Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 948: The Roster

The ones Brittany was worried about were sitting behind the water station on an overturned pallet, icing three different shoulders, and all three of them came off that pallet so fast when they saw who was walking over that one of them lost his ice pack into the gravel.

"Sit down," Kaiden said, and they sat down so hard the pallet complained.

He crouched in front of the middle one, a broad kid with a fresh purple bloom coming up under his collarbone, and turned the boy’s arm at the elbow to see how far it would go before the wince came. It came early.

"You’ll be in pain for two days and fine on the third." He let go. "Who put you down?"

"Ma’am did." The kid’s eyes flicked to Brittany with open admiration. "Twice."

"Then say thank you to ma’am, because the thing that would have done this to you in a dungeon doesn’t stop at the shoulder."

"Thank you, ma’am!" all three of them said, in unison, at a volume nobody had asked for.

The corner of Brittany’s mouth twitched, and she wrestled it flat. Trisha, at Kaiden’s other side, made a small noise of pure editorial disagreement and kept it to herself.

...

The training went on around them.

Squads rotated through the taped lanes at the southern end of the lot with an evaluator screaming at each one. The whistling was constant, and so was the complaint. Somewhere in the middle of it, Tessa’s crew had set up a folding table to hand out water like it was a marathon and not a slaughter.

Kaiden stood at the edge of it with his arms crossed and let the roster come up in the corner of his vision.

[Eclipse - Guild Roster]

[Registered Personnel: 476]

[Combat: 332. Support and Operations: 144]

[Special Classification: 1]

[Z: 7. SSS: 1. S: 3. A: 26. B: 74. C: 131. D and below: 89]

[Most recent S-tier registration: Park, Yuna.]

Four hundred and seventy-six names, only a few days after a folding table in a tent had become a guild, and most of them had chosen this over somewhere with plumbing.

The top of that list was not the interesting part, because the top of that list was his family, and it was the reason people in many countries said the word Eclipse carefully.

One special classification the Association had been forced to invent an entire section for. His mother at SSS. Seven Z-tiers who had walked into a measurement artifact and broken it. No guild on the continent could put nine heavier names on a page, and everybody in the industry knew it.

What he was looking at was everything underneath them, and the shape of it told him something he had been circling for days without saying out loud.

Because the intake had come in two flavors, and only two.

The first was Yuna’s kind, and she was the cleanest example of it on the sheet: a genuine S-tier classification with almost no levels sitting under it, because Skyline had spent three years keeping her on publicity rotations and classroom sessions. Most of his twenty-six A-tiers and seventy-odd B-tiers were the same story in a lower letter. People who tested beautifully and had never once been allowed to do anything with it.

They had also signed fast, nearly all of them inside the first day, which told him exactly who they were: stream watchers and opportunists, in roughly even measure.

The second flavor filled the whole long tail of C and D, and those were the veterans.

Men and women with more logged dungeon hours than anybody in his family, capped at their classification for a decade and perfectly good at their jobs inside it. Doug’s intake notes were full of them, ten years here and nine there. Proper veterans.

"The C-tiers are the ones you want," Brittany said at his shoulder, without looking up from her own tablet. "Nobody’s ever going to have to teach them how to get hit."

Trisha, on his other side, said nothing at all, which from her was a whole paragraph.

He knew why they were here, too.

Kaiden Grey had entered the Association as an F-tier. Every one of those people had been handed a letter once and told, politely, that the letter was the end of the conversation, and then they had watched an F-tier fight against impossible odds. None of them would ever say it out loud in an interview. All of them had wondered.

A good number of the rest came for his mother, and had tried her first before they tried him. New Dawn’s application process took the better part of a year and chewed people up for sport, so a real share of this page was names that had failed to get in there and had been waiting for a new door to open for them.

So he had the young and gifted, and he had the old and capped, and both of those groups had signed with him gladly.

What he did not have was the best of both worlds: a seasoned high-tier professional in the prime of a career, the kind of A-tier with a hundred levels behind them who made up the load-bearing structure of every real guild in the country. The people who actually knew how to run a high ranking dungeon had watched Eclipse open its doors, and then they had gone on watching, and that was all.

...

He pulled the news up alongside the roster.

The awakened boards had spent the last few days doing what they always did, which was ask famous people questions they had no reason to answer honestly.

Mariana Reyes got asked first, because she was the easiest SS-tier in the country to get a rise out of, and because a New Dawn fighter answering questions about Eclipse was free traffic for everyone involved.

’I’ve read the same reports you have. A guild staffed by monsters, run by a man whose entire career is a camera pointed at himself.’ The Colombian had not bothered to put her cigarillo down for the question. ’I am happily employed at New Dawn.’

Chinedu Obasuyi drew the same question two hours later, and the Nigerian spearman handled it the way he handled everything, which was politely and without giving anybody a single thing to print.

’Eclipse is impressive. No sensible person would say otherwise.’ Then he had asked whether the interview was going to cover the eastern rotation schedule, because he had opinions about the eastern rotation schedule, and the reporter had spent the remaining eight minutes on the eastern rotation schedule.

Kaiden read that one twice, because the man had never actually said no.

Gareth Lyons, Excalibur’s tactician, said he’d think about it in a couple of seasons, once the paint was dry. Everyone at his table laughed.

And then the one somebody had clipped and reposted forty thousand times, because it was the only honest answer in the set.

Commander Voss had walked out of New Dawn during the exodus with an expeditionary wing of three hundred fighters’ worth of command experience behind him and nowhere in particular to be, which made him the most available senior awakened in the country. A-tier, a hundred and twenty levels, two dead teams in his file, and no guild.

’Look. I’ve got a wife, kids, and a mortgage. That boy fought a god in the sky over a state I live in, or whatever the fuck that was. Whatever comes looking for him next, it isn’t coming looking for me, and I’d like to keep that arrangement.’

Kaiden didn’t need a second read on that one.

Eclipse wasn’t even a week old, with a headquarters that had no roof over half of it and no track record whatsoever as a guild, and that alone would have kept the career professionals away for a year.

But it was also his guild, and after the Claimant, everybody on the planet knew what the airspace above Kaiden Grey was worth. Standing near him was the single most interesting place in the world to stand, and the least survivable, and every high-tier veteran with a family and a reputation had done that math in about four seconds.

And the big hitters lost nothing by waiting. If Eclipse was still standing in a year, paying well and clearing gates, they could sign then with none of the risk of having been early.

An A-tier with a hundred and twenty levels would get a yes out of any sane guild leader on any day of any year, and every one of them knew it.

’So the question is how can I expedite the process.’ He watched a squad get folded in half in lane three and thought about it properly.

He was still turning that over when the light changed.

...

A second brightness arrived on the back of his neck before his eyes had anything to report, and the gravel of the lot took on a hard orange cast that had nothing to do with the sun.

The evaluator in lane three stopped mid-whistle, and then the heat got there ahead of whatever was bringing it, rolling across four hundred people in one slow wave that dried the sweat off them and kept going.

Recruits threw their arms up over their faces. A water bottle on Tessa’s table went soft and buckled inward, the tent canvas snapped taut on its lines, and three stories up the scaffolding netting rippled like something had walked through it.

"UP! LOOK UP!" somebody screamed.