Rated 4%. The lowest Guide score in history.
Cassia Veyne, the Academy's "defective" Guide, has always been its favorite disgrace — so when hero Sentinel Adrian Crowe publicly rejected their bond, nobody was even surprised.
The old Cassia would have begged. But the soul behind that face is no longer the same woman.
Fourteen years of clawing through a brutal, dying world taught her to survive on her own — and to beg no one.
So Cassia unclasped the resonance band, collected her severance pay, and walked away.
Then the Blight broke loose. And Cassia alone swallowed the corruption that even S-rank Guides couldn't purify. In that single moment, everything the world thought it knew about her was rewritten.
When the Registry re-matched her to Kael Vale, the people who once laughed at her stopped laughing for good.
The Empire's strongest SSS Sentinel. The monster they fear. The man who has rejected every Guide for years, whose madness no one has ever touched.
Everyone waited for Cassia to be rejected again.
Instead, the man who makes the whole Empire tremble takes her hand — and refuses to let go.
And Kael isn't the only one.
Four SSS-ranked monsters walk this Empire — and one by one, every single one of them is falling into orbit around the girl they called broken.
She was rated 4%. She was thrown away. She died once already.
But the woman who came back doesn't need to be chosen anymore — this time, the monsters are lining up, and she decides who stays.
