My Scumbag System Chapter 706: The Surgeon and the Tumor

The B-Rank swung.

The arm came down like a falling tree and I sidestepped at the last second, feeling the displacement ruffle my hair. The fist cratered the street. Water sprayed from a broken main. I brought the bat up in a rising arc that caught the creature’s elbow and Spatial Cleave activated on instinct, splitting the air along an invisible seam that went through the bone plate like it was paper.

The arm separated above the elbow.

The creature screamed without sound. The glow behind its eye-plates flared white. It swung the stump at me and the spray of whatever passed for blood caught my chest, hot and black and smelling of nothing I could name.

I absorbed the stump-impact. Twenty-eight percent. The creature was hitting harder than the wolves by an order of magnitude. My muscles sang with stolen force. I could feel the tendons in my forearms pulling taut, the fibers rearranging themselves to handle loads they’d never been designed for. Rockstar Made hummed underneath everything like a second heartbeat, the permanent five percent bonus from surviving the hit stacking on top of the temporary buffs until my baseline stats had jumped to a place that would have given Washington’s evaluation machine a stroke.

The creature brought its remaining arm around in a horizontal sweep. I ducked under it, planted my feet, and drove the bat straight up into the underside of its jaw.

The bone plate cracked from jawline to crown. Ember fired through the Dragon Witch’s Ring at the moment of impact, blue-white flame jetting up through the fracture and into the creature’s skull cavity. It cooked from the inside. The glow behind its eye-plates died. The four-segment jaw went slack and then the whole thing toppled backward, eight hundred pounds of dead monster hitting the intersection like a falling building.

I stood on its chest and looked at the Gate.

More shapes moved behind the seam. Bigger ones. A lot of them.

"That took four seconds," Jacob said, and his voice cracked on the number. "Four. I timed it. The B-Rank lasted four seconds."

"Three point seven," Skylar corrected.

"Oh my God."

"You said a bad word, Jacob."

"Three point seven seconds against a B-Rank. His file says C-Rank. His file says Thermal Incision with A potential. That’s not Thermal Incision. That’s not even close to Thermal Incision. What was that invisible cutting thing?"

"Jacob."

"That went through bone plate. Bone plate that my sensors read at eleven thousand PSI compressive strength. That’s tank armor. He cut through tank armor with nothing. With the air. With his hand."

"Jacob."

"I’m having a moment."

"Have it quieter."

I wiped my mouth on the back of my glove and rolled my neck. The buff stacks were fading but my baseline had permanently shifted upward from the near-death damage Rockstar Made had flagged during the wolf swarm. Every fight made the next one less fair. Every beating I took paid dividends in raw growth. My father had built me to be a weapon that got stronger the more it was used, and the entity had selected a consciousness that would never stop picking fights.

The seam pulsed.

Something new pressed against the membrane from the other side. I could feel it with the integration sense, a weight pushing against the fabric of reality like a hand pressing through wet cloth. Whatever it was, it had mass. Real mass. The kind of mass that bends the local gravity field and makes small objects drift toward it.

A pebble rolled across the intersection toward the Gate.

"Nat."

"I’m already reinforcing the barriers."

"Skylar, double the smoke. Inner layer. I want the streets blind from every direction."

"Done."

"Soomin, get off the roof. Regroup to Emi’s position. If something comes through that I can’t handle in the first ten seconds, you grab Emi and you run south and you don’t stop until you hit the highway."

The Fox laughed. "As if."

"That wasn’t a request."

The Fox went quiet. Then Soomin’s actual voice came through, soft and frightened and utterly sincere. "I’ll be ready. But I’m not leaving you."

"Emi."

"I’m here." She paused. "Your cortisol just spiked for the first time."

"Yeah."

"So whatever is coming through that Gate is the first thing tonight that scared you."

"Yeah."

"Okay." Another pause. "I love you."

The seam tore open with a sound like reality screaming.

It did not come through headfirst or feetfirst. It did not lunge or burst or explode into our world with the mindless hunger of the lesser spawn. It came through sideways, folding itself through a gap that should have been too small for something its size—a gap that should have been physically impossible for anything with bones to navigate—and the process looked like watching a building collapse in reverse, if buildings were made of meat and malice and had agency.

The first limb emerged. Then a second. Then four more in quick succession, each one unfolding with a wet, articulated snap that made my stomach clench. A torso straightened, vertebra by vertebra, each segment of its spine clicking into place with the methodical certainty of a puzzle box being solved by something that remembered how it was built. A head the size of a sedan swiveled on a neck made of layered chitin plate and corded muscle that looked like ship cables, and the eyes—

.

The eyes that found mine were not the ash-buried coals of the B-Rank cooling under my feet. These were not the dim, hungry embers of a thing that existed only to kill and feed and die.

These eyes were . These eyes were . And these eyes looked at me with something I recognized because I’d seen it in a mirror on the worst mornings of my life, in the reflection of a girl who had once thought she knew what power was: .

Not hunger. Interest. The kind of cold, clinical interest a surgeon has for a particularly fascinating tumor.

A-Rank. Minimum. Possibly higher.

"That was not in the briefing," Natalia breathed.

The creature filled the intersection. Its body was wrong in the way all Gate-spawn were wrong, asymmetric and excessive, too many joints in the arms and not enough in the legs, with a spine that curved in three directions at once. Bone spurs jutted from its shoulders and hips like the buttresses of a cathedral designed by someone who hated God. Its skin was the color of wet concrete and it moved with the terrible slowness of something that has never needed to hurry because nothing has ever survived long enough to run.

It looked at the dead B-Rank under my feet.

It looked at me.

It made a sound. Low. Not a roar. A sentence. A word in a language that had no phonemes, just frequency and weight, and I felt it in my back teeth like standing too close to a bass amp at a concert I’d attended in a life that wasn’t mine anymore.

"Jacob. Classification."