Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 918: Winning

Four steps crossed the arena, each footfall blooming white on the padding, a dotted line of winter stitched across the hall in half a second. The fifth step hit the wall.

She ran up twelve meters of vertical concrete, frost gluing each stride to the wall for the instant it needed, lungs burning, the edges of her vision crowding inward, because the Hush ate everything.

Somewhere far below, somebody finally spotted the frost line and shouted. The sound reached her thin and slow, a voice through deep water.

She cleared the railing with the dagger already moving.

The world snapped back to full volume at the exact moment five fingers closed around her throat.

"Agh?!" Her momentum died in a single yank, her feet dangling in the air, one dagger jolting loose and skittering across the deck.

She struck anyway, twisting to drive the remaining dagger at his neck with everything her emptied body had left. His other hand simply arrived, closing around her fist and stopping blade, arm, and follow-through all at once, frost-smoke curling against his skin a finger’s width from its mark.

Out of five hundred people, she was the one who had gotten closest.

He was still watching the arena.

Then, without hurry, he turned his head, and the red eyes settled on her from a distance no stream had ever put them.

"Excellent work, Yuna Park."

It was the greatest sentence anyone had ever said to her, and she couldn’t breathe.

The grip was calibrated for some other, sturdier category of throat, and hers was on the wrong end of the exchange rate. Her legs kicked once, politely. The edges of the room began to sparkle.

"I’m impressed," he continued, in the same tone Doug from HR had used to schedule her afternoon, "strong, cool-headed, and even a natural leader."

"Ghh..." All Yuna could reply with was the guttural sounds of a dying woman. She tapped two fingers against his wrist, twice. Wrestling rules. Honored on every playground on Earth.

He smiled.

"Ah." The hand opened. "My bad."

She hit the deck on all fours and sucked in a breath that scraped her throat the whole way down, followed by several uglier ones. The cap was gone, lost somewhere around the wall. The mask, loyal to the end, had stayed on.

Purple lightning cracked, and Luna was crouched on the railing beside them like a gargoyle in a hoodie, pointing down at her.

"What’s a midget doing here? Go back to elementary school."

"I’m one fourth of an inch taller than you... and three years older..." she managed, doing her utmost not to vomit.

"Hah?" Luna’s eyes narrowed. "Stop joking. You’re like my little sister from another mother. From an Asian one."

Yuna, face down on the observation deck, raised one shaking thumb. She was okay with the analogy for some odd reason.

Luna’s head whipped toward Kaiden. "Can we keep her?"

"Darling!" Calypso’s voice rolled up from the arena floor, where she stood beside the pile with her fists on her hips, beaming at the deck. "I like this one! She has murder in her!"

Yuna pressed her forehead against the cool metal of the deck and grinned until her cheeks hurt.

’He knows my name and Luna called me her sister!!’

Her windpipe filed a formal complaint. It was ignored.

...

The massive doors ground open again before the last badge had finished skidding, and a river of white and green flooded in, Awakened Association healers fanning out across the arena with practiced calm.

Glowing palms settled over swollen ankles, splints materialized out of kit bags, and two stretchers carried off a pair of frontliners who had absorbed Calypso’s enthusiasm a little too directly. Both men stayed conscious the whole ride, and one of them kept trying to wave to his new friends from the pile.

Broken bones, bruised ribs, concussions in polite quantities, and nothing crippling. Four monsters had spent a few minutes hammering five hundred people, and every single strike had been measured to the ounce.

A healer intercepted Yuna at the bottom of the deck stairs, tutted at her bruised throat like a disappointed aunt, and pressed warm light into it until swallowing no longer felt like a chore.

It gave her too much time to think. Across the floor, her ice was melting into dark patches under the industrial lights, the pile was being disassembled one groaning body at a time, and the arithmetic refused to improve no matter how many times she ran it.

They had lost. The chance was wasted.

She found the halberd woman sitting near the ruins of the formation with a fresh splint on two fingers, the stocky man beside her with his cracked bracers in his lap.

