My Scumbag System Chapter 711: The Price of a Jungle Gym

Natalia came down from the roof the way she did everything: like gravity was a suggestion she’d chosen to accept, temporarily, under protest.

She dropped the three stories in two moves. A telekinetic cushion caught her six feet above the pavement, held for half a heartbeat, then deposited her on the asphalt with the kind of grace that made parkour instructors weep into their energy drinks. Her boots hit the ground without a sound. The Cryo-Lich Ring on her finger cast blue shadows across the wet street.

I watched her walk toward me through the carnage of our morning. Through the steaming husks of wolf-things that were already decomposing into something that smelled like burnt rubber and regret. Through the spreading pool of oil-dark blood leaking from the A-Rank’s skull cavity where my bat had made its final argument. Through the shattered remains of her own ice walls, reduced to sparkling meltwater that caught the sunrise and threw it back at the sky in broken fragments.

Purple hair loose from its braid now, half of it plastered to her neck with sweat. White streaks at the temples glowing faint in the early light. Combat suit torn at the left hip where a piece of shrapnel from the ice wall had caught her. A bruise already darkening across her jawline from the concussive force of the A-Rank’s death scream.

She was, objectively, the most dangerous and beautiful woman I had ever seen.

And she was furious.

"Three ribs," she said. No preamble. No hello. Just the opening salvo of what I recognized as Natalia’s particular brand of romantic aggression: the kind where she cataloged your injuries as a prelude to either healing you or adding new ones.

"Cracked. Not broken. There’s a distinction."

"There is no distinction when you refuse to dodge."

"I dodged the tail."

"You did not dodge the tail. The tail hit you. I watched the tail hit you. My ice wall caught you after the tail hit you. My ice wall that I created from three blocks away while maintaining two other barriers and trying very hard not to have a heart attack on a pharmacy roof because the love of my life decided to climb an A-Rank like a jungle gym."

"Tactical mounting."

"I’m going to mount your headstone."

Emi appeared at Natalia’s elbow. The healer’s sapphire hair had escaped its braids entirely, hanging in wild blue strands around a face streaked with dried tears and the particular kind of righteous anger that only medical professionals could sustain at six in the morning.

"Sit down," Emi said.

"I’m standing."

"Sit down or I will make your legs stop working. I know pressure points now. You taught me pressure points. This is your fault."

I sat on the curb. Maki hopped onto my shoulder and began grooming her left paw with the smugness of a creature who contributed nothing to the final cleanup but intended to take full credit.

Emi knelt beside me and placed her hands against my ribs through the torn fabric of my suit. Her healing aura bloomed green and warm, sinking into the damaged tissue with the patient insistence of someone who had spent four months learning exactly how my body broke and exactly how to put it back together. The pain receded from white-hot to merely annoying.

"Breathing?"

"Hurts."

"Good. It should hurt. Pain is your body’s way of telling you not to stand in front of A-Rank tail swipes."

"Noted."

"I’m adding it to the list." Emi produced a small notebook from her medical kit. The cover had a cartoon cat on it. Inside, in her neat handwriting, was an itemized record of every injury I had sustained since the first week of Academy. The list was four pages long. "Cracked ribs, three count, sustained during unauthorized combat engagement against artificial Gate spawn in residential Sector Twelve. Aggravating factor: patient refused to use Steel Body because, quote, he wanted to feel the buffs stack."

"That’s not what I said."

"That is exactly what you said. Skylar recorded it."

From somewhere in the dissipating smoke, Skylar’s voice drifted over. "I record everything. Insurance purposes."

Natalia stood over me with her arms crossed. The pendant between us hummed with everything she wasn’t saying out loud. Love. Relief. The particular flavor of rage that only manifested when someone you cared about survived something they shouldn’t have attempted.

"The contract team," Natalia said. Not a question. A redirect. The shift from girlfriend to general happened so fast that I sometimes missed the exact moment of transition. This was not one of those times. Her jaw set. Her eyes went flat. The temperature around us dropped two degrees.

"Isabelle’s en route. Forty minutes to the Sector Seven staging area. She’ll have the B-Rank cleared before lunch."

"And us?"

"Twenty minutes to clean the site. Fifteen for Jacob to finish the data scrub. Then we extract before the gas authority inspection team arrives to investigate their very real, very convincing, entirely fictional pressure anomaly."

"The bodies."

I looked at the A-Rank corpse filling half the intersection. It was already losing structural integrity, the alien biology collapsing in on itself without the dimensional energy that had sustained it. In thirty minutes, the remains would be a foul-smelling stain and nothing more. The wolf-things were further along, their gray flesh already turning translucent and dissolving into the asphalt.

"Gate-spawn decompose. Standard protocol. By the time the first inspector walks this block, there’ll be nothing left but some discoloration that could pass for an oil spill."

"The control node data."

I pulled the fragment of the shattered sigil from my pocket. The piece of carved bone was the size of my thumb, covered in symbols that still pulsed with fading light. The data burst from its destruction had contained information I hadn’t finished processing. A frequency. A signature. An address.

"Someone signed their work," I said. "And I caught the return address."

Natalia’s eyes locked onto the fragment. "Show me."