Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 921

Chapter 921: Unsettling Rumors

Yuna Park sat near the back of a half-empty evening bus, phone pressed to her ear and a fresh bruise on her throat. Her guild leader’s voice sounded warmer than it had in three years of employment.

That alone was enough to put her on guard.

"Rumors?" she managed.

"Unsettling ones." Mercer gave the word room to breathe, an old negotiation-table habit, waiting for the other side to start filling silences. "A friend sent me a note. Eclipse held some kind of recruitment circus on the city’s eastern edge today. Five hundred hopefuls getting tossed around a government training hall by monsters, and in the middle of it, allegedly, was a girl in a cap and a mask, organizing strangers into formations and skating on ice she’d laid down herself."

The bus leaned through a corner, and Yuna watched the streetlights slide across the window, her reflection sliding with them, cap lost somewhere in that hall, mask still on.

"The account is secondhand, of course," Mercer added, generous. "Could be anyone, really. Slim build, oriental eyes, dark hair, twin daggers made of frost."

’Deny it,’ her instinct suggested. ’It’s just hearsay.’

The phone buzzed against her cheek as another message landed in a sixty-person group chat named DEFINITELY-NOT-YUNA, where her deniability was being celebrated by name.

"It was me," she said.

The line went quiet, and she took the small win of having surprised him and set it on a shelf that held very few others from Skyline.

"I appreciate the honesty." Papers shuffled on his end, and she could picture the room without trying. Desk lamp, quarterly binders, blinds. He was still at work at this hour, and of course he was. "You’ve always been straight with me, Yuna."

Twice. He’d gotten her name right twice in one call, which she was fairly sure was a personal record.

"So let me be straight with you, because I’m worried. Eclipse is not a guild. It’s a stunt with a fan base. A tent, a monster the government can’t classify, a man the government had to invent a tier for because he was such an alien anomaly, and a legal disaster that simply hasn’t happened yet.

"You’re the highly valued cornerstone of this organization, Yuna. I planned to build everything around you. That’s why I won’t stand by while you throw a stable career onto a bonfire because the bonfire streams well."

"They filled that hall with five hundred people in one afternoon," she countered.

"And that’s exactly what frightens me." A drawer opened and closed somewhere behind his voice, which rounded off into a fatherly register. "But I didn’t call to scold you. If anything, some of this is on me. The board approved changes weeks ago and I sat on the paperwork. So let me fix that tonight. Highest tiered gates available for purchase are starting next quarter. A budget to invite outsiders into your own strike team. A pay revision, a significant one. And the spring banner campaign built around you, not just featuring you."

There was a version of her, roughly twelve hours old, that would have traded fingers for half of that sentence.

She noticed the timing instead. The offer was generous, detailed, and exactly a minute younger than the rumor.

"You’re valued here," Mercer said. "You know that. Our only S-tier, our golden goose."

Valued. Her mother had used the same word earlier today over the onions, and Yuna had swallowed it then, as she always did.

Now she finally picked it up and looked underneath, and the inventory was short and ugly. Her face on recruitment banners nobody had asked her about.

The training-cost spreadsheet angled toward her at every quarterly review, so the debt stayed fresh. Feedback sessions he scheduled after hours, with the blinds drawn, which she’d kept telling herself she could handle, because she was S-tier and professionals handle things.

The guilt that had climbed into the bathtub with her earlier today, the debt she thought she owed the guild that trained her, had died quietly somewhere in the hours since. Listening to him now, she couldn’t even locate the grave.

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