"Hey." Yuna stopped in front of them, and the apology came out before she’d decided how to dress it. "You did great. Sorry for failing you guys."

The two of them traded a look, then lit up at her in stereo.

"Failing?" The halberd woman patted the weapon lying across her knees. "That was the most epic shit I’ve ever been part of. I got benched by a kaiju. Gently."

"Without you, we’d have embarrassed ourselves one at a time," the stocky man said. "You had us embarrassing ourselves in coordinated waves instead. That’s a career highlight."

Yuna laughed, and it only hurt a little.

"Good luck out there, Definitely-Not-Yuna." The halberd woman held a fist out to her, and Yuna bumped it.

They gathered themselves off the floor and joined the tired drift of candidates heading for the exit, and Yuna walked with them, because there was nothing left in this hall for a Skyline assassin except a lost cap and a story nobody at her guild would believe.

"Where are you going?"

The voice carried across the arena without effort, exactly as it had at the beginning of all this, and every foot between the group and the doors stopped moving.

Yuna turned. Kaiden Grey stood at the railing of the observation deck, hands relaxed at his sides, watching the departing crowd.

"We lost," she called back, her voice still half gravel. "The interview’s over."

"I said the test was simple." He smiled. "All you had to do was win. And you did."

Feet shuffled. Heads turned toward neighbors, finding no answers there.

"We... did?" the stocky man tried.

"You won my respect."

"..." Nobody had a reply for that. A hundred or so candidates stood scattered across the arena, bruised, healed, and blinking up at the deck, waiting for a punchline that never arrived.

"In the mana apocalypse, anything can happen." Kaiden let the silence sit for a moment, then went on, plain as a weather report. "Rifts don’t send invitations. Monsters don’t wait for you to gear up. Nothing out there will ever meet you under comfortable circumstances, so I saw no reason to test you under them."

Even the healers had given up pretending not to listen.

"The strongest awakened in the room was never what I was looking for. I’m looking for people who keep a level head when the plan dies. People who don’t run. People I can trust to be standing next to me when everything goes wrong at once." His gaze moved across the hall, and he took his time about it. "This hall is full of them."

It landed slowly, the way big things do.

Backs straightened one at a time as the words worked their way into a hundred tired bodies.

Yeah.

They had held their ground against a monster the size of an apartment block, a demoness who took their best hits and asked for seconds, and a speedster who never needed her hands.

Yeah!

They were still standing.

Hope came first, pride right behind it.

"We’ll reach out to each of you in the coming days for one-on-one discussions."

A hundred people froze at once, doing the same math. Discussions meant a second round, and a second round meant not hired yet.

"And I’m grateful," Kaiden added, "that you gave us your afternoon. The break rooms in this facility are stocked with refreshments, so help yourselves. If anyone needs a nap after all this, nobody will judge you."

A single incredulous laugh broke somewhere near the stretchers, and the hall followed it, tension collapsing into noise, cheers, groans, healers scolding patients who whooped with freshly mended ribs.

Then hands found Yuna. Before she could object, the halberd woman and the stocky man had her up on their shoulders, and the chant started immediately.

"DEFINITELY-NOT-YUNA! DEFINITELY-NOT-YUNA!"

The mask was still on, for whatever secrecy was worth by now, and every person chanting the fake name knew exactly who was under it. Nobody cared.

’So this is what the test was...’

From up there she could see all of it. The dark patches where her ice had been, the last of the pile being helped upright, Pebble sprawled by the massive doors with all six eyes half-lidded, watching the celebration like a satisfied guard on break.

Her interview had contained a kaiju, a demoness who approved of the killer in her, a lightning goddess who adopted her as a little sister, and a compliment on her leadership delivered while she dangled from the complimenter’s hand. If this was the interview, what did an ordinary Tuesday at Eclipse look like?

She wanted to find out. She wanted it so badly it pulled at her harder than any contract Skyline could wave in her face, harder than safe salaries and C-gates and a guild leader who couldn’t remember her name.

’This is my place. I want to be here... I want to be with these people so bad!!’