Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 915: A Simple Test

Kaiden Grey stood on top of a creature that could have swallowed half the hall, and he looked like he’d come to enjoy himself.

Yuna’s legs hadn’t moved since the massive doors opened. Her badge hung between numb fingers while five hundred people around her tried to decide whether the man with the red eyes was about to address them or simply let the monster do its work.

He addressed them.

His voice carried across the arena without effort, clean and unhurried, as if the hundreds of terrified applicants below him were a minor detail in his afternoon.

”The test is simple. You versus us. To pass, all you need to do is...”

Five hundred people held their breath.

”Win.”

Nobody moved for two full seconds. Then confusion broke across the hall like a wave, loud and formless, and the single word landed on hundreds of faces at once without anyone knowing what to do with it.

”Win WHAT?” someone shouted from the center of the pack.

”Against who? Against THAT?” A man near the front jabbed a shaking finger at Pebble. The beast’s six amber eyes tracked the gesture with lazy curiosity, and the finger lowered very quickly.

”We don’t have weapons! Nobody told us to bring combat gear!”

Kaiden didn’t answer. He stood on Pebble’s head with his hands relaxed at his sides and let the shouting wash over him without once changing expression, and the silence where an explanation should have been spoke louder than the noise trying to fill it.

Then the doors behind the candidates, the same ones every applicant had walked through, ground open with a heavy mechanical hum.

”Feel free to leave at any moment,” he said. ”Nobody here is forced to participate. We’re looking to hire and you’re looking to be hired. This is the process of that. If you don’t like it, then thanks for your time.”

That made it worse.

The outrage shifted from confusion into genuine anger, the kind that only forms when people have cleared their schedules, dressed for interviews, taken buses across the city, and are then told to fight an Anomaly-tier warrior and a building-sized beast in jeans and sneakers with no warning and no explanation.

”This is insane!” A woman near Yuna ripped off her numbered badge and threw it at the padded floor. ”Is this how Eclipse treats its applicants?”

”My guild leader warned me about this,” a tall man muttered, already heading for the exit with three others in tow.

Yuna stood frozen in the middle of it, badge clutched in both hands, cap pulled low.

The posting. She’d read it three times in the bathtub, read it until the water went cold and her fingers pruned and she’d nearly drowned her phone. The words were still there, letter-perfect:

’Apply only if you are willing to stand against whatever the mana apocalypse throws at humanity next, and against whatever humanity itself throws at Eclipse.’

Whatever came for humanity next wouldn’t schedule a gear check or wait for any of them to strap on armor.

Yuna looked up at Kaiden Grey, at the plain shirt and shorts he wore on top of a monster like he’d come from a morning jog.

He wasn’t wearing armor either.

Movement at the far end of the arena caught her eye. A raised observation deck built into the wall above the massive doors Pebble had entered through, ringed in reinforced glass. Two figures stepped onto it.

One was a demoness.

Red skin gleaming under the industrial lights, horns curling from dark hair, tail swaying in slow, heavy sweeps behind her. She wore a cropped tank top and loose pants that surrendered immediately to the sculpted muscle underneath, and she surveyed the fighters below, grinning like she’d already picked her favorite.

Calypso. The Manifestation of Carnage.

The other was Luna.

”!!” Yuna’s breath caught.

The Storm Valkyrie walked out in an oversized purple hoodie and shorts that ended mid-thigh, her hair pulled into a messy ponytail that had given up any pretense of tidiness, and Yuna’s heart forgot what its job was.

She was small. That was the first thing Yuna’s brain managed to process, ahead of the purple hair, ahead of the posture, ahead of everything. The Storm Valkyrie, the fastest awakened alive, the woman whose flickering repositions Yuna had studied frame by frame until she could trace them with her eyes closed, was small. The hoodie swallowed her shoulders and bunched at her wrists, and the shorts showed legs built from lean muscle and absolutely nothing else.

Perhaps it was the majestic demoness standing next to her, but...

’She’s so petite!!’ Yuna squealed inwardly. ’I already knew it, but seeing it... Finally, an awakened who has my proportions and thrives!’

