Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 934: Harsh Reality

*Blink*

That was all. She looked at her, blinking, otherwise perfectly still. Her hands stayed folded in her lap, and the golden light in them didn’t so much as flicker, because the Hearth Valkyrie had leveled to 77 in a single afternoon during a battle that made Vanessa Sloan’s decade of gates look like sparring practice, and after standing before the Claimant, the killing intent of an A-tier striker washed over her like a warm breeze over a cathedral wall.

Vanessa’s eyes widened. The non-reaction landed harder than any counter could have, because she had committed everything to that wave and the woman across the table had simply... not noticed.

Then the tent went cold.

It came from Kaiden’s chair, and it came without warning, without movement, without so much as a shift in posture. One moment the killing intent in the tent belonged to Vanessa Sloan, and the next it didn’t belong to anyone, because the Paragon of Sin opened the pressure he kept leashed every waking hour and Vanessa’s little tide vanished inside it like a match in a monsoon.

The folding table groaned. The lemonade glasses sang against the tray. Out on the gravel, the front of the line staggered as the wave rolled past the tent flap, and past the scaffolding, something the size of a hillside stopped pretending to nap, one amber eye swinging toward the commotion with lazy interest.

Vanessa Sloan’s legs locked. Her gauntlets, halfway summoned, fizzled and died at her wrists. Her lungs emptied and refused to refill, and every nerve in her body delivered the same ancient message at once: do not move, do not breathe, do not exist, because the thing looking at you will end you if you remind it you’re alive.

That was when Luna cracked her neck once, rose from her chair, and walked around the table.

"Get up," said the Storm Valkyrie.

Vanessa looked up at the purple-haired girl and saw, for the first time that afternoon, what the exam had actually been. The grinning gremlin who’d heckled five hundred candidates hoarse and the demoness who’d bowled through their formations had been doing it at a walk. The test had been designed to find the brave.

And Vanessa had just flexed killing intent at these people’s friend.

"I said get up." Luna grabbed her by the collar, hauled her vertical, and slapped her across the face so hard the sound cut the air like a starter pistol.

Vanessa came off the hit with a striker’s reflexes, mana flooding her frame, gauntlets snapping over both fists, and she was fast. Genuinely fast. Top-of-her-batch fast.

Her first punch went through the afterimage where Luna had been standing.

The answer arrived from behind, forehand, and spun her halfway around. "Ten years of training?" Luna’s voice moved around her, coming from everywhere at once. "So what?"

Another crack, backhand, other cheek, snapping her head straight as if correcting the first slap’s work. "I have been holding back on every single one of you since the moment that exam started-"

Vanessa swung at the voice. The voice was gone.

"-and you walk in here thinking you’re hot shit-" Crack. The gauntlet guard Vanessa threw up was simply disassembled, one small hand catching her wrist and steering her face into the next slap. "-because you survived a test we made easy-" Crack. "-and you talk down on my friend?!" Crack. "Thinking you’re speaking from some untouchable high ground?"

Everyone watching understood within the first two exchanges, Vanessa included: fights have two participants, and this was a lesson with sound effects. The Z-tier speedster conducted percussion on an A-tier ego at a tempo the eye refused to follow. Every slap was measured to hurt exactly as much as it humiliated, which was a great deal. None of it broke anything a healer couldn’t mend by dinner.

"Ohh, the spin one!" Calypso had the chip bag up like theater popcorn. "Darling, look! She’s doing the spin one!"

The finale came when Vanessa, cheeks glowing like brake lights, dropped her guard to gasp, and Luna caught her by the ankle instead of hitting her again. One short drag across the tent floor, out through the flap, past the silent, saucer-eyed line of candidates, to the end of the gravel, where Luna deposited her in the dust like a package that had failed inspection.

"And I fucking starred your name this morning, you ungrateful cunt," Luna informed her, betrayed.

