai, there are four hun-”

He put two fingers under her chin and tilted it up.

Whatever the rest of that sentence had been going to be, it did not survive the trip. She looked up at him with those big gorgeous eyes of hers, dark rings and all, and every calculation running behind them stopped exactly where it was.

”Thank you,” Kaiden said.

Then he leaned down. ”I love you.”

Her breath caught.

He got a hand into the pink and kissed her the way he did at home, taking his time about it.

On tens of thousands of screens, the shot tilted, went very close, and stopped being about the Flame Monarch at all.

So that was the answer, delivered to four hundred employees, an unknown number of feeds, and every awakened board on the continent.

Kaiden Grey was still Kaiden Grey.

And if there was a career A-tier out there watching this and deciding Eclipse looked unserious, he was welcome to keep waiting, because there was an SSS-tier forty feet away signing his forms who had watched the same streams and reached a different conclusion.

Nyx held out for about a second and a half.

Then the composure she had been wearing since the moment of the routing order came off her like a coat, both her arms went up around his neck, and the pink bimbo who had spent the whole night being a detective kissed the love of her life back in front of his entire guild without one further thought for the cameras she owned.

Then the ground let go of them.

Space folded under her heels and pulled. The two of them came off the gravel in one smooth motion with a ring of loose stone rising alongside them, up past the water station, up past the tape lanes, up past the second story of scaffolding, and she did not take her mouth off his for a single foot of it.

Four hundred heads tipped back together for the second time that morning.

She stopped them somewhere above the top of the frame, where the wind off the hills was moving and there was nothing underneath them but the crater. The ring of stone hung in the air around the two of them, turning slowly, holding position, because the woman keeping it up there had other things on her mind and it stayed up anyway.

Then the stones dropped all at once, clattering back down into the glass.

Nyx and Kaiden did not come down for a while.

Nobody on that lot had the presence of mind to make a sound for a good three seconds. Then somebody did, and the rest followed, and what came up out of them was louder than anything they had produced for the Flame Monarch, which a number of people would feel bad about later.

Scarlet looked up from the folding table where Doug had her cornered with the forms, put two fingers in her mouth, and whistled hard enough to be heard over all of it.

”Now that’s my type of guild leader! Decisive! Shameless! Hell yeah!”

”HELL YEAH!!” Hundreds parroted the newest recruit of Eclipse, screaming.