My Scumbag System Chapter 697: The Gas Leak Problem

She exhaled through her nose, which was Natalia for I hate that this might work. "Walk it through. Slowly. Because if you’re wrong about even one variable, people die and it’s on your name."

Fair.

"Seventeen active combatants in the Hounds," I said. "The contract requires a minimum of six for a B-Rank, maximum of eight for Gate stability. That leaves nine bodies unassigned and completely unaccounted for in any official documentation."

"Nine people who can be somewhere else on Wednesday morning without anyone noticing."

"Nine people who can be sitting on a residential block in Meridian Heights at five in the morning with a full loadout and no paperwork."

Natalia was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers moved across the datapad, building a second roster beside the first, dragging names between columns with the ruthlessness of a woman who’d been planning battles in her head since she was old enough to hold a spoon.

"Isabelle for the B-Rank," she said. "She’s the only other person who can command independently. If you’re not in the dungeon, she has to be. Non-negotiable."

"Agreed."

"Raphael and Hikari on her frontline. They’re loud, they’re durable, and their combat records are the kind of thing the VHC expects from an Onyx Hounds run. Nobody looks twice at property damage from those two."

"Marco and Malachi as her flank. They move as a unit and they don’t need supervision."

"Jacob for tactical." She frowned. "He’ll panic."

"He’ll panic and then he’ll produce a fourteen-minute analysis that saves someone’s life. Let him panic."

"Fine. Juan?"

"Juan sleeps through the contract, gets his name on the completion report, and generates the tactical readout Isabelle needs from a folding chair. Everyone wins."

Natalia’s mouth twitched at one corner. Not a smile. The precursor to one, which was rarer and better.

"That’s seven for the contract," she said. "Which leaves your Sector 12 team."

"You. Skylar. Emi. Soomin. Akari and Hikari’s sister, who I already put on reserve rotation for exactly this reason."

Her head came up sharply, purple eyes narrowing with that particular kind of suspicion that meant I’d confirmed something she’d already deduced. "You planned this before you even got the message from Kimiko."

"I planned for ," I corrected, keeping my tone casual even as I watched her work through the implications. "I didn’t know what exactly, but I knew something was coming. You always keep a reserve when you can afford it." I shrugged, channeling Kaelen’s voice from muscle memory alone. "He taught me that—never commit your whole force to a job you don’t fully understand, because the job always turns out to be a completely different job halfway through."

"You put Akari on the reserve rotation two hours ago," Natalia said slowly, her gaze flickering between me and the projected dungeon layout as if double-checking her own memory of the conversation. "Before you had any reason to need her specifically."

"I did. And she was absolutely furious about it at the time—gave me the full performance, all wounded pride and accusations of favoritism for her sister." I let myself smile at the memory of Akari’s theatrical outrage. "I let her be furious, didn’t argue, took it all on the chin. And now she gets to be delighted instead when I tell her the reserve spot was always strategic. And Akari being genuinely delighted with you? That’s how you get a chain user who’ll flatten an entire city block out of pure gratitude and competitive drive."

Natalia stared at me for three full seconds without blinking.

"You’re genuinely terrifying when you’re being this calculated," she said finally, and there was something in her voice that wasn’t quite criticism and wasn’t quite admiration—it was something more complex, more intimate. Recognition, maybe. The understanding of someone who operated on similar wavelengths.

"You keep pointing that out like it’s supposed to be a complaint," I said.

"It isn’t." She turned back to the display projection, and this time her hands were moving with renewed purpose, fingers dancing through the air as she sketched approach vectors across the Meridian Heights wireframe with surgical precision. "What about Celeste and Noah?"

That stopped me.

Because I’d thought about it. Cel Vance in a Gate response operation was worth three ordinary Hunters, and her Aspect stacked with mine in ways we’d already proven in a death garden forty-seven stories underground. Noah came attached, immovable, and would murder anything that breathed wrong in Cel’s direction.

And Cel Vance was also Seraphina’s sister.

"No," I said.

"Why."

"Because if Cel is on that block when an unregistered Gate opens, Seraphina finds out inside of ten minutes, and then we’re not investigating anything. We’re being investigated." I rubbed the back of my neck. "And because Cel already came to me today as a messenger. She’s being used as an antenna. Anything she sees, her sister sees, whether or not Cel wants it that way."

"She’d hate that assessment."

"She’d agree with that assessment. That’s why she’d hate it."

Natalia nodded slowly. "Fine. No Vance. But you’re going to have to tell her that, and she’s going to look at you with that expression she does where she pretends not to be hurt and does it so badly it’s worse."

"I’m aware."

"You’re going to feel terrible."

"I’m aware of that too."

"Good." She reached over and flicked my forehead, hard enough to sting. "Suffering builds character."

"I have too much character already. I’m at capacity."

"You have zero character. You have charisma and a talent for lying, and I love you anyway, which says more about my judgment than yours." She said it without looking up from the map, casual as a weather report, and something in my chest did a stupid thing that I refused to acknowledge.

The map rotated. She’d built four approach paths in the time it took me to feel a feeling.

"Here," she said, indicating a rooftop three blocks east of the community center. "Elevated, structurally sound, clear sightlines to the projected formation point. That’s my position. I can drop a barrier wall across the entire intersection from that range and hold it long enough for evacuation."

"Nine thousand civilians."

"Nine thousand civilians in a six-block radius. But formation zones don’t erupt outward evenly. They pulse from a center point." She tapped the marker. "First wave comes out here. If we’re already positioned when the membrane stabilizes, we control the choke, and the choke is this intersection. Four streets. Two viable exits for anything that comes through. I freeze both, Skylar fills the rest with smoke so nothing knows where it’s going, and you kill whatever the smoke doesn’t confuse."

"And the daycare?"

"Emi and Soomin. Emi triages, Soomin scouts the building interior and moves bodies. She’s fast and she can carry more than she looks like she can." Natalia’s fingers stilled. "But we need the building empty before formation, not during. Which means we need a reason for the community center to close on Wednesday."

I thought about it.

"Gas leak," I said.

"You want to fake a gas leak."