Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 968: Wake Up Call

Kaiden’s hand flattened on the map table.

”I see how it is,” he said, and it came out low.

”There he is.” Lazarus sounded fond about it. ”That’s the one from the mountain.”

A chair took the old man’s weight somewhere behind the voice, and ice shifted in a glass.

”Good. Then I’ll say the part I’ve been sitting on for this entire time. I want you to hear it from a man who likes you, because the next fellow who says it to you won’t.”

He let a beat go by. ”Three months ago you were a name in a chat room with twenty people in it. Tonight you hold sovereign territory. Twenty dungeons of your own choosing. Immense wealth in each of your inner circle’s accounts, and a signature that turned monsters into citizens.”

”Stop monologuing. I’m not in the mood to listen to your yapping.”

”Haha! This old man has things to say,” Lazarus audibly grinned. He continued, unbothered. ”You know what you have. You don’t know what it looks like from a desk.”

Doug had stopped pretending to read the page in his hand.

”There are men out there who inherited a contract book their grandfather started before the apocalypse, and then spent every year since it hit adding to it one job at a time. Sent their kids to school on it. Buried people on it.”

”And then they turned on the news and watched a boy who burns eggs on camera walk past the whole of it inside a season. That’s the view from their chair. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s fair.”

”Nobody in those rooms hates you.” The glass came down on wood. ”They’re frightened. And frightened men come at you with committees, filings, and a bureau that has suddenly developed questions about your dog.”

”And what was today?”

”Today was the polite version.”

Kaiden let that sit where it fell.

”I have eleven thousand people, Kaiden. They go home to families at the end of a shift.”

The next part came slower. ”If I spend six months being neighborly to a man who won’t sit down with me for a talk, and you become what I believe you are going to become, then I handed my entire house to a stranger. And everything that happened after that would be mine to carry.”

”Ah. I see. In your head, this is nothing but a wake-up call. A demand so that I no longer ignore you.”

Kaiden’s voice turned deeper as he went on. He was truly not amused.

”You assume I’ll just laugh it off and now be more amicable to your wishes? You took my recruits because I ignored you for a few days. I don’t find it funny at all.”

”I did a nasty thing to you today, no doubt.”

”I’m not going to dress it up, and I’d think less of you if you let me. I made some professionals an offer they’d have been fools to refuse.” Still no heat in any of it. ”I didn’t touch your family. I didn’t take a single veteran off you. Sit with that a while and see what it tells you.”

Calypso made a low sound at the back of the room. ”This gramps is delusional. He thinks his declaration of war will be brushed off? By my Darling?”

”Heh... The great Demoness, Calypso,” Lazarus chuckled. ”A declaration of war? No, miss...” His voice finally turned away from the kind old man tone, entering the feared leader of the Crimson Dominion mode. ”That was a border raid. You’ll know when Crimson Dominion declares war on you loud and clear.”

Crimson Dominion was known for being the most chaotic and aggressive of the three top-tier guilds in the USA.

Bastet’s hand closed around Kaiden’s forearm.

”Did you and the religious nutjobs talk?”

”Haha!” Lazarus finally laughed, his air of menace receding. ”Who knows?”

”That’s not an answer.”

”No. It isn’t.” The ice went round in the glass once.

The chair creaked as the old man leaned into it. ”I see now that my actions have come off stronger than I intended. Just say the word and all nine are back on your gravel Monday morning, bags in hand, contracts void, and my apology in writing.”

The ops floor went very quiet.

Kaiden looked down at the page on the table, at fourteen names he had already read twice.

”No.”

”...Hmm?”

”No.” He slid the page across the table toward Ms. Rook with two fingers. ”Rook, write it up. We have a new guild policy. Anybody who walks out of Eclipse doesn’t walk back in, period. We’re not building a boarding house.”

”Effective tonight, or from the filing date?” Ms. Rook asked, already typing.

”Tonight.”

”That’s nine bodies you cannot replace by Monday,” Lazarus said.

”I’m grateful, old man,” Kaiden smiled. ”You found the nine people in my guild who were never mine in the first place, and you paid through the nose to take them off my hands.”

”That’s the right call,” Nyx said, and she meant it. ”We rushed it and a few bad grains filtered in.”

”Let those pathetic losers go be somebody else’s cowards,” Luna said, considerably less diplomatically.

The rest of them piled in on top of that, overlapping and ragged, and it took a few seconds to die down.

Lazarus was quiet for a moment.

”...Hah.” The old man was genuinely delighted. ”All right, lad. It was a great talk.”

The television came back on behind him, some crowd noise rising and falling, and his voice slid right back into comfortable.

”My offer stands. It’s stood since the day your dog put me through a trench and it’ll stand next week. If you’re willing to meet, Crimson Dominion is ready to conduct diplomacy. God, that feels weird to say,” he laughed. ”You’re the first.”

”And you’ll be dealing with my Viera for most of it, which is the good news for you. She runs that entire guild without a drop of mana in her, and she does it better than I ever did.”

A pause that fooled nobody at all.

”Finest thing my lineage ever produced, that girl. Been watching your streams, too. Won’t admit it. And she isn’t seeing anybody, which I mention purely as background-”

Aria had been standing at the glass with her back to the room since Doug read the names.

She turned around.

”Mister Crane.”

Every head on the ops floor came with her, because she had not made a sound in eleven minutes.

”Ah. The Moon Valkyrie herself, I’ve been hoping-”

”You watched him take two of us to a shopping mall, and then you used it. You waited for the one afternoon he decided to relax, and you took nine people off his page.”

Her voice was warm and pleasant, and it did not rise by a single degree.

”He will not have another relaxed day off for a very long time, and that is your doing. And now you’re offering him your daughter down a phone line.”

”Now that is a considerable distortion of-”

”Is it?”

The crowd noise on the other end went off mid-cheer.

”If you were my father, I’d be very, very disappointed right now.” Aria tilted her head.

”...That has never been established as-”

”Stop talking already, you disgusting creep.”