My Scumbag System Chapter 712: For the Portfolio

"Not here. Not on comms. When we’re clean, back at the house, behind closed doors."

She held my gaze for three seconds. The bond between us carried a silent negotiation that would have taken anyone else twenty minutes of argument. Natalia weighed security against urgency, risk against reward, her desire to know everything immediately against the tactical reality that we were standing in an unsecured combat zone with six team members, no legal authorization, and approximately forty minutes before city workers arrived.

She nodded once.

"Move."

The team moved. Not because Natalia raised her voice or because I gave a formal order. They moved because seventeen people who had bled together developed a particular sensitivity to tone. When Natalia Kuzmina said move in that specific register, the one that sat somewhere between commanding officer and natural disaster, your body obeyed before your brain finished processing the syllable.

Skylar’s smoke began dissolving, layer by layer, in reverse order of deployment. The outer edges went first, revealing the evacuated street in all its mundane suburban glory. Empty storefronts with their security gates down. A flower shop with a handwritten sign in the window advertising two-for-one roses. The community center with its cheerful mural of children holding hands around a globe, now spattered with something that would look like mud by noon.

Emi finished her work on my ribs, sealing the cracks with her healing energy and applying a fresh layer of the regenerative compound she carried in her kit. She packed her supplies with the silent competence of someone who had made peace with the fact that her primary patient would never stop requiring her services.

"You owe me eleven hours of training this week," Emi said. "Archery. The target range behind the greenhouse. No excuses."

"I’ll be there."

"And you’ll bring snacks."

"What kind?"

"The good kind. From the bakery in Sector Three. The one with the cream puffs."

"That bakery is forty minutes from campus."

"Then you’d better leave early."

She stood, brushed dust from her knees, and walked away with her medical kit slung over one shoulder and her spine straight. Her blue hair caught the sun and threw it back in fragments of sapphire. Six months ago, Emi Aoyama couldn’t throw a punch without apologizing to her own fist. Now she dispensed medical ultimatums with the casual authority of someone who had healed wounds that should have killed the patient and expected the patient to show proper gratitude.

The Nectar of Devotion hummed beneath my skin where she’d touched me. Not the old chemical hook, the one that manufactured dependency and desire from nothing. The evolved version. The one that amplified what was already real. What I felt watching Emi walk away with that straight spine and fierce heart was entirely mine.

Soomin crouched on the curb ten feet away, still shaking off the residual effects of the Fox’s possession. Her pink hair fell in a curtain across her face, and she held her gauntlets in her lap, turning them over and examining the blood crusted under the retractable claws. The Fox’s blood. The A-Rank’s blood. Indistinguishable at this point.

"Soomin."

She flinched. Looked up at me through her hair with those gradient blue eyes that shifted toward gold at the edges when the Fox pressed close to the surface.

"I... the Fox was... I didn’t mean to ride its face."

"You saved my damn life."

"The Fox saved your life. I was just... there. Inside. Watching."

"Were you scared?"

"I was terrified."

"And did you run?"

"No."

"Then you saved my life."

Her face went through four colors in two seconds. Pink to red to scarlet to something approaching magenta. She made a sound that sat precisely between a squeak and a whimper, pulled her hood over her head, and fled toward the pharmacy where Emi was organizing the extraction.

Maki watched her go with one ear cocked.

"The pink one is cute."

"Don’t start."

"The Fox wants to eat Master’s face. Maki finds this relatable."

"I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that."

Akari sauntered over with the boneless confidence of a woman who had just made forty-seven thousand credits in illegal gambling profits and was calculating how to invest them. Her combat suit was somehow still immaculate. Her black hair fell in waves around a face that showed no sign of the fact that she’d spent the last hour using adamantine chains to trip a creature the size of a delivery truck.

"So," Akari said. "That was fun."

"One word for it."

"I have others. Lucrative. Educational. Terrifying in a good way." She produced her phone and angled it toward me. The screen showed a photograph of the A-Rank’s collapsed body with Akari posing next to it, one boot on its shoulder, making a peace sign. "For the portfolio."

"Delete that."

"Absolutely not. This is going in my private collection. Do you know what the secondary market pays for authenticated A-Rank kill photos? Because I do. Extensively."

"Akari."

"Twenty-five thousand plus dinner. That was the deal. But I want to renegotiate."

"We literally just settled this."

"That was before I saw the bone fragment you pulled from the sigil. I don’t know what data is on that thing, but I know the way your face looked when you pocketed it. That face has a market value. I’m estimating high five figures."

"You’re estimating prison time."

She grinned. White teeth, green eyes, the particular warmth of someone who viewed every interaction as a transaction but had chosen, for reasons I still didn’t fully understand, to invest in me. Akari Miyamoto didn’t follow anyone. She’d decided the Onyx Hounds represented a growth opportunity and she’d positioned herself accordingly.

The fact that she’d nearly died tonight protecting a neighborhood full of strangers put a crack in that interpretation. But she’d seal it with nail polish and pretend it never happened.

"Twenty-five and dinner. Final offer."

"Done. Now help Skylar with the smoke residue. I want this block clean."