"Anyone else think passing our exam makes them a level 1000 SSS-tier supreme existence?" she asked the line, conversational.

The line, as one organism, discovered fascinating details in the middle distance. Past the scaffolding, the amber eye slid shut again.

Vanessa found her voice one last time, wet and shaking with rage. "You’re insane! All of you! This was an interview! There are rules! My agent will have this on every network by tonight-"

"Luna."

Alexandra’s voice came from the tent flap, quiet, and every head in the line turned toward it. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her apron, not a hair out of place, not a tremor in her posture, looking at the woman in the dust with an expression that had no anger in it at all.

"Can you bring her back inside, please?"

Luna turned. Her eyes narrowed, then widened, and a grin split her face. ’Wait. Wait wait wait. Softie’s about to beat someone up?!’

Luna grabbed Vanessa by the collar and dragged her back through the flap, across the tent floor, and deposited her in front of Alexandra’s feet with the enthusiasm of a dog delivering a stick.

Vanessa hit the packed dirt on her hands and knees, cheeks swollen, pride in ruins, and looked up at the blonde standing over her, already bracing for whatever came next.

Alexandra knelt beside her.

Not above her. Beside her. She lowered herself to the dirt in her maid outfit without a thought for the fabric, reached out, and tilted Vanessa’s chin gently to check the damage on her left cheek.

"What-" Vanessa flinched from the touch.

"Hold still." Alexandra’s fingers moved to the other cheek, turning her face with care, cataloguing the swelling the way a nurse catalogues a chart. "These aren’t too bad. Luna was being kind, whether you believe that or not."

"Kind?!" Vanessa’s voice cracked.

Golden light bloomed from Alexandra’s palms, warm and soft, and settled over Vanessa’s face like sunlight through a window. The swelling began to fade.

Luna’s grin died. Calypso lowered her chip bag. Kira and Rika looked at each other, then at the blonde kneeling in the dirt, healing the woman who had just tried to humiliate her out of the guild.

"I like you, Miss Sloan," Alexandra said, while she worked. "Your answers are sharp, your gate knowledge is real, and you are a feisty warrioress, exactly who we need." The light shifted to the bruise blooming along Vanessa’s jawline. "You were right that I’m new to this. I haven’t stood before a monster until very recently."

Alexandra’s eyes drooped. "While you were valiantly battling monsters, I was..." she bit her lip, unable to finish. "I’m still figuring out what the light in my hands is for."

"W-wait-" Vanessa’s eyes were wet.

"I want her," Alexandra said, looking up at Kaiden. "On a trial basis. If she’ll take orders from the lemonade girl."

The killing intent that had been pressing down on the tent since Kaiden opened the lid evaporated in one breath, and he looked at his Hearth Valkyrie kneeling in the dirt with golden light in her hands, healing the woman who had called her a decoration, and smiled. Small, tender, and entirely for her.

"Your call," he said.

"Blondie, how can you be such a softie..." Luna’s hands went into her hair. "I just dragged her across the gravel for you! Don’t you have an overwhelming desire to slap some sense into this snob bitch? Not even a little?!"

"No... But I appreciate it, Luna." Alexandra told her, still healing. "You’re a wonderful friend."

"That’s not- I’m not being- you can’t just-" Luna sputtered, gestured violently at Vanessa, at the tent flap, at the concept of justice itself, and gave up. "Calypso, tell her she’s insane."

"Kukuku..." Calypso propped her chin on one hand, watching the whole scene with naked delight. "I think she’s magnificent. An angel in human skin..."

Vanessa Sloan sat on the dirt floor, healed. She looked up at the woman she had called a nepo baby five minutes ago and found she had no face left to put on. No professional mask, no righteous anger, no rehearsed composure. Just a woman sitting in the wreckage of her own cruelty while the person she’d been cruel to fixed her bruises and offered her a job.

"I’m sorry," Vanessa said, and her voice broke on the second word.