My Scumbag System Chapter 637: An Excellent Question

The word "deal" hung in the air between us like a grenade with the pin already pulled. I kept my face neutral, but inside my head, alarm bells were screaming loud enough to wake the dead.

Seraphina Vance wanted to make a deal. With me. The woman who could see probability chains stretching into infinity, who had spent twenty-five years building an empire on the corpses of anyone stupid enough to challenge her, who viewed human beings as chess pieces to be sacrificed for the greater good of her perfect, orderly garden.

She wanted to negotiate.

Which meant I had something she needed.

Which meant I was either about to become very powerful or very dead.

Natalia’s voice sliced through the bond, sharp with worry.

I knew that. Of course I knew that. But the thing about being useful to someone like Seraphina Vance was that useful people tended to live longer than useless ones. At least until they stopped being useful.

"I’m listening," I said.

Seraphina moved away from the window and walked toward a small bar set into the far wall of the observation deck. Crystal decanters caught the city lights and scattered them across the polished floor like fallen stars. She poured two glasses of something amber and expensive without asking if I wanted one.

"The documentation you carry is dangerous," she said, her back still to me. "Not because it threatens the VHC specifically, though it certainly does. Not because it would cause social upheaval, though that consequence is inevitable. It is dangerous because it is incomplete."

She turned and extended one glass toward me. I took it but didn’t drink. Neither did she.

"Incomplete how?"

"Your father’s research documented the mechanism of artificial Aspect manifestation. The theoretical framework. The energy requirements. The psychological architecture necessary to serve as a filter for trans-dimensional consciousness." She swirled the liquid in her glass, watching the way light moved through it. "What it does not document is the source."

"The source of what?"

"The consciousness that was transferred into you, Mr. Nakano."

The observation deck suddenly felt ten degrees colder.

"Finch mentioned that," I said carefully. "He said my father never revealed where he planned to find a suitable source. Assumed he was still working on it when he disappeared."

"Finch is either lying or genuinely ignorant. I suspect the latter, given his personality profile." Seraphina’s pale eyes fixed on mine. "Your father did find a source. He documented the acquisition process in a separate file that was never included in the materials given to the VHC. A file that was removed from his personal laboratory approximately three days before his disappearance."

"Removed by whom?"

"That is an excellent question." She lifted the crystal glass to her lips, taking the smallest, most measured sip—the kind of drink that was more performance than consumption, a punctuation mark on her statement. "One that I have spent considerable personal resources, political capital, and more than a few favors attempting to answer over the course of the past eighteen years."

I processed this information with the same meticulous care I’d use disarming a live explosive, keeping my expression carefully neutral and my body language unrevealing.

Seraphina Vance was telling me, in her characteristically precise way, that someone had orchestrated the theft of critical, world-altering research from my father’s private laboratory before he vanished from the face of the earth. Not just anyone.

Someone who knew exactly what documentation to target and precisely when to strike. Someone who understood the full scope and terrifying implications of Project Prometheus in a way that even the all-knowing, all-seeing Valorian Hunter Commission apparently did not.

Someone who had been operating in the shadows for nearly two decades while the rest of the world remained blissfully ignorant.

"You’re saying there’s a third party. An unknown player on the board."

"I am saying that your father’s groundbreaking work attracted the focused attention of entities well beyond the considerable reach of the Valorian Hunter Commission." Seraphina set her still-untouched glass down on the polished surface of the bar with a soft, definitive .

The crystal caught the ambient light, refracting it into tiny rainbows across the dark wood.

"Entities that have continued to monitor the situation with remarkable patience and discipline for nearly two decades. Entities that, based on very recent and deeply troubling intelligence gathered by my Insight Division, appear to have taken a renewed and active interest in you specifically, Mr. Nakano."

The pendant against my chest flared with sudden, searing heat. Natalia’s terror surged through our bond like a bucket of ice water dumped directly into my bloodstream, shocking my system with the raw intensity of her fear.

her mental voice cut through the connection, sharp and urgent.

"The theft from Dr. Finch’s personal safe," I said aloud, connecting the threads she’d deliberately laid out for me to follow. "That was them. The same unknown third party."

"That operation was most likely orchestrated by them, yes." Seraphina’s pale blue eyes remained fixed on mine, her expression as serene and unreadable as a death mask carved from flawless marble.

"Though I must be transparent: I cannot definitively confirm the specific identity of the perpetrators with the evidence currently available to me. What I can confirm, based on forensic analysis of the scene and cross-referenced intelligence reports, is that whoever successfully infiltrated Dr. Finch’s safeguards and stole those classified files now possesses nearly complete documentation of the Prometheus Protocol’s theoretical framework and technical specifications. The methodology. The energy conversion calculations. The neural template mapping process."

She paused, and that pause felt weighted with significance. "The only critical piece of the puzzle they currently lack is the source acquisition file. The specific documentation detailing how your father obtained the consciousness that would eventually be transferred into you. The file that your father personally removed from his laboratory approximately three days before his permanent disappearance from all known records."

"And you think my father still has it."

"I think your father hid it somewhere before he vanished. I think he intended for it to remain hidden until certain conditions were met. And I think those conditions may involve you directly."

I stared at her. The woman who controlled Valoria with an iron fist wrapped in silk and deception. The woman who had admitted, just minutes ago, that the entire world order was built on a lie. The woman who should have been my enemy in every possible configuration of this situation.

She was offering me information. Real information. Information that could get her killed if the wrong people found out she’d shared it.

"Why are you telling me this?"

Seraphina smiled. It was the first genuine expression I’d seen on her face, and it terrified me more than anything else she’d done all evening.

"Because you are going to help me find that file, Mr. Nakano."

The observation deck went quiet. Even the distant hum of the city below seemed to fade, leaving nothing but the soft pulse of the pendant against my chest and the steady rhythm of my own heartbeat.

"And why would I do that?"