My Scumbag System Chapter 708: The Fox Can Wait In Line

The creature’s one good leg held its weight like a pillar of concrete and hate. Blood the color of motor oil poured from the stump where its right knee used too be, pooling across the asphalt in patterns that caught the dawn light wrong. The carved symbols on its bone spurs pulsed brighter now, reactive, angry, flooding the intersection with a low harmonic that made my fillings ache.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The blood on my lip was mine. The blood on my bat was not.

"Jacob. Time since formation."

"S-seventeen minutes. The seam is still active. More signatures moving behind the membrane. Smaller. Lots of them."

"How many is lots?"

"I genuinely do not want to answer that question."

"Jacob."

"Sixty plus. Maybe eighty. They’re queuing."

I looked at the A-Rank. The A-Rank looked at me. Its carved bone spurs were glowing hot enough to cast shadows now, and the symbols had started rotating along the spiral tracks like text scrolling across a marquee. This thing was a message. A calling card left by someone who wanted me to know they could build monsters the way my father built me. From scratch. With intention.

The Fox landed on the community center roof in a shower of white sparks, two tails fanning behind Soomin’s transformed body like war banners. Her hair had gone fully white, her eyes burning blue, her claws dripping black from the wrist wound she’d torn into the A-Rank. The Fox crouched on the roof’s edge and grinned down at me with all of Soomin’s teeth and none of her restraint.

"It tastes old. Like the tree god. Like the thing in the void."

"I know."

"The Fox wants more."

"The Fox can wait in line."

The creature shifted its weight. One massive hand pressed flat against the pavement and the asphalt cracked outward in a radial pattern, crunching under fingers thick as fire hoses. It was going to lunge. The good leg tensed, muscles bunching under that wet concrete skin, and the arm I’d failed to sever drew back like a battering ram.

I had seven seconds before Steel Body came off cooldown. Seven seconds where I was made of regular human meat and good intentions.

"Nat."

"Already moving."

Her voice cut through the chaos with a precision that matched the frost she commanded. Natalia’s presence blazed through the bond like a star going supernova—three blocks east, every ounce of her focus channeled through the Cryo-Lich Ring. I felt her will crystallize into reality as she poured everything she had into a barrier that erupted from the broken street between me and the creature.

The ice wall that materialized was a work of desperate art—six inches thick, twelve feet tall, translucent enough to see the creature’s silhouette through its crystalline surface. Beautiful, really. She’d even reinforced it with those spiral patterns she’d been practicing, the ones that were supposed to distribute impact force across the entire structure.

It bought me exactly two seconds.

Then the creature’s fist went through her masterwork like a wrecking ball through drywall, like her hours of training meant nothing, like physics was just a polite suggestion.

Ice shards sprayed across my face in a glittering constellation of failure. Something sharp cut my cheek. Blood, hot and immediate, tracked down to my jaw. I was already rolling, already moving before my conscious mind registered the barrier’s destruction, the bat singing its familiar song through the air as I came up on the creature’s blind side. The severed leg left a gap in its guard, a flaw in its stance, and I drove straight into that opening like a wedge into cracking wood.

The invisible blade—silent, impossible to see, impossible to block—caught the creature across the back of its remaining thigh. Not deep enough to sever, not this time. The chitin plating here was denser, more evolved, layered in overlapping scales that dispersed the cutting force across too wide an area. Some kind of adaptive defense the creature had developed specifically to counter slashing attacks. Smart. Frightening. Exactly the kind of intelligent design choice that made my father’s theory feel less like paranoia and more like prophecy.

But the flesh beneath the armor split open anyway. More of that oil-dark blood gushed free, viscous and wrong, pooling on the asphalt like a spill from some industrial nightmare. The creature’s leg buckled—just for a second, just a momentary loss of balance as damaged muscle failed to support that impossible weight.

Just long enough.

Akari’s chains wrapped the creature’s remaining ankle and pulled.

The A-Rank went down on one knee with an impact that registered on seismographs three districts away. I felt the shockwave in my heels, in my spine, in the roots of my teeth. Somewhere glass shattered. The creature roared. Not the frequency-word from before but an actual roar, animal and furious and so loud that Skylar’s smoke wall rippled like a curtain in a hurricane.

"Skylar. Now."

"Way ahead of you, Stray Dog."

The smoke thickened into a solid curtain of indigo vapor that flooded the creature’s face. Every layer converged at once, all twelve pockets collapsing inward like a closing fist. The creature thrashed, swiping at smoke it couldn’t dispel, its massive hands passing through phantom shapes that dissolved and reformed around its fingers. Skylar was everywhere and nowhere, her duplicates bleeding from shadow to shadow, each one wearing Skylar’s lazy grin and holding knives made of nothing.

I climbed the creature’s back.

This was not a sophisticated tactical decision. This was not a move I learned at the Academy or inherited from Kaelen’s decades of enforcer training. This was a stupid, reckless, deeply Satori Nakano choice that would make Natalia furious and Braxton drink and the Audience lose their collective divine minds.

The bone spurs on its shoulders served as handholds. The carved symbols burned my palms through my gloves, searing heat that the Dragon Witch’s Ring absorbed greedily, converting their energy into fuel for the fire building in my hands. The creature bucked. My grip held. My ribs screamed. Rockstar Made flagged the damage and filed it under investment.

I reached the base of the creature’s skull, where the chitin plates overlapped in a pattern I recognized from the integration chamber. The same geometry. The same impossible symmetry. The markings here were denser, concentrated, forming a sigil that pulsed with trans-dimensional light. Not a natural formation. A control node. Someone had installed a kill switch in this thing’s brain.

"Soomin."

"Here," the Fox purred.

"I need you to hold its head still for exactly four seconds."

"Gladly."