My Scumbag System Chapter 489: Bring Your Ego

Reyna sat cross-legged on her dorm room floor, laptop balanced precariously on her knees, replaying the Crucible fight for what had to be the seventh time since midnight had come and gone. The soft glow of the screen cast flickering shadows across her face as the footage looped, the timestamp in the corner marking each viewing like some kind of obsessive ritual she couldn’t quite break.

Her ribs still ached where Satori’s bat had connected—a deep, persistent throb that radiated outward with each breath. Emi’s healing had done its job perfectly: mended the fractured bone, stopped the internal bleeding, repositioned everything back where anatomy textbooks said it belonged. The medical scan had come back clean, showing nothing but perfectly healed tissue. But pain had memory, stubborn and insistent, and hers remembered with crystal clarity what it felt like to get hit by someone who, by all rights and reasonable expectations, shouldn’t have been able to lay a finger on her.

She watched herself launch the opening barrage for the dozenth time. Watched her marionettes surge forward in perfect formation, crackling with lethal voltage. Watched Satori stand there in the center of it all, completely and utterly still, while her constructs of pure lightning charged toward him like avenging angels made of electricity and wrath.

Then watched him absorb the lightning like it was nothing more than a light summer rain.

That moment. Right there, frozen on her screen. That’s when she’d known something was fundamentally wrong with the entire situation.

The angle of his head had been deliberate. The way his stance had shifted—subtle but unmistakable to someone who’d spent years studying combat footage. The absolute, bone-deep confidence written across his expression like he was following a script only he could read.

He’d been waiting for it.

Had waited for it.

"Pinche cabrón," she muttered under her breath, fingers flying across the keyboard with the kind of manic energy that came from too much coffee and too little sleep. She backed up the footage, slowed it down frame by agonizing frame until each second of movement stretched into a small eternity.

There.

Right there.

The split second before her marionettes made contact, his entire body language had changed. Shoulders squared just so. Weight shifted onto the balls of his feet. Jaw set with the kind of resolve you saw in fighters who knew exactly what was about to happen and had already made peace with it.

Like an actor standing in the wings, waiting patiently for his cue to step into the spotlight.

"You knew," she said aloud to the empty room, her voice echoing slightly off the walls. "Somehow you knew exactly what I was going to do before I even fucking did it."

Her phone buzzed insistently on the floor beside her, the vibration loud against the hardwood. She glanced at the screen. Takamura this time, the message characteristically blunt.

She closed the laptop with perhaps more force than strictly necessary, pulled on her Scarlet Phantoms jacket—crimson and black, with the Olympus Rising logo embroidered in shimmering gold thread across the back—and headed downstairs, her bare feet silent against the cool floor of the dormitory hallway.

The Scarlet Phantoms’ common room looked like someone had been given an unlimited budget to recreate a professional gym inside a high-end sports bar, then abruptly run out of both money and interest halfway through the project. Heavy-duty weight equipment dominated one entire side of the space—barbells, benching stations, a power rack that looked capable of handling small vehicles. The other wall was claimed by a massive screen that currently displayed a frozen frame from the Crucible match: Satori’s face captured in perfect high-definition detail right before impact, blood streaking his jaw in a vivid crimson line, his dark eyes blazing with something that looked disturbingly close to pure, undiluted joy.

Diego Ramos had sprawled across the main couch like a territorial cat, his ash-blond hair sticking up in what had to be at least seventeen different directions, each one defying gravity in its own unique way. Kira Tanaka perched on the arm of the same couch with the poised balance of a bird of prey, her shadow manipulation Aspect making the darkness pooling around her seem somehow deeper and more substantial than it had any right to be—as if the shadows themselves were drawn to her presence.

Leo Vargas leaned against the far wall with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, wearing the particular expression of someone who’d been explicitly asked to care about something and was still running the internal calculations on whether the required emotional investment was actually worth the energy expenditure.

Professor Takamura commanded the room's central seat as if it were a throne secured through a duel to the death, the scars on his face contorting into a wide grin that hinted at impending violence and seemed to savor the thought all too much.

"There's our prized combatant," he announced with forced cheerfulness as Reyna entered, sweeping a massive hand towards the frozen image on the display. "Fancy a viewing of your most glorious moments on the grand screen? I've set the part where you ingested concrete to repeat endlessly. Truly artistic. It perfectly encapsulates the event."

"I'll politely decline, thank you." Reyna settled onto the opposing sofa with affected nonchalance, tucking her legs beneath her. "What is this about?"

"Tournament tactics," Takamura stated, his grin somehow expanding further. "Which we absolutely must strategize because the infernal Onyx Hounds are currently dominating the leaderboard at first place. This means every other guild within this entire academy will be targeting them with their full might."

"And we must confront them directly to usurp their top position," Diego interjected, shifting from his languid posture to a more upright stance. His characteristic easy-going attitude had been replaced by a sharpened focus. "The standings are accurate, Rey. They've navigated two distinct A-Rank encounters without sustaining any casualties, conquered a damn Black Gate when most first-year students would be obliterated within five minutes, and their top prodigy just concluded a bout with our top prodigy that many observers are labeling as a draw."

"He fought me to a stalemate," Reyna corrected with a pointed edge, the nuance feeling critically significant. "There's a substantial divergence between those two outcomes."