My Scumbag System Chapter 683: The Weight of a King’s Entourage

Natalia looked at me like she wanted to either kiss me or throw me through a wall. Sometimes both. The line between those two impulses had gotten dangerously thin over the past six months.

"For now," she repeated. She wasn’t satisfied with that answer. Natalia was never satisfied with an answer that involved uncertainty. Her entire personality was built around control, around planning, around knowing every variable before she made a move. And here I was, telling her the biggest variable in our lives was a cosmic surveillance state that could crush us on a whim.

"I got another hour before the next thing on my schedule," I said. "Braxton wants to see me. Something about integration testing that isn’t the VHC kind."

"He knows?"

"He suspects. Which for Braxton is basically the same thing."

We walked back through the Academy’s guts, past the energy-dampening wards that hummed like sleeping hornets, past the reinforced steel bulkheads scarred with the black burn-marks of a hundred failed containment drills, up toward the levels where actual sunlight was allowed to exist. Natalia kept close to my side as the corridors brightened. Not clinging. Natalia didn’t cling; the very concept was beneath her, an act reserved for lesser girls who lacked her poise. But present. A cold weight against my arm, the chill of her Aspect bleeding through her uniform blazer, a constant reminder that she was there, she was mine, and she would freeze the marrow in someone’s bones if they so much as looked at me wrong.

The thing about walking through the Academy with Natalia Kuzmina was that people noticed. They always noticed. She had that quality, that gravity, that made an entire hallway go quiet without her saying a single word. Students pressed themselves against the walls to give us room, clutching their datapads and their monster-core samples like they were afraid we’d take those too. Whispers followed us like a tide pulling out from shore.

Stray Dog and the Ice Queen.

I could get used to that. I really could.

"You’re smiling like an idiot," Natalia said, not bothering to look at me.

"I’m enjoying the attention."

"Of course you are."

"You love it too. Don’t lie. I can feel it through the bond, remember?"

She didn’t argue. Her chin lifted a fraction, that little imperious tilt she thought I hadn’t catalogued months ago. That was answer enough.

We turned a corner near the eastern stairwell and nearly collided with a wall of pink hair and pure, radiating nervous energy.

Soomin.

She yelped. Actually yelped, this small startled sound like a kicked puppy that had just been stepped on for good measure, and then her face went through about six different emotions in rapid succession—surprise, recognition, relief, embarrassment, more relief—before finally settling on something caught halfway between joy and terror.

Her hair was the same soft sakura pink it always was, falling loose around her shoulders today instead of her usual pigtails, framing a face that belonged on a shrine maiden painting, all delicate curves and gentle softness.

Big eyes that shifted from that shallow-sea blue to gold at the very edges when the Fox stirred somewhere underneath her skin, waking up at the sight of me. She had a stack of thick textbooks clutched against her chest like a shield, or maybe like a barrier between herself and the rest of the world she was still too timid to face head-on.

"Satori-oppa!" The books nearly tumbled from her grasp. She caught them against her body at the last second, pressing them tight, which did several very interesting things to the front of her uniform blouse, straining the fabric in ways that made me file the image away for later—for a time when Natalia wasn’t standing three feet away and radiating a cold that could frost the windows.

"You’re back! You—you disappeared, and nobody knew where you went, and the Fox kept saying you were doing something dangerous, saying it over and over until I couldn’t sleep, and I got so worried, and then Emi got worried too because I couldn’t stop talking about it, and then even Skylar got quiet which is really scary because Skylar never gets quiet, she just says something mean and then eats her cake, and—"

"Soomin. Breathe."

She breathed. Her chest rose and fell. I appreciated that too.

Natalia’s grip on my arm tightened by a fraction. Just enough to say she noticed where my eyes had gone. Just enough to promise consequences.

"I’m fine," I said. "Better than fine. I was handling some family business."

"Your father?" Soomin’s eyes went wide. She was one of the few who knew even a fragment of that story. "Is he—did you find—"

"It’s complicated. I’ll explain later. When we’ve got more time and fewer ears."

She nodded fast, the way she did everything when she was flustered. Her tail flickered into visibility for half a second, a ghost of white fur, before she caught herself and it faded. The Fox stirring. Reacting to me the way it always did, with that hungry territorial interest that Soomin herself was too shy to voice.

"The Fox says you smell different," Soomin blurted, and then immediately looked like she wanted the floor to swallow her. "That’s—I didn’t mean—that came out weird. You smell like, um. Like a storm. Like something old. The Fox likes it. I mean. I’m not saying I—"

"Soomin."

"Yes?"

"You’re adorable when you panic."

The pink of her hair had nothing on the pink of her face. She made a strangled sound and hid behind her textbooks entirely, only her wide gold-flecked eyes peeking over the top.

Natalia sighed. The kind of sigh that carried the weight of a woman who had decided, a long time ago, that her boyfriend was a menace and there was nothing she could do about it.

"We have somewhere to be," she said to Soomin, not unkindly. Natalia had softened toward the pack over the months. Not much. But enough. "Walk with us. You can tell us what’s happened while we were gone."

Soomin fell into step on my other side, which meant I was now sandwiched between the Ice Queen and a fox girl who kept sneaking glances at me and then looking away whenever I caught her. It was a lot of feminine attention for a Tuesday morning. I bore the burden with grace.

Okay. I bore it with a smug grin that Natalia kept threatening to slap off my face.

"So," I said. "What did I miss?"