My Scumbag System Chapter 714: Horizontal Integration

The common room smelled like cinnamon and violence.

Not metaphorically. Emi had been baking since before dawn—I could taste the cinnamon-sugar in the air, see the faint dusting of flour on the kitchen counter like snow that had wandered indoors and decided to stay. The residual ozone from my combat suit had followed me through the front door like a stray dog following another stray dog. Full circle. Very poetic. Somebody give me a book deal and a therapist who specializes in emotional compartmentalization.

Seventeen onigiri sat arranged on the coffee table in a formation that suggested Emi had spent real, measurable time considering their visual presentation. Each one wore a strip of nori like a little belt, perfectly centered with the kind of obsessive precision that only came from someone who genuinely believed presentation mattered. Several had faces drawn in sesame seeds—tiny dots and lines that transformed rice balls into an army of carbohydrate-based cheerleaders. One of them appeared to be winking. I stared at it. It continued winking. The audacity.

"You drew faces on the rice."

"They’re motivational!" Emi bounced on the balls of her feet, her entire body vibrating with the kind of manic breakfast enthusiasm that should be illegal before noon. Her sapphire hair had escaped its carefully constructed braid in approximately nine places, creating a halo of flyaway strands that caught the morning light streaming through the windows. Her apron—previously white, now a Jackson Pollock tribute piece—bore evidence of a losing battle with powdered sugar, and her antenna pieces bobbed with each bounce like tiny satellite dishes receiving signals from the food dimension. "That one says ’you can do it’ if you tilt your head!"

I tilted my head at the required forty-five-degree angle. The sesame seed face stared back with the vacant, eternal encouragement of a motivational poster in a dentist’s office. The kind that featured a kitten hanging from a branch with inspirational text about persistence.

"I see it."

"Really?" Her face lit up like I’d just told her she’d won the lottery and a puppy.

"Absolutely not."

Emi’s lower lip wobbled for exactly one second—a tiny tremor of disappointment that she caught between her teeth before it could evolve into actual sadness. She redirected the energy into a healing pulse that washed through my ribs like warm bathwater mixed with liquid sunshine, chasing away the lingering ache from the Hydra fight I hadn’t consciously registered I was carrying. The girl could not help herself. She healed things the way other people breathed. Unconscious. Constant. Radiating from her fingertips whether she wanted it to or not, flowing toward any hint of pain or injury with the inevitability of water finding a crack.

I grabbed three onigiri—one winking, two stoic—and dropped onto the couch beside Juan, who had achieved what could only be described as horizontal integration with the cushions. He’d melted into the furniture at some point during the last twenty minutes, his lanky form draped across the sofa like a particularly exhausted cat. His messy brown hair obscured half his face, and his breathing had the slow, steady rhythm of someone who had achieved enlightenment through the ancient art of aggressively not giving a shit.

"He alive?"

"His heart rate’s steady," Emi said, her tone carrying the casual certainty of someone who’d checked. Probably multiple times. "I’ve been monitoring it."

"Of course you did."

She sat on the couch arm next to me and placed her hand on my shoulder. Not healing this time. Just touching. The Nectar of Devotion hummed beneath my skin where her palm rested, warm and golden and free of the chemical coercion that had once made me hate myself for enjoying it. The evolved version only amplified what already existed. What Emi felt for me was real. Inconvenient, complicated, desperately earnest, and real.

Her reddish-brown eyes searched my face.

"You look tired."

"I killed an A-Rank before breakfast. Tired seems reasonable."

"You look tired in a different way." Her thumb traced a circle on my shoulder. "The same way you looked after the Necropolis. Like you’re carrying something you haven’t told us about."

Emi Aoyama. The girl who could not lie, could not scheme, could not survive five minutes of political maneuvering without accidentally revealing her hand through sheer emotional transparency. And yet she could read me like a book someone had left open on a park bench.

"After the debrief," I said.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

She kissed my cheek. Light and quick, her lips barely there before she pulled away. The spot burned warm for five seconds afterward. The pendant at my chest pulsed cold.

Natalia had felt that.

Of course Natalia had felt that.

I ate the onigiri. They were perfect. Warm rice, salmon filling, a hint of something sweet Emi had added that shouldn’t work but did anyway. Like everything about her.

The common room filled in stages. Raphael arrived first from the basement, knuckles wrapped and gleaming with sweat, radiating the particular energy of a man who had beaten a heavy bag for three hours and emerged angrier than when he started. He dropped into the wingback chair, caught my eye, and gave a single nod that communicated an entire paragraph of grudging respect and simmering resentment.

Marco and Malachi materialized together as always, Marco carrying two protein shakes and Malachi appearing to have simply condensed from the room’s shadows. Malachi’s dark eyes found mine for a fraction of a second. Something passed between us. Recognition, maybe. The quiet acknowledgment of someone who lived partially in darkness greeting someone who had recently conversed with it.

Hikari crashed through the door at full volume.

"SATORIII! I heard you FOUGHT something! Was it BIG? Did you HIT it? Can I FIGHT the next one? Isabelle said I have to ask before punching and I’m ASKING!"

"Yes. Yes. We’ll see."

She beamed with the radiance of a sun that had learned to throw haymakers and settled cross-legged on the floor next to Soomin, who had changed out of her combat gear into an oversized sweater and clutched her seashell charm like a prayer bead.

Jaime entered shirtless. Because of course Jaime entered shirtless.

"BROTHER!" His green hair caught the light as he flexed. "The muscles speak of your TRIUMPH! I sensed the vibrations of combat from THREE MILES AWAY through my deltoids! Sakura herself would weep at the beauty of your morning’s work!"

"Your deltoids don’t have nerve endings for vibration, Jaime."

"THE MUSCLES DISAGREE!"