My Scumbag System Chapter 721: Keep Scaring Me

Skylar leaned against her doorframe in an oversized black shirt that barely qualified as a garment. Her indigo hair stuck up on one side and the pink streaks caught the dim hallway light. She wore no shoes. One knee crossed over the other in a pose that suggested she had been standing there for longer than the two seconds since the door opened.

"Couldn’t sleep."

"Liar. You slept for five hours and twelve minutes. I heard you snoring through the wall at one thirty-seven. What woke you up?"

I looked at her. Skylar looked back.

"Something’s different," I said.

"Different how."

"I can feel the building. The foundation, the walls, the electrical wiring behind the plaster. I can hear Raphael’s fists on the bag two floors below and tell you he’s hitting with his right hand three degrees off center because his left shoulder still hurts from the Gate run yesterday."

Skylar’s violet eyes narrowed by a fraction. The pupils contracted. Her heartbeat, which I should not have been able to hear at twelve feet, increased by four beats per minute.

"That’s creepy."

"Agreed."

"Is it the integration?"

"Nel says residual bleed. Sensory spikes while the connection stabilizes."

"And you believe the cosmic slot machine in your brain."

"I believe approximately forty percent of what Nel tells me on a good day. This feels like a thirty percent day."

Skylar pushed off the doorframe and padded toward me on bare feet. She stopped close enough that I caught the scent of clove cigarettes and the vanilla bodywash she pretended she did not use. Her hand came up and pressed flat against my chest over the pendant.

"Your temperature is higher than normal."

"Two degrees above baseline. I noticed."

"Your heartbeat is slower."

"Forty-nine BPM resting. Down from sixty-two last week."

She looked up at me. The height difference between us meant she had to tilt her chin significantly, and the position exposed the column of her throat and the hickey I had left there four days ago that had faded to a pale shadow.

"You’re changing," she said. Not a question.

"I changed. Past tense. This is the aftermath."

"Aftermath doesn’t spike at five in the morning. Aftermath is gradual. This is something else." Her fingers curled against the fabric of my shirt. "When I woke up two minutes ago, I felt like someone had plugged a space heater into the wall next to my bed. That was you. Your body is throwing heat through the walls of this building like a broadcast tower."

That was information I did not have.

"Did anyone else notice?"

"Emi rolled over at five thirty-one and her aura flared green for eight seconds. She’s a healer. Her body responds to injury and illness within proximity. If your new condition registered as a medical event to her Aspect at five thirty-one in the morning through a wall and a floor, then yes. Others noticed."

Maki emerged from my room in cat form and wound between my ankles. She looked up at Skylar with the particular brand of feline contempt that communicated I was here first.

Skylar looked down at the cat.

"Move."

Maki did not move.

"Let me rephrase. Move or I drop smoke in your litter box for a week."

Maki moved. She relocated to my other ankle and made herself comfortable there instead, her twin tails wrapping around my calf with possessive deliberation.

"She’s getting worse," Skylar said.

"She’s three hundred years old. At a certain point you just accept the personality."

The pendant pulsed. Warmer now. Natalia had felt my conversation through the bond and decided to remain in bed but conscious. Listening. Her awareness sat at the back of my skull like a second opinion I had not requested.

Skylar removed her hand from my chest and crossed her arms. The shirt rode up on her thighs. I noticed because I was alive and because Skylar Amane in a stolen shirt at five in the morning was a sight that demanded notice from anyone with a functioning nervous system and at least one working eye.

"You need to tell Braxton."

"I need to tell no one."

"You need to tell the man responsible for keeping seventeen students alive that his Number One prospect just leveled up in his sleep and is now broadcasting thermal energy through the infrastructure of his dormitory. If Emi’s aura reacted, Braxton’s instincts will react. The man has thirty years of combat experience and a sixth sense for when someone in his orbit starts radiating threat signatures above their registered classification."

She was right. I hated that she was right.

"I’ll tell him after the mission."

"You’ll tell him today. Before dinner. Or I tell Natalia and Natalia tells him in the particular way that involves ice forming on his desk while she explains the situation in excruciating detail."

The hallway stretched between us. Maki purred against my ankle.

"Fine."

"Fine."

Skylar turned and walked back toward her door. At the threshold she paused and looked over her shoulder. The morning light from the hallway window caught her face at an angle that made her appear younger and more dangerous than she had any right to be.

"For the record. Whatever you became in that chamber. Whatever changed last night while you slept. It scares me."

I waited for the second half. With Skylar there was always a second half.

"Keep scaring me. It means you’re growing."

Her door closed. The lock clicked.

I stood alone in the hallway of Onyx House with a supernatural cat wrapped around my ankle, a pendant broadcasting my girlfriend’s heartbeat against my sternum, a bone fragment from a manufactured nightmare in my pocket, coordinates to a hidden floor beneath the most powerful building in Valoria burned into my memory, and a new sensory suite that insisted on mapping the thermal signatures of every living thing within a fifty-foot radius whether I wanted it to or not.

Somewhere far below the floorboards, Raphael’s fists hit the heavy bag. One point three seconds. One point three seconds. One point three seconds.

The Dragon Witch’s Ring pulsed warm.

The pendant pulsed cold.

And something else, something without a name that lived in the space between my ribs where the integration had carved out a home for itself, pulsed with a frequency I could not identify and a purpose I could not determine.

I headed for the stairs. Coffee first. Existential crisis second. That was the rule.

Three steps down and my right foot hit the landing and the sensory spike returned. The building opened itself to me for one heartbeat. I felt the water in the pipes, the electricity in the walls, the heat signatures of sixteen sleeping bodies arranged across two floors, the slow green pulse of Emi’s aura seeping through the gap beneath her door, the cold edge of Natalia’s ring bleeding frost into the humidity, and beyond all of it, beyond the walls and the foundation and the volcanic rock beneath, something vast and patient turning its attention toward the small island where a boy with a bat and too many problems stood on a staircase at five fifty-two in the morning.

The sensation vanished.

I gripped the railing until the wood creaked.