My Scumbag System Chapter 725: The Man Being Handled

The kettle ticked as it cooled.

"So here’s my problem, kid." Braxton looked up. "You are sitting in my kitchen radiating enough heat to sweat a glass of bourbon through a wall, and you’re telling me your body is adding structures that don’t exist in the medical literature. And the people whose job it is to notice that have already flagged you twice. Monthly evaluations. That’s what they gave you after the last workup, right? Monthly."

"Right."

"Then you have three weeks and change before you sit in a chair in front of a technician who is going to plug you into a machine that measures exactly the thing you just described to me."

Three weeks. And six days before the Key recharged, and Friday before whoever ran that basement figured out I had their address, and thirty years before something buried under reality finished chewing through its chain, though I did not know that part yet and would have laughed if anybody had told me.

"I’ll handle the evaluation."

"With what."

"With whatever I have to."

Braxton laughed, and there was no joy anywhere in it. "That’s the answer I’d have given at eighteen. That’s the answer Talia gave. That’s the answer everybody gives right before the machine reads a number they can’t explain and men in charcoal suits show up with paperwork that says nothing and means everything."

"Then help me."

He stopped rolling the cigarette.

"Say that again."

"Help me." I set my hands flat on the counter, fingers splayed against the cold granite like I was bracing for impact. "You’ve been an A-Rank Hunter sitting in reserve status for six years. That means you know what the workup looks like from the inside—not the sanitized version they show the public, but the real thing. You know which readings they actually care about, which metrics get flagged for review, and which ones get filed in a drawer and forgotten about." I paused, holding his eyes.

"You know who runs the Insight Division intake process. You probably know what they were like before they had the title and the office and the mandate to ruin people’s lives."

His expression didn’t change, but something in his posture shifted. Not quite relaxing. Just... listening.

"I’m not asking you to lie to the VHC," I continued. "I’m not asking you to falsify data or cover anything up. I’m asking you to tell me exactly where the walls are—what they’re made of, how high they go, and which ones have doors I can’t see yet—so I can figure out which one to walk through instead of running face-first into concrete."

Silence settled over the kitchen. The kind that has actual weight to it, like the air itself is holding its breath.

Maki’s twin tails swished once against the stool leg, a soft rustling sound that somehow made the quiet deeper.

Braxton stared at me for a long moment, his tired eyes doing that thing where they seemed to peel back layers. Then he let out a long breath through his nose.

"You know what the difference is between you and every other cocky little disaster I’ve had the misfortune of teaching," he said finally, voice flat and thoughtful. "Most of them ask me to fix it. They want me to make the problem go away, wave a magic wand, pull some strings. But you?" He shook his head, something almost like approval flickering across his face. "You ask me for the blueprints."

"Is that a yes."

"It’s a maybe with a lot of conditions attached." He pushed himself upright from where he’d been leaning against the counter and pulled the synth-cigarette from behind his ear, rolling it between his fingers like a meditation tool. "First condition. Whatever’s happening to you right now—this growth surge, this transformation, whatever you want to call it—you don’t fight for three full days. No sparring sessions with your sister, no drilling in the yard, no field runs, no ’light training’ that turns into you getting your ribs kicked in." His eyes narrowed. "Your body is currently rebuilding load-bearing structures at the cellular level. You put weight on scaffolding before the concrete sets, the scaffolding goes down and takes the whole goddamn building with it."

"Nel said seventy-two hours."

"Who’s Nel."

"My cardiologist."

"Uh huh." He did not press, which meant he was filing it. "Second condition. You tell Kuzmina everything you just told me, because she’s already looked at the north hallway and done the math and she’s currently sitting on her floor with a datapad pretending she isn’t."

I checked the pendant. He was right, and worse, she had heard him say it.

"Third," Braxton said, and he walked to the doorway and stopped there with his back to me. "When it goes wrong. Not if. When. You come to me before you go to Petrova, before you go to Vance, before you go to whoever’s been slipping you notes from a burner number." He glanced over his shoulder. "Yeah. I know about the notes. I don’t know what’s in them. I know your face when you read your phone and I know what a man looks like when he’s being handled."

He left.

The back door clicked shut and I stood in the kitchen with a cooling kettle and thirty-six cinnamon rolls upstairs and a supernatural cat staring at me from a stool.

I like him, Maki said. He smells like a man who has already lost everything once and decided to keep going anyway.

"Yeah."

Also you handled him.

"I told him the truth."

You told him the truth in the order that made him want to help you. Her golden eyes narrowed with satisfaction. That is handling. I have been alive three hundred years and I know a con when I taste one, Master.

I poured the coffee. It tasted exactly like burnt tires, which was comforting, because at least one thing in my life was performing to expectation.

Upstairs, a door opened. Bare feet on hardwood, and the temperature in the stairwell dropped eight degrees, and I did not have to look up to know who was coming down.

The pendant went so cold it stung.

Natalia stopped in the doorway in silk shorts and one of my shirts with her purple hair loose and the white streaks throwing back the kitchen light, and the Cryo-Lich Ring on her finger burned a pale blue that painted frost across the doorframe in a slow spreading web.

She looked at me for a while.

"Thirty channels," she said.

"Give or take."

"You kissed Emi in the kitchen while your body was actively restructuring itself, which means your baseline is unstable, which means you have no idea what your output looks like right now, which means if that had escalated you could have put her in the medical bay."

I had not thought about that.

I saw the exact moment she registered that I had not thought about that, and something in her face went from cold to something a great deal worse.

"Sit down," Natalia said. "We’re doing a full workup. Now. Before anyone else wakes up and before you touch another person in this house."