My Scumbag System Chapter 705: The Breaking Point is the Point

The first wolf-thing hit me at thirty miles an hour and I let it.

Not because I’m stupid. Because I’m doing math.

Kinetic Absorption caught the impact across my forearms where I’d braced the bat horizontal, and the force translated clean. Five percent Strength. Five percent Agility. Thirty-second timer. The wolf-thing bounced off me like it had run into a parked truck and tumbled sideways across the hopscotch grid, already bleeding from where the Dragon Witch’s Ring had scorched through its jaw on contact.

The second one came half a heartbeat later, low and fast, going for my knees. I brought the bat down in a vertical chop that split its skull before it reached me. No Spatial Cleave. No Ember. Just the bat and eight thousand points of hidden Strength doing what Strength does when you stop pretending you’re C-Rank.

The third and fourth arrived together, flanking. My Protection from Arrows screamed from both sides at once and I dropped into a crouch, letting them sail over me in a collision of gray limbs and snapping teeth. They tangled in midair. I stood up through them swinging, and the bat caught the left one across the ribcage hard enough to fold it in half around the barrel. The right one I kicked in the throat with a steel-toed boot. It went down gargling.

Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

They stopped coming one at a time.

"Twenty inbound," Soomin called from the community center roof, and she sounded like she was narrating a nature documentary about her own dinner. The Fox had the mic now. "Thirty. Forty. Oh, Master, the big ones are waking up."

"Nat."

"I see them."

The intersection filled with bodies. Gray bodies, pale bodies, things with too many legs and things with not enough. They poured through the east corridor because that was the only corridor I’d left open, funneling exactly where I wanted them, exactly the way Natalia had designed the formation to work except with me standing in the kill box instead of behind it.

Every single one of them hit me first.

I stopped counting individual kills at twelve and started counting the buff stacks instead. The numbers were easier. Cleaner. Twelve percent Strength. Twelve percent Agility.

Timer refreshing with every impact that crashed against me like waves against a breakwater. A claw, jagged and filth-crusted, raked across my shoulder—and Rockstar Made activated underneath the Kinetic Absorption, the two systems layering on top of each other in a way that should have been illegal and probably was, creating a feedback loop that the System’s designers had clearly never intended to exist simultaneously.

My stats climbed like a stock chart during a bubble. Fourteen percent. Sixteen. I was getting faster between heartbeats, stronger between breaths, and every single monster in the funnel was feeding the machine they were desperately trying to destroy. The irony was delicious. The harder they tried to kill me, the more unkillable I became.

A creature the approximate size and weight of an industrial refrigerator threw itself at my chest with enough force to crack concrete.

I caught it on the bat’s barrel and used its own considerable momentum to hammer it straight down into the asphalt, the impact creating a spiderweb of cracks in the pavement.

Before it could even twitch, I stomped on its neck with my full weight while simultaneously pivoting on the ball of my foot to meet the next three that were already lunging. One went down to a horizontal sweep that caught it across the midsection and sent it tumbling across the intersection.

One took a boot to the kneecap that buckled the joint backward with a sound like breaking kindling. The third got its jaws around my left forearm and bit down hard enough that I felt my armor creak.

The bite registered as pressure. The armor held. The Dragon Witch’s Ring ignited against its gums and the thing screamed with a mouth full of fire before I ripped my arm free and smashed its temple with the butt of the bat.

"His heart rate is dropping," Emi said in the comm, and her voice had that clinical edge she gets when she’s done being scared and started being a professional. "He’s actually getting calmer. His cortisol is going down. That’s not, that shouldn’t happen during sustained combat."

"Welcome to Satori Nakano," Skylar said.

Twenty-two percent Strength. Twenty-two percent Agility. Timer stacking clean. I could feel the numbers climbing behind my eyes like a speedometer with the governor removed. The integration had changed something fundamental about how the absorption worked. Before, the buffs felt like caffeine. Now they felt like becoming. Like each hit carved away something unnecessary and left whatever was underneath.

I grinned. Blood on my teeth from where a claw had caught my lip. I could taste copper and ozone and I felt more alive than I had since crawling out of that mountain bunker.

"Movement on the north wall," Natalia said. "Something large. B-Rank energy signature."

"How large."

"Satori."

"How large, Nat."

"It’s climbing out of the Gate."

I looked up.

The seam in reality had widened. What came through it filled the opening like a cork being pushed from the wrong side of a bottle. Shoulders first, then a head that was all bone plate and exposed jaw, then arms as long as I was tall ending in hands with six fingers each. It hit the ground in the center of the intersection and the impact cracked the asphalt in a starburst pattern that swallowed three dead wolf-things and the hopscotch grid.

B-Rank. Easy. Maybe B-plus if the bone plate was as dense as it looked.

It turned toward me and I saw that it had no eyes. Where eyes should have been there were smooth depressions with something glowing underneath, like coals buried in ash. Its mouth opened and the jaw split into four segments that unfolded outward like a flower made of teeth.

The remaining small creatures scattered. They knew what this was. Pack animals recognize the alpha.

"Oh, that one is fun," the Fox said, and Soomin’s voice had dropped an octave into the register that meant the spirit was fully in the driver’s seat. "Play with that one, Master. Please play with it."