Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 968

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.

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