My Scumbag System Chapter 694: Cookies and Coordinates

I stood in the darkened room listening to Maki’s purring fill the space like a diesel engine someone forgot to turn off. Two blown lightbulbs. One destroyed pillowcase. Feathers still drifting through the air like the aftermath of a pillow fight in a psych ward.

Not my worst Tuesday.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I grabbed it before the vibration could wake the sleeping catastrophe buried under my spare blanket.

Three messages. Natalia. Emi. And one from a number I didn’t recognize.

Natalia’s came first: I heard something blow out in your room. If that cat destroyed my hair straightener I’m going to skin her.

I typed back: Lightbulbs. She sneezed.

Cats don’t sneeze hard enough to blow lightbulbs, Satori.

Mine does.

A pause. Then: I’m coming over in twenty minutes. You better not smell like cat.

I smelled entirely like cat. Among other things.

Emi’s message was softer, because Emi’s everything was softer: I left cookies outside your door! The pumpkin ones you said you liked. Also I noticed your energy signature is doing something weird today? Like it’s bigger? Is that normal? Should I scan you? I have my kit!!

Six exclamation marks. Peak Aoyama.

I opened the door and found a plate of cookies balanced on the threshold with a little paper napkin folded into a heart. The pumpkin ones. She remembered from a conversation three weeks ago when I’d mentioned them in passing while she was bandaging my hand after a training accident. I hadn’t even been sure she was listening. Her eyes had been locked on the wound, her healing aura washing green light across my knuckles, her lips moving through the steps of a treatment protocol she’d memorized from a textbook she kept dog-eared under her pillow.

She’d been listening. She was always listening.

I ate two cookies standing in the hallway. They were perfect. Warm center, crisp edges, exactly the right amount of spice. Emi couldn’t cook a fried egg without summoning a fire department, but her baking operated on a completely different frequency, somewhere between witchcraft and divine intervention.

The third message stopped me mid-chew.

Unknown number. No greeting. No signature. Just coordinates and a single line of text:

Gate formation detected. Sector 12. Unregistered. 72 hours to stabilization. This is not your father’s work.

The cookie turned to paste in my mouth.

I leaned against the doorframe and read the message four more times. Sector 12 was residential. Upper middle class. Families. Kids. The kind of neighborhood where people argued about lawn care and school board meetings and whether the new coffee shop was overpriced. Not the kind of place where Gates typically spawned, because Gate formation patterns followed ley line concentrations that mapped almost exclusively to industrial or geological fault areas.

Almost exclusively.

Someone was manufacturing Gates. Someone who wasn’t my father. Someone who wanted me to know about it.

The unknown number had provided information twice before and been correct both times. Helena Vasquez. The pier meeting. Both tips had led somewhere real and dangerous and ultimately useful, even when the path to get there tried to kill me.

I forwarded the coordinates to Nel.

Nel’s response came wrapped in the particular flavor of cosmic irritation that meant I’d interrupted something entertaining: Checking. The coordinates correspond to a residential block in the Meridian Heights district. VHC sensors show no registered Gate activity in that sector. However, I’m detecting trace concentrations of trans-dimensional particles at approximately 0.3 parts per million above ambient baseline. That’s consistent with pre-formation buildup approximately sixty to seventy-two hours before manifestation.

So the anonymous tip was accurate. A Gate was forming in a residential neighborhood, and nobody in the VHC’s monitoring network had flagged it yet.

Nel. The message says this isn’t my father’s work.

Noted. The implication being that someone else has learned to create artificial Gates. Or that someone has acquired your father’s research and is applying it independently.

Or that the entity itself was accelerating its timeline.

Or that the Remnant, the woman wearing my mother’s face from a timeline where she said yes instead of no, had decided to stop providing information and start taking direct action.

None of these options sat well in my stomach alongside Emi’s cookies.

I closed the door and crossed to where Bartholomew inched along the inside of his terrarium. The immortal snail regarded me with the unblinking serenity of a creature that would outlast civilizations. I envied him. Bartholomew never received cryptic text messages from interdimensional informants. Bartholomew never had to decide whether an unregistered Gate in a family neighborhood was bait, test, or warning. Bartholomew ate lettuce and traversed glass walls and existed in perfect, immortal simplicity.

"Any advice?" I asked him.

Bartholomew ate lettuce.

"Helpful. Thanks."

I pulled up the datapad Braxton had given me with the B-Rank Gate parameters for our upcoming guild operation. Cross-referenced the location. Our assigned Gate sat in the industrial district, Sector 7, a good fifteen miles from the Sector 12 coordinates. Two separate Gates. Two separate problems. The B-Rank in Sector 7 was registered, documented, and contracted to the Onyx Hounds. The one forming in Sector 12 existed nowhere in any official system.

If I reported the Sector 12 Gate to Braxton, the VHC would dispatch a response team. Standard protocol. Professional Hunters would handle it. Civilians would be evacuated. Everything would proceed according to the playbook that had kept Valoria functioning for twenty-five years.

And I would lose any chance of discovering who was creating it and why.

Because the VHC’s response to unregistered Gates was containment first, investigation never. They’d clear the monsters, seal the breach, classify the incident, and bury the report under seventeen layers of bureaucratic concrete. I’d seen how they handled the Necropolis Anomaly and the Black Gate. Cover stories. Redacted files. Seraphina’s people turning inconvenient truths into convenient fiction with the practiced ease of a government that had been lying to its citizens since the Rupture.

If someone was manufacturing Gates, the VHC didn’t want to know about it. Because knowing meant admitting the possibility. And admitting the possibility meant acknowledging that Gates weren’t natural phenomena but engineered systems that could be replicated, manipulated, and weaponized.

The same truth my father died protecting.

I sat on the edge of my bed, careful not to disturb Maki’s blanketed form, and pulled up a map of the city on my phone. Meridian Heights was a thirty-minute drive from the Academy. Forty minutes from Onyx House during peak traffic. The coordinates pointed to a specific intersection, which meant whoever sent the message knew exactly where the Gate would form before it manifested.

Not a prediction. Not a guess. Prior knowledge.

Which meant involvement.

I saved the coordinates and encrypted the message thread. Then I opened a new conversation with the one person whose tactical mind I trusted more than my own.

Natalia picked up before the second ring.

"You said twenty minutes." Her voice carried the particular edge that meant she was already halfway through getting dressed. "I’m coming over in twelve."