My Scumbag System Chapter 635: What Do You Intend To Do?

No preamble. No small talk. No offer of tea or refreshments or the polite verbal fencing that people in power used to establish hierarchy before getting to the point. She went straight for the jugular with the same serene expression she probably wore when signing budgets.

I let the silence stretch for three heartbeats. Four. Five.

She’d killed the cameras. She’d emptied the floor. She’d arranged a private meeting at the highest point in the entire country, a location where no one could eavesdrop and no recording could exist, and her first question was about a man who’d been erased from history eighteen years ago.

Seraphina Vance didn’t want a conversation.

She wanted a confession.

"Which version do you want?" I said, keeping my voice level. "The official one, where he was a mid-level researcher who died in a Gate accident? Or the real one?"

"I’ve read the official version." She clasped her hands behind her back. The gesture was casual. Everything about Seraphina Vance looked casual. That was the danger. "I found it insufficient."

"Join the club."

"Dr. Kenji Nakano was not a mid-level researcher. He was a pioneer in trans-dimensional energy theory who worked alongside my grandfather, Dr. Aris Vance, developing the foundational models upon which our entire understanding of Gates and Aspects is built. His contributions were systematically removed from the public record approximately eighteen years ago, coinciding with the termination of a classified project designated Prometheus." She recited this without inflection, without notes, without breaking eye contact. "His son, raised as a Zero in one of New Vein’s most economically disadvantaged districts, manifested an Aspect at seventeen. Six months later, that son won a national tournament, killed an A-Rank entity, survived a Black Gate, and attracted the romantic attention of my sister. I find these coincidences insufficient."

The pendant pulsed against my chest. Warm. Steady. Natalia was there, listening through our bond, three hundred miles of ocean between us and it didn’t matter because our souls were stitched together in ways that physics couldn’t explain.

"So you know about Prometheus."

"I know it existed. I know it was funded. I know it was terminated." She paused. "I also know that someone has been systematically accessing classified files related to the project for the past three months, and that a former colleague of your father’s recently provided you with documentation that my organization has spent nearly two decades ensuring did not exist."

Finch. She knew about Finch. Of course she did.

"Let me save us both some time," I said. I reached into my jacket.

Seraphina didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. Her eyes tracked my hand the way a hawk tracks a mouse, but the rest of her body remained perfectly still.

I pulled out the folder and set it on the nearest surface, a glass display case that normally held some historical artifact but was currently empty. The thirteen pages sat there between us like a grenade with the pin half-pulled.

"That contains the original research proposal for Project Prometheus," I said. "Written by Kenji Nakano. Countersigned by Alistair Finch. Authorized for funding by the Valorian Hunter Commission." I watched her face. Nothing moved. Not a muscle. Not a nerve. "It proves that your organization didn’t just know about artificial Aspect manifestation. You funded it. You supervised it. And when people started dying during the human trials, you buried the entire project and erased my father from existence."

The observation deck was so quiet I could hear the building’s structural support humming sixty floors below.

"Interesting," Seraphina said.

That was it. One word. Seven letters. Delivered with the same tone someone might use to describe a mildly entertaining documentary.

"I was expecting more of a reaction," I admitted.

"Were you expecting me to deny it?"

"Most people in your position would."

"I am not most people, Mr. Nakano." She walked toward the folder. Her fingers hovered above the manila surface without touching it. "The question is not whether this documentation is authentic. I suspect it is. Dr. Finch was many things, but a forger was not among them." Her eyes lifted from the folder to my face. "The question is what you intend to do with it."

And there it was. The real conversation. Not the facts. Not the history. Not the long, ugly chain of decisions that led from a classified research lab to a dead boy’s body to a cosmic soul transplant to me standing in a suit that cost more than my childhood apartment, holding leverage over the most powerful woman on the continent.

What do you intend to do with it.

I’d thought about this. Lay awake thinking about it while Reyna slept against my shoulder and the pendant burned cold and Maki snored in cat form on the pillow above my head. I’d run the scenarios with Nel. Calculated the angles. Mapped out the probable responses and counter-responses and counter-counter-responses until my brain felt like a pretzel that someone had dipped in anxiety and deep-fried in paranoia.

Every calculation led to the same conclusion.

"Nothing," I said.

Seraphina’s eyebrow moved approximately one millimeter. For her, this was equivalent to a full-body flinch.

"Nothing?"

"I didn’t come here to blackmail you, Madam President. If I wanted to burn the VHC to the ground, I could have released those documents to every news outlet in Valoria three days ago. Akari Miyamoto would have had them trending on seven platforms within the hour. The betting pools alone would have funded my retirement."

"Then why bring them?"

"Because I needed you to know that I have them. And I needed you to understand that the fact I haven’t used them isn’t because I’m too stupid to recognize their value." I held her gaze. Those pale blue eyes stared back at me from a face that betrayed nothing, reflected nothing, offered nothing. "It’s because I want something more valuable than destruction."

"And what would that be?"

"Answers."