The Ashbound guild hall’s mand room smelled 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 men sat across from her. Henrik Ashbound, the guild’s chief financial officer, had the pale plexion of a man who hadn’t slept in forty hours and the posture of someone who knew the numbers weren’t going to improve no matter how many times he ran them. Gabriel Ashbound, head of sponsorship operations, kept adjusting his glasses because it gave his hands something to do other than shake.
The holographic display on the table showed Ashbound’s petition standings. Suspended. The word glowed in flat amber text next to the guild’s name like a bruise that refused to heal.
"Three sponsors have exercised their exit clauses," Henrik said, scrolling through a document only he could see behind his eyes. "Titan Gear, ArcLight Dynamics, and Verdant Solutions. bined annual value of forty million Chronos. Two more have requested emergency review meetings, which in my experience is the polite version of the same 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, temperamental, S-tier son had screamed threats on a live broadcast watched by over a million people, gotten himself arrested for attempted murder, and handed every petitor, critic, and ambulance-chasing journalist in the country a reason to bury the Ashbound name. The petition 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, pounding, 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 recruitment 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 messaging, and contain the legal exposure, but she couldn’t undo what the cameras had recorded. She couldn’t unscream what Ash had screamed. She couldn’t un-die the girl who’d died in that basin.
"Gabriel." She turned to the sponsorship lead. "Timeline on the replacement pitches."
"We have feelers out to six firms," Gabriel said, adjusting his glasses again. "Three domestic, 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 crimes. 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 document 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 bat deployment, and the target was an opposing batant 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 something to say, say it."
Henrik cleared his throat. "The legal argument is pretty sound. It’s gonna cost us but I think we can get Ash out sooner or later. The public argument is the problem. Even if the Association downgrades the charge, the footage exists. He’s on camera threatening to kill a man. That plays on a loop every time a sponsor Googles his name."
"He’s also on camera 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 some badass awakened guy who fucks hot chicks and fights epic battles while having a ton of charisma on his side."
"The public memory is short!" Maeve hissed, not liking how her brother pared Ash and Kaiden. "Especially for winners. If Ash es back and performs, the narrative shifts from ’arrested fighter’ to ’controversial champion.’ The sponsors who left will e 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 adjustments in red pen, her handwriting precise and small.
That was when three phones rang at the same time.
Artifacts, not phones. The munication relays built into the guild’s executive equipment, the kind that bypassed standard channels and connected directly to intelligence contacts, media monitors, and the network of informants that any serious guild maintained. All three devices screamed in unison, the priority alert tone that meant someone on the other end had flagged a message as urgent enough to override silent mode.
Henrik answered first. His face changed.
Gabriel answered second. His face changed the same way.
Maeve picked up her own artifact and the voice on the other end was her media liaison, a woman named Delphine whose posure had survived seventeen years of crisis management 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 bloomed 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 media 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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