Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 964: Poor Choice of Words

The first month was the most money Nikki had ever seen, and nearly all of it came from people who hated her.

Every quote post calling her a lying attention whore carried her handle along with it, and enough of the men doing the quoting followed the handle to find out what a lying attention whore looked like with her clothes off.

Kaiden’s fangirls found her inside a day.

Kaiden Grey’s fandom ran to millions of women and organized like a labor union, and they went through her page - the non-paid social media one - in shifts.

Bitch. Liar. Monsterphobe. Ran at the axe lady on purpose and then sold her tits about it.

Nikki screenshotted the worst of them and posted them, because outrage was traffic and traffic was rent.

It held for about three months.

The trouble with selling the only thing anybody had ever come for was that there was nowhere left to go afterward.

Her subscriber count came off the top and kept coming, and the men who had signed up to see the girl from the video eventually stopped being able to remember which video.

In the end she was a nobody again, at a higher resolution.

WerewolfAssLicker_44 stayed.

He had been there at the start and he was there at the finish, the last name in a room that had emptied out around him, and month by month his requests got more specific.

Nikki filled them. She had no choice.

...

Back at the compound, in the half-finished room the twins had claimed as a studio on the grounds that nobody had told them not to, Kira had the sentiment dashboard up on the only good monitor and had not blinked in a while.

”Rika.”

”I see it.”

”Look at the curve.”

”I am looking at the curve. Stop telling me to look at the curve.” Rika had dragged her chair over until their shoulders were touching. ”That is not a curve. Curves bend.”

”We didn’t do anything.” Kira said it the way people confess to crimes. ”We didn’t post. We didn’t comment. We didn’t even put out a statement. It just-”

”It happened on its own.”

”It happened on its OWN.”

They sat with that for a second.

”We’re still cutting a video,” Rika said.

”Obviously we’re cutting a video.”

”Nine angles.”

”Nine angles and the slow motion. But let’s not post this from the main channel.” Kira was already scrubbing through the grid.

”Agreed. Would feel too tryhard. Let’s find a fitting influencer to post it for us then run an ad campaign.”

Rika sat back and put both hands over her mouth as she squealed.

”This is the best fucking job in the world,” Kira said.

...

Kaiden took them out through the east service exit, because the crowd out front had grown to a size that would have turned departure into a parade. The service corridor ran past the loading docks, wide and concrete, lit in long gaps.

Kaiden heard it before they reached the corner.

It was a sound Kaiden knew in his bones, the wet packed thud of knuckles landing on somebody who was past defending, and under it laughter, three voices of it, young and ugly and having fun.

”Say it again,” one of the voices invited. ”Come on. You had all that mouth a minute ago.”

”Yeah, where’d the mouth go?”

Around the corner, in the dead space between two loading bays, three of them had a fourth against the wall.

The fourth was smaller, a teenager, hoodie half torn off one shoulder, one eye swelling shut, blood running freely from a split brow down a face that Kaiden recognized between one step and the next, because the hair above the ruin of it was silver.

Damian Levander.

Aria’s brother.

Bloodied and pinned and beaten, the boy had both fists up, wavering.

As they watched he pushed himself off the wall and swung at the biggest of the three, a wide exhausted arc with nothing left in it.

The big one leaned out of its way without hurrying, laughed, and put him back into the wall with a short hook to the body that folded the boy over his own lungs.

”There it is. The gigaslut’s little gem still got one in him.” The big one shook out his hand, loose and easy, a heavyset twenty-something with a lifter’s shoulders and a class ring.

”Your sister’s the most famous whore in America, little man, alongside the other four cunts, and you’re back here restocking a smoothie kiosk. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever-”

”Shut your mouth.”

It came out of the folded boy in pieces, wet and thin, and he was fighting to get his feet under him while he said it.

”Say one more thing about my sister. I dare you!”

The knee took him in the ribs and put him down on all fours, and the laughter started up again over the top of him.

He got a hand under himself anyway. Got one knee up. Spat something red onto the concrete and lifted his head.

”...One more.”

”Bro.” The wiry one sounded impressed. ”Bro, he’s still going.”

”He’s still going.” The big one came back around, delighted, and drew his fist back for a boy who was on his knees. ”All right. Last one, and then we’re-”

He stopped, because his friends had stopped.

One man and two monsters stood at the mouth of the loading bay.

The overhead gap-lighting did unhelpful things to horns and red skin, and the demoness was the second most dangerous thing standing in that doorway.

Kaiden looked at Damian.

Damian looked back at him through one good eye, and what came into the boy’s face was recognition first, and then, arriving right behind it, a shame so total it read like a second beating. His fists came down. He looked at the concrete.

The big one’s brain, marinating in adrenaline and an audience, arrived at the worst available conclusion, which was that these were cosplayers from the anime shop on the fourth floor.

”Ohh, look at this. Freaks united.” He spread his arms at Bastet and Calypso, taking in the silk, the sundress, the tails. ”Costume convention’s upstairs, alien prostitute wannabes.”

”Bro, the commitment though.” The wiry one circled a finger at Calypso’s horns, delighted with himself. ”The paint, the tail rig. That’s a whole build.”

”Nah, forget the build.” The big one’s grin went wet, and he looked the demoness up and down at his leisure. ”Red, you can stay, I’ve got questions about the body paint. I’ll examine it thoroughly~” He made ugly licking motions with his tongue.

”I’ll take the bitch in gold, she’s my type.” He pointed at Kaiden. ”You can keep walking. This is a private conversation between me and a retard.”

None of the three in the doorway so much as turned a head.

Bastet’s hand closed around Kaiden’s arm above the elbow and stayed there. She had found the silver hair under the blood.

Calypso had come in behind Kaiden with her weight already shifting forward. She took in the swollen eye and the blood running off the chin, and her grin sharpened by exactly one tooth.

On his knees in the middle of it, Damian had gone gray under the blood, because Damian was the only one down there who understood what those three had just walked into.

”Don’t,” he croaked. He was talking to the biggest of the bullies. ”Run. Don’t attack him. He’ll...”

Kaiden tilted his head.

The wiry one started to laugh.

It came apart in his throat a third of the way out and went back down the wrong pipe. He stood there coughing into his fist, eyes working on the man in the doorway.

Because that face was on a poster in the arcade two floors up, and it had gone past the food court nine times that afternoon on the side of a bus.

The big one got there second.

Kaiden Grey. In a dark shirt, in a service corridor, eleven feet away, with his hands loose at his sides.