Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 918

Chapter 918: Winning

Four steps crossed the arena, each footfall blooming white on the padding, a dotted line of winter stitched across the hall in half a second. The fifth step hit the wall.

She ran up twelve meters of vertical concrete, frost gluing each stride to the wall for the instant it needed, lungs burning, the edges of her vision crowding inward, because the Hush ate everything.

Somewhere far below, somebody finally spotted the frost line and shouted. The sound reached her thin and slow, a voice through deep water.

She cleared the railing with the dagger already moving.

The world snapped back to full volume at the exact moment five fingers closed around her throat.

"Agh?!" Her momentum died in a single yank, her feet dangling in the air, one dagger jolting loose and skittering across the deck.

She struck anyway, twisting to drive the remaining dagger at his neck with everything her emptied body had left. His other hand simply arrived, closing around her fist and stopping blade, arm, and follow-through all at once, frost-smoke curling against his skin a finger’s width from its mark.

Out of five hundred people, she was the one who had gotten closest.

He was still watching the arena.

Then, without hurry, he turned his head, and the red eyes settled on her from a distance no stream had ever put them.

"Excellent work, Yuna Park."

It was the greatest sentence anyone had ever said to her, and she couldn’t breathe.

The grip was calibrated for some other, sturdier category of throat, and hers was on the wrong end of the exchange rate. Her legs kicked once, politely. The edges of the room began to sparkle.

"I’m impressed," he continued, in the same tone Doug from HR had used to schedule her afternoon, "strong, cool-headed, and even a natural leader."

"Ghh..." All Yuna could reply with was the guttural sounds of a dying woman. She tapped two fingers against his wrist, twice. Wrestling rules. Honored on every playground on Earth.

He smiled.

"Ah." The hand opened. "My bad."

She hit the deck on all fours and sucked in a breath that scraped her throat the whole way down, followed by several uglier ones. The cap was gone, lost somewhere around the wall. The mask, loyal to the end, had stayed on.

Purple lightning cracked, and Luna was crouched on the railing beside them like a gargoyle in a hoodie, pointing down at her.

"What’s a midget doing here? Go back to elementary school."

"I’m one fourth of an inch taller than you... and three years older..." she managed, doing her utmost not to vomit.

"Hah?" Luna’s eyes narrowed. "Stop joking. You’re like my little sister from another mother. From an Asian one."

Yuna, face down on the observation deck, raised one shaking thumb. She was okay with the analogy for some odd reason.

Luna’s head whipped toward Kaiden. "Can we keep her?"

"Darling!" Calypso’s voice rolled up from the arena floor, where she stood beside the pile with her fists on her hips, beaming at the deck. "I like this one! She has murder in her!"

Yuna pressed her forehead against the cool metal of the deck and grinned until her cheeks hurt.

’He knows my name and Luna called me her sister!!’

Her windpipe filed a formal complaint. It was ignored.

...

The massive doors ground open again before the last badge had finished skidding, and a river of white and green flooded in, Awakened Association healers fanning out across the arena with practiced calm.

Glowing palms settled over swollen ankles, splints materialized out of kit bags, and two stretchers carried off a pair of frontliners who had absorbed Calypso’s enthusiasm a little too directly. Both men stayed conscious the whole ride, and one of them kept trying to wave to his new friends from the pile.

Broken bones, bruised ribs, concussions in polite quantities, and nothing crippling. Four monsters had spent a few minutes hammering five hundred people, and every single strike had been measured to the ounce.

A healer intercepted Yuna at the bottom of the deck stairs, tutted at her bruised throat like a disappointed aunt, and pressed warm light into it until swallowing no longer felt like a chore.

It gave her too much time to think. Across the floor, her ice was melting into dark patches under the industrial lights, the pile was being disassembled one groaning body at a time, and the arithmetic refused to improve no matter how many times she ran it.

They had lost. The chance was wasted.

She found the halberd woman sitting near the ruins of the formation with a fresh splint on two fingers, the stocky man beside her with his cracked bracers in his lap.

"Hey." Yuna stopped in front of them, and the apology came out before she’d decided how to dress it. "You did great. Sorry for failing you guys."

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