My Scumbag System Chapter 713: A Key for the Belly of the Beast

She saluted with two fingers and walked away, her chains retracting into golden nothing as she went.

I sat on the curb and let the morning settle around me. The sun climbed higher. Birds returned to the trees along the boulevard, confused by the silence and the absence of their usual audience. A stray cat, the one Soomin had relocated from the community center storage room, watched me from behind a mailbox with the disinterested superiority that only cats could manage.

Maki hissed at it.

The cat hissed back.

Maki’s fur stood on end. Her tails lashed. I grabbed her by the scruff before she could launch herself off my shoulder and start a territorial war with a domestic shorthair in the middle of an active crime scene.

"We are leaving."

"That cat disrespected Maki."

"That cat weighs six pounds."

"Size is irrelevant. Respect is everything."

Natalia appeared beside me. She’d collected her hair into something approximating a functional ponytail and wiped the worst of the grime from her face. The bruise on her jaw was darkening into something that would require explanation.

"Jacob’s done. Sensors are clean. Municipal records show nothing abnormal. The gas authority will arrive at zero eight thirty and find a neighborhood that experienced a minor pressure fluctuation consistent with aging infrastructure."

"And us?"

"Never here." She extended her hand. I took it, and she pulled me to my feet with the easy strength of someone whose telekinesis provided assistance even when she wasn’t consciously directing it. Her fingers were cold against mine. They were always cold. I’d stopped noticing months ago.

No. That was a lie. I noticed every single time.

The team assembled at the extraction point two blocks south. Skylar leaned against a streetlight, smoking a clove cigarette she hadn’t earned, her violet eyes tracking the empty streets for threats that no longer existed. Soomin walked beside Emi, their shoulders almost touching, drawing comfort from proximity. Jacob clutched his datapad like a bible and vibrated at a frequency that suggested he’d consumed his body weight in caffeine sometime around four in the morning. Akari checked her phone.

I looked back at the intersection. The A-Rank’s body had collapsed into a dark stain on the asphalt, barely distinguishable from the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings. The seam was gone, sealed by a key that wouldn’t recharge for seven days. The smaller corpses had dissolved into nothing.

In two hours, the gas authority would walk this block. They’d find a neighborhood that smelled faintly of ozone, a community center with its doors locked and its daycare closed for inspection, and six blocks of confused residents returning to homes they’d evacuated over a pipeline concern that never actually existed.

They would not find the carved bone fragment in my pocket, still warm, still pulsing with the fading signature of whoever had built a door beneath a daycare and filled it with nightmares.

They would not find the team of seven teenagers who had saved nine thousand people before breakfast.

And they would absolutely not find the answer to the question that burned in my chest hotter than any Ember, sharper than any Spatial Cleave, colder than the pendant pressed against my sternum.

Who built the room? Who opened the door? And why did they want me to close it?

The bone fragment pulsed in my pocket. The return address embedded in its data pointed somewhere specific. Somewhere I recognized. Not a building or a bunker. Not a mountain cabin where my father hid from the world.

The coordinates pointed to a location beneath the Apex Tower. Sublevel Eleven. A floor that didn’t appear on any public or classified blueprint I’d ever seen.

The VHC’s own headquarters. The most surveilled building in Valoria. The seat of Seraphina Vance’s power.

Someone had built an artificial Gate beneath a daycare using my father’s research, and the trail led directly into the belly of the beast that was already watching me.

"Satori." Natalia’s voice. She stood beside me, her hand still in mine, her eyes reading my face with the fluency of someone who’d spent months learning my tells.

"Tell me."

I showed her the fragment. The pulsing coordinates. The destination that made no sense and perfect sense simultaneously.

Her face went blank. Then cold. Then something beyond cold, something that dropped the temperature around us fast enough that frost crackled across the surface of a nearby puddle.

"Sublevel Eleven," she said.

"You know it?"

"No. Nobody knows it. I’ve had access to the Apex Tower’s complete architectural registry since Cel gave me her sister’s security passcodes three weeks ago. There are ten sublevels. Not eleven."

"Someone disagrees."

The pendant burned between us. Through the bond, I felt Natalia’s mind working. The general assembling her pieces. The queen surveying her board.

"Then we go there," she said. The words carried the weight of a woman who had frozen battlefields and torn reality and decided, somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, that she would follow me into anything.

"Not yet. Not until I understand what’s waiting."

"When?"

I looked at the rising sun. At the stain where the A-Rank had fallen. At the empty streets of a neighborhood that would never know how close it came to becoming a graveyard.

"Soon."

Natalia squeezed my hand once. Hard. The ring on her finger bit cold into my knuckles.

"Soon isn’t good enough. Give me a date."

"One week. After the key recharges."

She processed this. The Skeleton Key opened any door, once per week. The door to Sublevel Eleven. A floor that shouldn’t exist in a building controlled by the most powerful woman in the country.

"One week," she repeated. "I’ll have formations drafted by tomorrow. Contingencies by Wednesday. Backup extraction by Thursday."

"I love you."

"I know. Now move your ass before the gas authority shows up and we have to explain why seven teenagers are standing in an evacuated zone covered in blood that doesn’t belong to any species on the evolutionary record."