My Scumbag System Chapter 702: Cowards Do Not Delegate Risk

Four hours and eleven minutes.

That’s what I had left when Natalia finally went to her own room, and I lay there in the dark listening to Maki purr against my ribs and thinking about how a person can build an entire empire out of favors and still not be able to buy an extra hour of sleep.

I didn’t sleep. My body didn’t need it anymore. That’s one of the things nobody warns you about when a cosmic intelligence rewires your architecture like a landlord installing better plumbing. Mysticism used to make sleep optional. Now it makes sleep sort of decorative. I lay there with my eyes open and mapped the house by feel.

Sixteen people. Eleven asleep. Jacob face down on a datapad in the common room, heart rate slow, brain still humming like a fridge. Raphael awake and punching something in the basement because that’s how he prays. Isabelle awake and reading, because Isabelle doesn’t sleep so much as recharge in a chair like an expensive appliance. Soomin awake in the garden, drawing.

And Natalia, three rooms over, not asleep either. Her thread ran through the wall like a wire under tension, and I could feel her heartbeat against my palm even though my palm was on my own chest.

Nel drifted up out of the dark like a bad houseguest.

"Only six?"

"That last one’s not a felony. That’s a public service."

"What are the odds."

I turned that over in the dark. Sixty-forty recruit. Which meant sixty percent of the divine gambling public had watched me for eleven months and concluded that I collect people the way other men collect debt.

They weren’t wrong. That was the annoying part.

Maki’s tail tightened on my wrist. She didn’t wake up. Bartholomew reached the far wall of his terrarium, considered his life’s work, and turned around to do it again.

Honestly, king. No notes.

At 0355 the house came alive without an alarm.

That’s the thing about people who’ve almost died together. You don’t need to be told. Doors opened. Water ran. Somebody swore in Spanish. Emi’s kettle whistled and she killed it in half a second because she’d promised to be quiet, and then Marco dropped a boot on the stairs and apologized to the boot.

I came down at 0410 in the black suit with the reinforced plating and the bat riding my back in the harness Emi had reworked twice because she said the old one made me lean wrong. She’d sewn a small blue thread into the strap. I hadn’t mentioned it. She hadn’t mentioned it. It was there.

The common room had turned into two rooms without moving a single wall.

On the left, Isabelle’s seven. She had them in a loose arc with the map floating at knee height, and she was walking corridor rotation with two fingers like she was conducting something. Raphael. Hikari. Marco. Malachi. Juan, upright, technically. Jaime, shirt on for once, which I chose to interpret as respect.

On the right, mine. Natalia at the window in purple and black with her braid pulled down tight. Skylar on the arm of the couch with her hood up. Soomin in her gauntlets, checking each finger like she expected them to have opinions. Emi with her medical rig and a bag of onigiri she was not going to admit was for morale. Akari against the doorframe, gloves on, chains not out yet, eyes doing that thing they do where she prices you.

And Jacob, sitting bolt upright with a datapad in his lap and the look of a man who’d been told he was a good boy and had not recovered.

I stopped in the middle. Everybody stopped.

"Isabelle."

"Present."

"Sector Seven. What’s the wall time."

"Gate stabilizes at zero six hundred. We enter at zero six oh five. Boss chamber is projected at the two hour mark, and I intend to make it in ninety minutes." She turned a page in her book, which she was still holding, because Isabelle likes to remind you that you’re an item on her list. "Four hundred low-tier, mixed spawn, Hollow-tier boss with a regeneration profile. We will hold the eastern corridor with Raphael, funnel with Hikari, and Malachi will take the ceiling. Marco anchors retreat. Jaime carries whatever needs carrying."

"Sakura is with me," Jaime said, to nobody.

"Juan."

Juan opened one eye. "I’ll be awake for the parts that matter."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only honest one you’re getting at four in the morning." He shifted, and his cards made a soft sound in his sleeve. "Readouts every ninety seconds, cleaner than the VHC’s own techs, and my name on the completion doc. Wake me for the boss."

"Good enough." I looked at Isabelle. "You have full command. Your call, your report, your name on it. If it goes wrong you pull them out and you let the contract fail."

Raphael’s head came up. "We’re not failing anything."

"If it goes wrong," I repeated, "you pull them out. That’s an order from the guy whose name isn’t on your roster."

Isabelle closed her book. She looked at me for four seconds, which from her is a paragraph.

"You are aware," she said, "that if the VHC audits the timeline, my signature is the one that hangs."

"I’m aware."

"And you asked anyway."

"I did."

"Good." She stood. The spear came off the wall and into her hand like it had been waiting. "I would have been insulted otherwise. Cowards do not delegate risk. They distribute blame." She adjusted her glove. "Bring my people back, Nakano. All five of them belong to this house."

"Six," Emi said quietly. "Jacob’s coming."

Jacob made a sound like a kettle that had learned fear.