Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 951

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.

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