My Scumbag System Chapter 689: The Part I Can’t Get Past

"Natalia was outside the whole time."

"You went alone into the chamber, dumbass. Nobody with you. Nobody who could pull you out." Her voice didn’t rise. It got quieter, which was worse. "You do that a lot. You throw yourself at the thing and then you look surprised when the people who care about you want to kill you for it."

"I didn’t have a choice."

"You had six." She held up her fingers and counted them off with the disgust of a woman filing a complaint. "Kuzmina. Aoyama. Vance. Miyamoto. Cabana. Me."

"Skylar."

"You had six people who would have walked into a bunker with you and sat on the floor for two days holding your hand like idiots, and you picked the option where if it went wrong you’d die alone in a concrete room in a mountain." She grabbed the front of my shirt. Her knuckles went white. "That’s the part I can’t get past. Not the cosmic horror. Not the science experiment. The part where you still think you have to do it by yourself."

I looked at her.

She was five foot three and built like a hand grenade with a haircut, and she’d spent her whole life around rockstars and sycophants and people who wanted her father’s name in their mouth, and she’d built herself a personality out of razor wire specifically so nobody could get close enough to disappoint her.

And she was standing here with a fist in my shirt telling me off because I hadn’t asked her to come.

"I’ll do better," I said.

"You’ll say you’ll do better and then you’ll do the exact same thing next month."

"Probably."

"See, this is the problem." Her mouth twitched. She hated that it twitched. "You’re honest at the worst possible times."

"It’s a curse."

"It’s a strategy." She pulled me down by the shirt and kissed me.

It was not gentle. Skylar Amane did not do gentle. Her teeth found my lower lip and set them, hard enough to sting, and her free hand came up to fist in my hair, and the Nectar bloomed between us like a flare going off underwater. She made a sound against my mouth she’d deny to her grave. Her whole body shuddered once, head to heel, and her nails scraped across my scalp.

When she broke off she was breathing through her mouth, and the flush had climbed all the way from her collarbones to her ears, and her violet eyes had gone unfocused and enormous.

"That’s different," she said hoarsely.

"What is?"

"That." She touched two fingers to her own lips like she was checking for damage. "It’s stronger. Whatever you did in that bunker made it stronger. That felt like getting hit by a train made of. of."

"Of?"

"I’m not finishing that sentence. Ever." She let go of my shirt and shoved me back a step and turned away to fix her hair with a violence that was doing no favors to her hair. "God, I hate you."

"You’ve mentioned."

"I’m coming on the Gate run."

"You are."

"I wasn’t asking."

"I know. I already had you penciled in as the roamer."

She stopped. Turned her head, one eye visible past the curtain of indigo. "You penciled me in before you asked."

"You’re the best scout in the guild and you fight dirtier than anyone except Natalia. Of course you were penciled in."

Skylar Amane looked at me for three full seconds. Then she pulled her hood up over her head, jammed her hands in her pockets, and walked past me into the house.

"Whatever," she said. "Don’t die and I’ll consider not stabbing you."

Nel said, "That was the closest thing to a love confession she is biologically capable of producing."

I’m aware.

Soomin was in the garden behind the house, sitting cross-legged in the grass with her sketchbook on her knees, and she nearly launched it into the pine trees when my shadow fell across the page.

"Oh! Satori-san, I didn’t, I mean I didn’t hear you, sorry, I was drawing and I get very focused when I’m drawing and my mother says I could sleep through a Gate break which is probably not a good quality for a Hunter to have?"

"Breathe, Soomin."

"Right. Breathing. Yes." She breathed. She was wearing a pale cardigan two sizes too large with the sleeves pushed to her forearms, and sakura-pink hair falling out of low twin tails, and she’d gone from white to red in the space of one heartbeat. "You’re back."

"I’m back."

"Everyone was scared." She hugged the sketchbook to her chest, which did unfortunate things to the front of the cardigan and which she was entirely unaware of, and which I noticed with the professionalism of a man who notices things. "The Fox kept saying you were doing something stupid and it wouldn’t stop pacing in my head and I got maybe four hours of sleep across two days and Emi kept giving me cookies."

"How’s the Fox now?"

Her gradient-blue eyes flickered. Gold bled in at the edges like ink through water, and the temperature in the little garden climbed three degrees.

"Awake," said a voice that was not Soomin’s. Lower. Warmer. A purr with teeth in it. "You smell like a thunderhead and something very old, Master. You went and got yourself upgraded."

"Something like that."

"I approve." Two ghost-white tails uncurled behind her, flickering with pale flame, and she rose onto her knees and leaned into my space with her head tilted like she was deciding where to bite. "You feel like you could actually keep up with me now. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for that?"

"Down."

"Make me."

"Soomin," I said.

The gold guttered out. The tails vanished. Soomin sat back on her heels with her hands over her face and made a small strangled noise into her palms.

"I’m so sorry."

"Don’t be."

"She’s very rude."

"She’s honest. There’s a difference nobody appreciates."

Soomin lowered her hands enough to peek over her fingertips. Her whole face was the color of her hair. "Are you going into the Gate? Isabelle said there’s a contract."

"Three days. B-Rank."

"Can I come?" It came out fast, all in one breath, like she had to get it out before her nerve went. "I know I froze in the Necropolis and I know the Fox is hard to control and I know I’m not as strong as Natalia-san or Isabelle-san but I’ve been practicing the breathing thing you taught me and I can hold the partial transformation for almost four minutes now without her taking over and I want to be useful. Please."

Kaelen would have said no. Kaelen would have looked at a girl with a nine-tailed monster in her chest and a stamina cap of fifteen minutes and made the cold call.

I said, "You’re my scout. Sensory net. Nobody in the pack sees what you see."

Soomin’s face did something I wasn’t prepared for. It crumpled and rebuilt itself into the brightest thing in the garden.

"I won’t let you down."

"I know."