My Scumbag System Chapter 686: The Stray Dog’s Command

"I’m listening."

"There’s a Gate opening in three days. B-Rank. Standard blue. The kind of thing a good team can clear without too much trouble." He pulled a datapad off the rack and tossed it to me. I caught it out of the air. "The Onyx Hounds have been offered the contract. First official guild operation. Real stakes. Real money. Real danger."

I scrolled through the briefing. Gate parameters. Monster composition. The usual.

"And?"

"And I want you leading it. Not me. You." He turned back to face me. "The VHC’s watching. The other guilds are watching. Everyone wants to see whether the Onyx Hounds are a fluke or the real thing. Whether the Stray Dog is a media stunt or an actual Hunter." His eyes glinted. "I think you’re the real thing. Now I need you to prove it. In the field. With your team’s lives on the line."

The datapad felt heavier in my hand than it should have.

This was it. The next move. The next piece on the board.

A B-Rank Gate. My team. My pack. Natalia and Emi and Skylar and Soomin and all the other beautiful, broken weapons I’d spent months gathering and sharpening and reforging into something loyal, something mine. Every one of them a queen in her own right, and every one of them mine to command.

And somewhere out there, past the walls of this ugly little concrete room, an entity that had engineered my very existence was watching the show. Seraphina Vance was watching, her crystalline gaze tracing the machinery of fate. A Remnant clawed loose from another timeline was watching. Julian Valerius was somewhere across the campus nursing his broken hand and his shattered pride, plotting whatever a spoiled prince plots when the world stops bowing. My father was hiding in some mountain cabin, patient as a stone, waiting for me to make the single choice that would tip over every domino in his careful little conspiracy.

Everyone was watching.

Good.

Let them watch.

"When do we leave?"

Braxton’s mouth twitched at the corner. Almost a smile. The most genuine emotion I’d ever managed to drag out of the man.

"Three days. Get your team ready." He turned away, already dismissing me, already reaching for the flask I knew he kept tucked behind the ration packs in the equipment locker. "And Nakano."

"Yeah?"

"Whatever you are now. Whatever it was you did to get this strong, this fast." He didn’t look back at me, kept his tired eyes fixed on some middle distance only he could see. "Don’t let it turn you into something your people can’t follow. Strength’s easy. Cheapest thing in the world. Anybody can get strong if they’re willing to pay enough, bleed enough, sell enough of themselves off piece by piece. Leadership’s the hard part. Being strong and still being someone worth walking into a Gate for. Someone worth dying for." He unscrewed the flask with a lazy twist of his wrist. "That’s the only thing that actually matters, kid. The rest is just noise. Static. Applause from people who won’t be there when it goes wrong."

He took a long, slow drink.

I left him there in his scarred concrete chamber, alone with his cheap whiskey and his bone-deep exhaustion and his tired, hard-won wisdom, and I walked back out into the hallway where the frost from Natalia’s earlier display had finally melted off the walls, leaving nothing but damp streaks and the faint mineral smell of ice.

Natalia was waiting on the observation deck, exactly like she’d promised. She turned the instant she heard my footsteps on the metal stairs, those sharp violet eyes finding my face and reading it the way she read everything about me now—every microexpression, every shift in my shoulders, every secret I thought I was still keeping.

"Well?"

"We’ve got a Gate." I tossed her the datapad. She snatched it out of the air, thumb already flicking across the screen, her gaze devouring the briefing in seconds. "B-Rank. First official guild op. Braxton wants me leading."

"Of course he does." She handed the datapad back. Her expression had shifted into that focused sharpness she got when there was a problem to solve, a plan to build, a variable to control. "Three days isn’t much time to prep the whole pack."

"It’s enough. We’re better than we were. All of us."

"We’ll need to run formation drills. Test the new members. Figure out how your integration changes the way you fight in the field." She was already listing, already planning, already ten steps ahead. That gorgeous, terrifying mind of hers spinning through contingencies. "And we’ll need to be careful. The VHC’s watching. Everyone’s watching."

"Let them watch."

She looked at me. And under the planning, under the sharpness, I saw it. The fear she kept buried. The love she wielded like a weapon. The woman who’d torn reality apart to keep me breathing and then decided she wanted to build a life inside all this chaos anyway.

"You’re going to do something reckless," she said. Not a question.

"Probably."

"And I’m going to be right there beside you when you do."

"I’m counting on it, Queen."

She stepped into me. Pressed her forehead against mine. Cold and warm all at once, the ice and the fire that was Natalia Kuzmina, my first pillar, my keystone, the foundation of everything I was building.

"Then let’s go show them," she murmured, "exactly what the Stray Dog and his court can do."

And through the window of the observation deck, past the Academy grounds and the training wings and the whole sprawling machine of a world that wanted to use me or study me or kill me, the sun was climbing toward noon.

Three days.

One Gate.

An empire waiting to be built.

I’d survived death, gods, cosmic horrors, and my own father’s ambition. I’d gathered a court of women who loved me and feared me and would burn the world at my word. I’d taken a fragment of the universe’s deepest secret and woven it into myself without losing who I was.

Let them watch.

The show was just getting started.