Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 914: Job Interview

She’d never told her parents any of that. She was S-tier. She could handle it.

”I know it’s safe!” Yuna’s eyes sparked. ”That’s why I need to leave to grow! To learn from Vespera, Kaiden, Luna, everyone!”

Her mother’s knife paused.

”Mom...” Yuna pulled the phone against her chest. ”I’m clearing C-gates with a team that’s fine and a leader who calls me by the wrong name every other week. Soon my contract ends and I re-sign for another few years and clear more C-gates with the same team, and in five years I’m twenty-six and I’ve never done anything that mattered.”

The kitchen was quiet except for the ventilation fan.

”There’s a box at the bottom of the form,” she said, quieter. ”For people like me. Under contract but wanting to transfer. They planned for it. They’re willing to work with existing agreements.” She swallowed. ”They thought about people like me, Dad.”

”What a shocker. They want to poach an S-tier awakened.”

”Dad!”

”What?” Her father studied her pouting face for a long moment, then looked at her mother.

A decision passed between them, wordless, the way decisions passed between two people who’d been married long enough to have whole conversations with their shoulders.

Her mother turned from the counter, knife still in hand, and looked at her daughter.

”You’ll visit every week.”

Yuna’s breath caught.

Yuna hugged them both at the same time, one arm around each, the phone still clutched in her fingers behind her father’s back, and held on for longer than she’d held on to anything since she was a child.

Then she sprinted to her room, dropped into her desk chair, and pulled up the form with fingers that trembled enough to make the first letter of her name a lowercase y that she had to backspace and retype.

Name. Tier. Combat class. Guild affiliation. Statement of intent.

She checked the box at the bottom.

Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

Submit.

Her phone rang.

”Hie!” Yuna yelped, nearly dropping it for the second time today, and fumbled it to her ear with both hands.

The caller ID read ’Eclipse Guild - Recruitment Office’ and her brain supplied the rest before she could stop it: Kaiden Grey, calling her personally, because he’d seen her application and felt a connection across the digital void and wanted to welcome her himself and maybe also introduce her to Luna and-

”Good afternoon! This is Doug, Eclipse Human Resources. Am I speaking with Yuna Park?”

”...Yes.” Yuna’s fantasy died a quick and merciful death. ”That’s me.”

”Wonderful. We’ve reviewed your application and would like to schedule you for an in-person assessment this afternoon. Are you available at four o’clock?”

This afternoon. She’d submitted the form only a few seconds ago.

”I- yes. Yes, I’m available.”

”Great! I’m sending the address to your registered contact now. Please wear comfortable clothing and bring a valid ID.”

”Anything else I should know?”

”You’ll receive further instructions on site. We look forward to meeting you, Miss Park!”

The call ended. Yuna stared at her phone, then at the ceiling, then down at her phone again.

She had three hours to pick an outfit. That was not enough time to pick an outfit.

...

It was, in fact, barely enough time.

Yuna stepped off the bus in a cropped jacket over a fitted black top, dark jeans that hugged her legs, and boots she’d spent eleven minutes choosing between. A cloth mask covered the lower half of her face, and a cap sat low over her eyes, because Skyline Guild’s only S-tier showing up at an Eclipse recruitment event was the kind of news that traveled fast and arrived with lawyers.

The address wasn’t Eclipse’s compound.

She’d expected the construction site, the tent, maybe Pebble napping by the entrance. Instead, the bus had dropped her in front of a sprawling government training facility on the city’s eastern edge, all reinforced concrete and steel-shuttered windows, built to survive whatever happened inside it.

Her pulse ran hot the whole walk from the gate to the main entrance. Would it be Kaiden himself? A personal interview, face to face, across a table? Would Luna be there? Would she say something stupid? Would Luna say something crude and perfect and exactly like the streams and would Yuna be able to form words in response or would she just stand there vibrating?

She showed her ID at the security checkpoint, received a numbered badge, and followed the signs down a wide corridor that smelled like floor polish and old sweat. The signs read ’ECLIPSE RECRUITMENT - HALL C’ in clean printed letters, and the corridor ended at a set of double doors tall enough to drive a truck through.

She stepped inside, and every fantasy she’d built on the bus ride shattered.

The hall was enormous, a training arena the size of a warehouse, its walls and floor lined with reinforced padding rated for combat-class impacts. Industrial lighting hummed overhead in long white rows.

And it was full of people.

Hundreds of them, packed shoulder to shoulder across the padded floor, all in civilian clothes, all wearing the same numbered badges, all looking around with the same mixture of excitement and confusion she felt pooling in her own stomach. A woman in running shoes and a ponytail stood next to a man built like a refrigerator who’d chosen, for reasons Yuna couldn’t fathom, to wear a Hawaiian shirt to the most important interview of his life.

No tables. No chairs. No interview stations. No clipboards.

Just a padded room and a crowd.

Several hundred people were beginning to arrive at the same question Yuna had: if this was a fighter recruitment, why were they standing in a combat arena with nothing to fight with and nothing to fight?

No one told them to bring combat gear! She thought it’d be a face-to-face interview, as is normal procedure!

Inviting your candidates, then pushing them into a training hall together, without giving a single piece of information was anything but expected procedure.

A murmur ran through the crowd, nervous and electric. Someone near the front laughed too loudly. Someone near the back was recording on their phone.

Then the thuds began.

Low, rhythmic, heavy enough that Yuna felt them in the soles of her boots before she heard them with her ears.

The padded floor absorbed most of the vibration, but most wasn’t all, and the remaining fraction was enough to silence every voice in the hall within three beats.

*Thud.*

*Thud.*

*Thud.*

The massive doors at the far end of the arena, a reinforced set twenty times the height of the ones she’d entered through, began to slide apart with a grinding mechanical hum. Darkness waited on the other side, deep and absolute, swallowing the facility’s lighting whole.

”Grr...”

Then the eyes opened.

Six of them, burning amber, each the size of a dinner plate, arranged in three pairs that stacked vertically in the dark.

Pebble stepped through the doorway, and the floor shook.

The beast from the streams, the one who’d peeked into the recruitment photo with one curious eye, the guardian dog who’d destroyed a walkway by sitting on it, was nothing like what walked into that hall.

What walked into that hall was a creature the size of a large building, wreathed in ominous chitin. Its claws gouged the reinforced padding with every step, leaving furrows deep enough to lose a hand in, and the pressure rolling off it hit the front rows like a physical wall.

People buckled. Knees folded. A woman in the second row sat down hard without choosing to. The man in the Hawaiian shirt made a sound that would haunt him at parties for years.

And on top of the beast’s head, arms relaxed at his sides, stood a man.

His eyes were red. Genuinely, deeply red, the color of a creature that had nothing to do with human biology, and they swept the crowd with the same unhurried patience as the six amber ones beneath him.

He was grinning.

Wider than the recruitment photo. Sharper than the streams where Luna said something foul and he tried not to laugh. This grin reached his eyes in a way that made every survival instinct Yuna possessed scream a single word.

Run.

Yuna’s legs locked, and the badge went numb between her fingers.

She knew that face anywhere. Every stream, every clip, every screenshot she’d saved and would never admit to saving.

Kaiden Grey.