Luna was grinning. The grin. The exact one from a hundred streams, the one that showed up three seconds before she said something that would’ve gotten the channel flagged. It meant someone nearby was about to have a terrible day, and Luna intended to savor every moment of it.

She looked like she’d been dragged off a couch mid-game and told there was something fun happening, and she’d said ”sure, whatever” and come exactly as she was.

Fabulous.

Yuna could feel her pulse in her throat, in her wrists, in the backs of her knees, hammering hard enough that the woman standing beside her glanced over with concern.

The hall hadn’t quieted. The departure of a few dozen had thinned the mass but concentrated the anger, and voices were climbing again.

Demands for an explanation, threats to report Eclipse to the Association, someone near the back lecturing loudly about applicant rights and formal complaint procedures.

Luna listened to it for about four seconds, hands buried in her hoodie pockets, and her eyes began to glow, not one bit subtle.

Purple light blazed from her irises like someone had lit a furnace behind them, bright enough to cast violet shadows across the observation deck, and the temperature of every complaint in the hall dropped by several degrees.

Then she stomped once, and the world cracked open.

The thunderclap hit the arena like a physical wall, rattling the industrial lights in their housings, splintering a line up the reinforced glass behind the deck, and dropping every person in the front three rows to their knees. Yuna’s ears rang. The woman who’d been lecturing about formal complaints was sitting on the floor with both hands over her head.

Above the crowd, two crackling shapes formed in the air. Lightning, violet and white, bending and forking until it resolved into a shape every single person in the hall recognized instantly.

Two enormous middle fingers, sculpted from living thunder, hovering over five hundred heads.

Luna’s hands hadn’t left her pockets.

”Stop bitching and get the fuck out,” she said, her voice thinner than the thunder, yet it somehow carried to every corner with utmost clarity. ”Pussies.”

The lightning fingers held for one more glorious second, then rotated in unison and pointed at the exit doors, crackling with idle menace until they dissolved into sparks that rained down on the stunned crowd like violet snow.

”Is she really too lazy to flip us off with her own hands?!” someone shouted, outraged.

”Who behaves like that? You’re not playing a video game or shooting a fun video right now! You represent your guild, gremlin!”

As more and more shouts like that arrived, Yuna’s vision went briefly white at the edges.

She’d done that with her hands still in her pockets, eyes blazing, without even bothering to flip them off herself.

’So fucking cool...!!’

Something behind Yuna’s ribs was doing things no medical professional would have endorsed.

The doors swallowed another wave. Twenty, maybe thirty, footsteps echoing down the corridor with the hurried rhythm of a decision that couldn’t be unmade.

But the ones who stayed.

”Who the FUCK does she think she is?”

The tall man who’d been heading for the exit had stopped walking. His fists were clenched, his whole trajectory reversed, and the look on his face had shifted from ”this is beneath me” to open hostility.

”I didn’t cross the city to get called a pussy by a crude midget!” someone else growled, and a murmur of agreement rolled through the remaining fighters.

Men and women alike were planting their feet, rolling up sleeves, cracking their necks, and the anger that had been aimed at the situation was now aimed squarely at the purple-haired girl on the observation deck.

Which was exactly what Luna wanted.

She stood with her hands still buried in her hoodie pockets, listening to every insult hurled her way with her grin stretching wider by the second, and Calypso beside her watched the display with a sharp smile and a tail that swished once, approving.

Then the floor shook.

Pebble circled behind the observation deck with steps that rattled Yuna’s teeth, six amber eyes blazing down from above. Kaiden appeared between Luna and Calypso, unhurried, red eyes passing over the remaining candidates.

Calypso cracked her knuckles, each pop distinct in the silence, and tilted her horned head toward him.

”Darling, can we begin?”

Kaiden’s gaze swept the hall one last time, and whatever he found there was enough.

”Three.”

All remaining fighters drew a collective breath.

”Two.”

Yuna bounced on the balls of her feet, rolled her neck left and right, and shook out her hands at her sides. The cap stayed low, the mask stayed on, and underneath both she was grinning so hard her cheeks hurt.

She hadn’t even been hired yet and this was already more fun than her years at Skyline as a whole.

”One.”