My Scumbag System Chapter 546: Queen

Not running. Walking. Taking his time. Destroying everything she built in his path with the patience of someone who knew he’d reach her eventually.

Natalia’s heart hammered behind her ribs. The Cryo-Lich Ring pulsed so hard it hurt. Something hot and electric pooled in her lower stomach and she hated it. She hated that watching Satori break through her defenses turned her on. She hated that the raw physicality of him, the way his shoulders rolled with each swing and his jaw tightened when the bat struck and his dark eyes never left hers, made her thighs press together involuntarily.

This was a tournament match. National television. Twenty million viewers.

And she was wet.

Because her boyfriend was scary.

Not scary the way Julian was scary, all bluster and family money and polished armor covering a hollow center. Not scary the way Reyna was scary, professional and disciplined and technically overwhelming. Satori was scary the way a natural disaster was scary. The way a wildfire was scary. Something elemental and unchained that operated on its own logic and didn’t care about yours.

Every ice spike she threw at him died against that bat.

Every wall she raised lasted three seconds before heat and force reduced it to steam.

He kept walking.

Skylar appeared behind him. The real Skylar. Two trench knives in her fists, her body moving with that boneless grace that made her look like a ghost given a body and a grudge. Her first strike aimed for Satori’s kidney. A perfect ambush. Textbook positioning. The blade moved fast enough that Natalia barely tracked it.

Satori pivoted without looking.

His hand caught Skylar’s wrist mid-strike. Not the knife—not the weapon—the wrist itself. His fingers wrapped around those narrow bones with surgical precision, and Skylar’s eyes widened for the half-second it took her brain to register that her ambush had failed before Satori yanked her forward and him. He used her own momentum, her own body weight, her own forward commitment as a weapon, throwing her directly into the path of Isabelle’s incoming spear thrust.

The spear had been lancing toward his left shoulder from behind. A killing blow. Perfectly timed with Skylar’s attack. Isabelle had moved with that silent, regal efficiency that made her one of the most dangerous fighters in the Academy, her green-wreathed spear aimed for the gap between Satori’s shoulder blades.

But Skylar’s body was suddenly , suspended in the air between predator and prey.

Isabelle aborted the strike rather than impale her own teammate. Her spear twisted mid-thrust, the tip redirecting at the last possible instant, and in that single heartbeat of hesitation—that fraction of a second where Isabelle’s commitment to the attack wavered—Satori spun.

The bat came around in a brutal horizontal arc.

It caught Isabelle square across the midsection with a sound like thunder compressed into a baseball bat. Green wind exploded outward in a concussive burst, her Fujin barrier flaring to life and absorbing most of the kinetic energy, but the of it still launched her backward across the ice. Her feet finally touched the surface and she slid, her boots carving twin lines through Natalia’s frost as she skidded ten feet before catching herself. Her spear planted into the ice. One hand pressed against her stomach, her perfect posture finally broken.

Three seconds.

In three seconds, Satori had neutralized Skylar’s textbook ambush, weaponized her body as a human shield, forced Isabelle to abort a killing blow, and landed a clean hit on one of the best pure fighters in the Academy. He’d turned a two-pronged assault from S-Rank potentials into a humiliating defensive scramble without taking a single hit himself.

The crowd went .

The roar hit Natalia like a physical wall. Forty thousand voices screaming at once, the sound of pure, primal excitement that came from watching something that shouldn’t be possible happen anyway. The commentators were losing their minds. The camera drones swarmed like metallic vultures, desperate to capture every angle.

Natalia stood frozen.

Not from her own ice. Not from the cold that radiated from the Cryo-Lich Ring on her finger. She was frozen from the realization that she was watching someone fight at a level that in a first-year student. His body moved too fast, too cleanly, every motion economical and precise in a way that spoke to thousands of hours of brutal, bloody experience. His instincts responded too quickly—he’d caught Skylar’s wrist without , had known exactly where Isabelle would strike before the spear even moved. The way his entire body operated as a single weapon rather than a collection of limbs following a brain’s panicked instructions.

This was not a C-Rank fighter pretending to be dangerous.

This was not even an A-Rank fighter doing competent A-Rank things.

This was something . Something that scared her and aroused her in equal measure, something primal and vast and utterly uncontained that made her want to yield and devour him at the same time. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Heat pooled low in her belly. Her breath came short.

She wanted to freeze him solid. She wanted to pin him down. She wanted to make him say her name until the cameras melted and the crowd went silent and the only sound left in the arena was him gasping it against her throat.

Satori looked at her again. Still walking. Blood on his chin from a cut she didn’t remember him taking. Bat resting casually on his shoulder like a king’s scepter. His eyes locked onto hers with that dark, predatory focus that made her knees weak.

His voice carried across the platform. Low. Confident. Intimate in a way that had no business existing in front of twenty thousand spectators and forty camera drones. He said "Queen" the same way he said it in her bedroom at two in the morning when his hands were on her hips and his mouth was on her neck and she couldn’t remember her own name.

Natalia’s face burned. Her entire body burned. The Cryo-Lich Ring screamed cold against her finger but the rest of her ran hot enough to melt her own ice.

She was going to kill him. She was going to freeze every drop of moisture in a fifty-foot radius and bury him under a glacier. She was going to drag him off this platform by his collar and pin him against the nearest wall and make him say her name until his voice gave out.

After she won.

"Skylar." Natalia’s voice came out steadier than she felt. "Plan B."

Skylar picked herself off the ice and rolled her neck. A red mark shaped like Satori’s fingers circled her wrist. She looked at it. Looked at Natalia. Something passed between them that didn’t need words.

Skylar exhaled smoke. Not the wide dispersal pattern from before. A tight, focused cloud that wrapped exclusively around Satori’s head and upper body like a blindfold made of vapor. The phantasms that formed inside this cloud weren’t copies of Natalia. They were sounds. Whispers. Footsteps. The scrape of a blade on stone. False sensory data from every direction at once.

Satori stopped walking.

Natalia didn’t waste the opening. She pulled moisture from the air with both hands and channeled it through Cel’s gloves and the Ring simultaneously. Two ice serpents formed at her sides, each five feet long and thick as her thigh, their bodies translucent and crackling with the cold of deep winter. She sent them forward with a thought and they raced across the platform toward Satori, weaving around the remnants of her destroyed spike field.

Satori’s bat came alive.