My Scumbag System Chapter 695: Your Problems Are My Problems

"Something came up."

"Something always comes up with you. That’s the problem."

"New Gate. Unregistered. Sector 12. Residential district. Seventy-two hours to formation."

Silence. Not the angry kind. The processing kind. I could almost hear the gears of her mind engaging, sorting variables and mapping contingencies the way she always did when tactical reality overrode emotional priority.

"How do you know?" she asked.

"Same source as Helena. Same source as the pier."

"The anonymous tipster who knows everything about you and your father and has access to classified VHC intelligence."

"That’s the one."

"And you trust this information."

"They’ve been right twice. The math favors a pattern over coincidence."

Another silence. Shorter this time. "Sector 12 is families. Schools. A community center with a daycare."

"I know."

"If a Gate manifests in a residential zone without advance warning, evacuation protocols require a minimum of four hours to clear a six-block radius. The VHC’s fastest response time for unregistered formations is ninety minutes from detection to boots on ground. That leaves a gap of at least five hours where approximately nine thousand civilians are sitting directly on top of an active dimensional breach."

Natalia Kuzmina, everyone. My girlfriend turned the apocalypse into a word problem and solved it before most people finished reading the question.

"You want to handle it ourselves," she said. Not a question.

"I want to be there when it opens. I want to see what comes out. And I want to trace whoever put it there, because the message said this isn’t my father’s work."

"Meaning someone else has figured out how to create Gates."

"Or someone stole the research and decided to field-test it."

"The files from Finch’s safe."

"The files from Finch’s safe."

I heard the soft click of her Cryo-Lich Ring against her phone. She did that when she was thinking, tapping the artifact against whatever surface was closest, letting the cold steady her pulse and focus her thoughts. I’d learned to read the rhythm of those taps the way other people read facial expressions. Fast taps meant anger. Slow taps meant calculation. The current rhythm was medium and consistent.

She was building a plan.

"We have the B-Rank in three days," Natalia said. "Braxton’s contract. The official guild run. That’s our priority and our cover. If we divert resources to Sector 12 before completing the contracted operation, Braxton reports us, the VHC investigates, and everything we’ve built collapses under scrutiny we can’t afford."

"Which means we handle the B-Rank first. Then Sector 12."

"The formation window overlaps. If the B-Rank runs long, the Sector 12 Gate stabilizes before we can get there."

"Then the B-Rank doesn’t run long."

"You’re proposing we speedrun an official guild contract through a B-Rank Gate so we can moonlight as unauthorized investigators of an unregistered dimensional breach in a family neighborhood."

"When you phrase it like that it sounds irresponsible."

"It is irresponsible."

"So?"

The tapping stopped. "I’ll have a formation plan ready by morning. Alpha team composition. We go hard, we go fast, we clear the dungeon in under four hours and extract before the VHC’s monitoring reports our completion time as anomalous."

"Can you clear a B-Rank in four hours?"

"Can I? No. Can we? With Isabelle running defense and Skylar eliminating targets before they see us coming and Emi keeping everyone alive and you doing whatever insane new thing the integration gave you?" She paused. "Under five. Four if we’re lucky."

"When have we ever been lucky?"

"We’re alive. That counts."

I heard her moving through her room. Closet opening. Gear rattling. She was already packing.

"Natalia."

"What."

"You don’t have to come to Sector 12. The B-Rank is the obligation. Everything after that is my problem."

The temperature in my room dropped three degrees. Through my phone. From a separate building. Through the bond, I felt her fury spike like a needle shoved into my brainstem.

"If you finish that sentence I will walk to your room right now and freeze your tongue to the roof of your mouth."

"Understood."

"Your problems are my problems. Your unregistered Gates are my unregistered Gates. Your mysterious informants are my mysterious informants. You do not get to carve me out of the dangerous parts of your life and keep me in the safe ones. We established this. I established this. In your bed. Multiple times. While you were inside me. Do you remember?"

"Vividly."

"Good. Then stop trying to protect me from things I’ve already chosen to face and start telling me what else you know about Sector 12 that you haven’t mentioned yet."

She was right. Of course she was right. Natalia Kuzmina was right about everything, always, and the fact that I kept trying to shield her from consequences was the one flaw in my character she refused to tolerate. Not because she resented the impulse. Because she recognized it as patronizing. As diminishing. As the same instinct that had driven her father to wrap her in cotton and keep her from the world’s sharp edges until she couldn’t tell the difference between safety and suffocation.

I told her everything. The message. The coordinates. My theory about the stolen research. The implication that whoever was creating artificial Gates had moved from theory to practice and chosen a civilian population center as their proving ground.

Natalia listened without interruption. When I finished, the bond pulsed with something that existed beyond language. Not fear. Not anger. Something harder and colder and more dangerous than either.

"Twelve minutes," she said. "I’m bringing the combat suit."

She hung up.

I set the phone down and stared at the ceiling. Behind me, Maki’s purring hitched, stuttered, and resumed at a slightly different frequency. In her sleep, one ear twitched. She could sense the shift in my emotional state even through unconsciousness. Three hundred years of predator instinct didn’t take breaks.

"You heard all of that," I said.

The purring didn’t change. But one tail snaked out from under the blanket and curled around my wrist. Warm. Possessive. Ready.

I reached for my bat.