The Ashbound guild hall’s command room slled like cold coffee and expensive paper.
Maeve Ashbound sat behind a table covered in financial projections that had been printed, annotated, reprinted, and annotated again until the margins looked like they’d been attacked by a swarm of red-penned wasps.
Two n sat across from her. Henrik Ashbound, the guild’s chief financial officer, had the pale complexion of a man who hadn’t slept in forty hours and the posture of soone who knew the numbers weren’t going to improve no matter how many tis he ran them. Gabriel Ashbound, head of sponsorship operations, kept adjusting his glasses because it gave his hands sothing to do other than shake.
The holographic display on the table showed Ashbound’s competition standings. Suspended. The word glowed in flat amber text next to the guild’s na like a bruise that refused to heal.
"Three sponsors have exercised their exit clauses," Henrik said, scrolling through a docunt only he could see behind his eyes. "Titan Gear, ArcLight Dynamics, and Verdant Solutions. Combined annual value of forty million Chronos. Two more have requested ergency review etings, which in my experience is the polite version of the sa thing."
"The polite version costs us more," Maeve said. "They’ll drag the review out for weeks before pulling the trigger, and their contracts require us to maintain campaign obligations during the review period. We’ll be spending money on partners who’ve already decided to leave."
"Yes."
Maeve’s jaw worked once, a controlled motion that she caught and stopped.
Her son had done this. Her idiot, temperantal, S-tier son had scread threats on a live broadcast watched by over a million people, gotten himself arrested for attempted murder, and handed every competitor, critic, and ambulance-chasing journalist in the country a reason to bury the Ashbound na. The competition standing alone was survivable. The legal fees weren’t going to amount anything significant. Even the sponsor bleed, substantial as it was, could be absorbed by a guild with Ashbound’s reserves.
But all of it together, compounding, each crisis feeding the next while the public narrative spiraled further out of her control with every hour, that was the kind of damage that didn’t heal with money. That was reputational rot. The kind that made future sponsors hesitate, made recruitnt targets look elsewhere, made the Association’s oversight board start asking questions about guild governance.
And the worst part was that she couldn’t fix it from here. She could manage the finances, control the ssaging, and contain the legal exposure, but she couldn’t undo what the caras had recorded. She couldn’t unscream what Ash had scread. She couldn’t un-die the girl who’d died in that basin.
"Gabriel." She turned to the sponsorship lead. "Tiline on the replacent pitches."
"We have feelers out to six firms," Gabriel said, adjusting his glasses again. "Three dostic, three international. But I’ll be honest with you, Maeve. The pitch deck right now is toxic. Every prospective partner’s first question is going to be about the arrest, and their second question is going to be about when he’s cleared of his cris. If we can’t give them a clearance date, we’re selling them a brand with a hole in it."
"Then we give them a clearance date."
"Do we have one?"
"We will." Maeve pulled a separate docunt toward her, a legal brief from the defense team. "The arbitration hearing is scheduled for next week. The Association’s case is thinner than they’d like it to be. Ash acted during an active combat deploynt, and the target was an opposing combatant who’d already drawn weapons and killed his teammate. There’s enough ambiguity here to argue this down from attempted murder to excessive force, which carries a hefty fine and a suspension, not a criminal sentence."
Henrik and Gabriel exchanged a glance that they thought she didn’t catch.
She caught it.
"If you have sothing to say, say it."
Henrik cleared his throat. "The legal argunt is pretty sound. It’s gonna cost us but I think we can get Ash out sooner or later. The public argunt is the problem. Even if the Association downgrades the charge, the footage exists. He’s on cara threatening to kill a man. That plays on a loop every ti a sponsor Googles his na."
"He’s also on cara with his cock and balls out, it doesn’t matter."
"Being an awakened pornstar is very different from crying for your mommy after getting arrested, sister. You know it... Kaiden’s business model works because he never does anything like that. Hell, we don’t even know if he has a mother. He’s just so badass awakened guy who fucks hot chicks and fights epic battles while having a ton of charisma on his side."
"The public mory is short!" Maeve hissed, not liking how her brother compared Ash and Kaiden. "Especially for winners. If Ash cos back and performs, the narrative shifts from ’arrested fighter’ to ’controversial champion.’ The sponsors who left will co back when the numbers do."
She believed it. She had to believe it, because the alternative was admitting that her son had inflicted damage she couldn’t repair, and Maeve Ashbound did not traffic in problems without solutions.
She turned back to the financial projections and began marking adjustnts in red pen, her handwriting precise and small.
That was when three phones rang at the sa ti.
Artifacts, not phones. The communication relays built into the guild’s executive equipnt, the kind that bypassed standard channels and connected directly to intelligence contacts, dia monitors, and the network of informants that any serious guild maintained. All three devices scread in unison, the priority alert tone that ant soone on the other end had flagged a ssage as urgent enough to override silent mode.
Henrik answered first. His face changed.
Gabriel answered second. His face changed the sa way.
Maeve picked up her own artifact and the voice on the other end was her dia liaison, a woman nad Delphine whose composure had survived seventeen years of crisis managent without cracking once.
It cracked now.
"Valhalla’s Sinners just posted a new video. You need to watch it right now."
Maeve set the artifact down without responding and activated her personal interface. The holographic display blood behind her eyes, a private screen visible only to her, navigated by thought alone. She found the video in three seconds. It was already trending on every awakened dia platform that existed, climbing the rankings with the speed of a wildfire that had found dry timber.
The title was simple.
Used and Abused
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