Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 947: Rocky Future

"She would like to speak to whoever is in charge of her son’s schedule."

Alice, at Kaiden’s other elbow, had been keeping a visible count of how long all of this was going to be allowed to continue, and the count had just doubled.

He left his hand where it was and talked to the rest of the tent over the top of her head, because she wasn’t the only one in the room who had taken the outcome badly.

"Alright. Everybody’s been up since yesterday morning and everybody’s decided we lost, so let me lay out how I actually see it. We did lose something last night, yes. But yesterday a federal inspector walked this compound for most of a day with a pen in his hand, and every single thing he put that pen on was in order. That’s on the record permanently now. Whoever comes at us next has to start from a guild that’s already been ruled compliant on camera."

Doug’s smile arrived a half second before he caught it. Nyx tightened her grip without lifting her head.

"And that’s not all," Kaiden continued. "We know something this morning that we didn’t know yesterday. Somebody with a very deep pocket, or pull inside the government, has taken an interest in us. They were already sitting on that routing file before Nyx ever went looking for it. So we keep pulling at it, and we get ready."

"Now we’re talking!" Calypso had spent most of the night on the floor against the map table’s leg and she came up onto her feet with far too much energy for the hour. "Darling, I only have the one question and it’s the only part of this I’ve cared about all night. When do we get to meet them?"

"Hopefully soon."

Calypso’s eyes met Kaiden’s, and both pairs held the same cruelty. A bloodbath had to ensue.

Aria had not said much all night.

She was standing at the open tent flap with her arms folded, watching the intake get shouted at out on the gravel, and she didn’t turn around when she finally spoke.

"Somebody paid to have a stranger walk through Kai’s kingdom and ruin it." Her voice hadn’t changed at all, which was how the rest of the tent knew to stop talking. "And then somebody with more money made certain we would never learn his name."

She turned around then, and nothing in her face had moved since midnight, which everyone present understood correctly.

"I will get his name."

He let the look he shared with his sadistic demoness go before he answered.

"We will," Kaiden nodded. "But not now. We won yesterday because our paperwork was in order, and we lost last night because somebody had more money than us. Both of those are fixable, and we’re sitting on two prizes we won and never went to collect."

He looked over at Doug. "Any news on the Association’s smiths honoring the gear they owe us?"

"Not yet. Grace said it’d take some time."

"Let’s give them a reminder anyways. Eclipse is very unhappy with how the government has been treating them. I’d certainly hope they don’t take their sweet time honoring their promises."

"On it." Doug was already writing, eyes flashing. He loved writing this kind of letter.

"Then there’s the twenty dungeons."

Nyx’s head came up off his chest.

"...Oh." Then, considerably faster, "Oh. Twenty. We never picked them."

"We never picked them."

"I will have the list tonight," Vespera said, already writing.

"I want one with a lightning domain in it," Luna announced, sitting upright for the first time in six hours. "Maybe it’ll give me a good drop."

"These dungeons are for our guild members to grind," Bastet sighed.

"I’m a guild member, aren’t I?"

The tent went from a funeral to an argument inside of ten seconds, and Kaiden let it happen with a big grin on his face, because it was the first time since midnight that any of them sounded like themselves.

Alexandra used the confusion to extract herself, recovered her pot, and went off to answer forty-one questions about contracts.

He left the rest of them to it and went outside to deal with the letters.

...

He found the two of them behind the equipment tent, which was the only spot on the lot with enough cover for two A-tier awakened to be furious at each other quietly.

Brittany and Trisha stood about four feet apart with their arms crossed in poses that matched each other exactly, which neither of them would have admitted to, and they both started talking the second they saw him coming.

"She’s coddling them-"

"She put three of them on the ground before nine in the morning-"

"Because they were slow-"

"They’ve been excited and I bet they didn’t sleep properly-"

"One at a time." Kaiden stopped a few paces short of the pair of them. "Brittany. What happened?"

"I ran the two o’clock yesterday. Half of them couldn’t hold a line for ninety seconds." Her arms stayed crossed. "So this morning I hit them."

"Three of them are icing something," Trisha said.

"Better here than in a gate."

"That’s what Ash used to say." Trisha said it quietly, and she said it knowing exactly where it would land. "Word for word. Better here than in a gate. He said it to Stacy about six weeks before-"

"Don’t."

"Then stop using his sentence."

Neither of them had anything after that, and Kaiden let the two of them stand in it, because that was the argument underneath the letters and they had both known it before he walked up.

"How many of them quit this morning?"

Brittany blinked at him. "...None."

"How many asked you to do it again tomorrow?"

"...Four."

"Then you’re not him, and she isn’t coddling anybody either. Show me the ones you’re worried about."

"Yes, boss!" The duo chirped together as if they weren’t just done conducting a hissy kitten fight.

The three of them came around the equipment tent together, and the lot noticed in stages.

The cluster nearest them went quiet first. Then a woman with a clipboard turned to see what had happened to the noise, and stopped. Then the southern half of the gravel worked out at the same moment that the man walking toward them was not on his way to somewhere else.

Somebody said it out loud, badly, in a whisper that carried about forty feet.

"He’s evaluating us today?!"

The reorganization that followed would have impressed the Bureau. Bootlaces got retied. Somebody swallowed their gum.

Eugene Wexler, at the water station, snapped a salute at Kaiden from ninety meters out and held it at full extension.

Vanessa Sloan didn’t straighten up, because she had been standing straight since seven. She moved to the front of her squad instead and put herself where he would reach her first.

And Yuna Park was three rows back with her weight settled on her heels, the only person on that gravel looking at him with no nerves in it whatsoever, because she had spent three years being evaluated by a man who did it to remind her that she was owned.

Kaiden walked the line with Brittany on one side and Trisha on the other, and he did his math while he went.

A few days ago, none of these people had been his.

Most of them had come for the streams. A good number had come because Vespera Ashborn’s name was on the incorporation paperwork, which in this country was its own form of advertising.

Plenty of them had been freelancers with no contract to break. Others had been like the woman three rows back, and prying her loose from somebody else’s building had cost real money.

His mother’s name was supposed to be the wall around all of this. Vespera Ashborn had pull in places that didn’t publish an address, and that was supposed to mean nobody sane went shopping for a federal clerk to use against her son.

Somebody had gone shopping anyway.

A few minutes ago he had stood in that tent and handed his family the encouraging half of it, and every word had been true. He had kept the rest, and he intended to go on keeping it, because there were several hundred people on this gravel who had put their names down next to his, and every one of them believed they had joined the future.

They had. It just wasn’t going to stay quiet.