My Scumbag System Chapter 727: More Than an S-Rank

"Channels show as cold gaps," she said quietly. "Mana runs warm. Frost won’t hold over an active line, so when I ice a limb I get a negative image. It’s a party trick. My father taught me when I was nine so I could find my own overload points." Her thumb hovered over my forearm. "You should have four lines through here. Radial, ulnar, and two subsidiaries that feed the palm."

"How many are there."

"Nine."

The frost sat on my skin in a web with nine dark rivers running through it and one of them ran diagonally from the wrist to the outside of the elbow, which I am fairly sure is not where anything in the human body goes.

"Do it again," I said.

She did it again. Same nine.

"Do the other arm."

Eleven.

"That’s asymmetrical," Natalia said, and her voice had gone flat in the way it does when she is genuinely frightened and refuses to give it anywhere to go. "Nothing in a body is asymmetrical at the channel level. Not naturally. Aspect trauma can scar a line but it does not add one, and it certainly does not add seven that run against the grain of the musculature."

Nel arrived like she’d been waiting in the wings for her cue, which she had.

Would you like the actual count, or would you prefer to keep watching your girlfriend do haruspicy with frost.

"Both."

Thirty-one primary channels. Forty-four secondaries. Your July intake recorded fourteen and nineteen. Nel’s voice went thoughtful, which from her is worse than mockery. The distribution is what I would flag, though. They are not clustered around musculature or organ systems the way a human network organizes. They are running lattice.

"Lattice."

Yes.

"Say more than that."

I would love to. I cannot. Nel paused. Something about that sentence is above my clearance, and I want you to understand how much I hate telling you that.

"Satori." Natalia’s hand closed around my wrist and pulled. Not gently. "You went somewhere. Your eyes did the thing. Who are you talking to."

"My cardiologist."

The temperature dropped again and the water in the drain on the floor cracked as it froze.

"Fine," I said. "Sorry. Nel. The System. She counted for me."

"And?"

"Thirty-one primaries. Forty-four secondaries."

Natalia let go of my wrist and sat down on the mats. Just sat, right there in silk shorts on a rubber floor, with her back against the leg press and her hands loose in her lap and her Ring throwing that pale blue light up onto her face.

"That is more than an S-Rank," she said.

"Is it."

"My father has been a B-Rank for nineteen years and he has twenty-two primaries. Isabelle has twenty-six and everyone at the Academy talks about her like she’s a natural disaster in a school uniform. Celeste has twenty-nine and her sister runs the country." She looked up at me. "You have thirty-one and you were a Zero eight months ago."

"Nine months. I want credit for the whole nine."

"Do not," she said, "make me laugh right now."

Feet on the stairs.

Emi came down with a tray, because of course she did, because the woman deals with existential terror by carbohydrate, and she stopped four steps from the bottom when she saw the shape of the room. Me shirtless on the bench. Natalia on the floor. Maki in my hoodie with her tails out. Frost webbing across both my arms in a pattern with holes in it.

"Okay," Emi said. "Okay. Okay okay okay. Nobody move, I am going to put this down and then I am going to be a professional."

She put the tray down on the medical cart and then she was all business, and I never get tired of the switch. Emi Aoyama out in the world apologizes to furniture. Emi Aoyama with a patient on a bench is the calmest person in any building she has ever been in.

"Natalia. What have you got."

"Frost negative on both arms. Nine on the left, eleven on the right. Thirty-one primaries total per his internal count."

"Internal count from what."

"He has a cardiologist," Natalia said, with the exact inflection of a woman filing a complaint she has already lost.

"Right. Sure. That’s normal." Emi’s hands came up and green light bled out of her palms and she pressed both to my chest. "Deep breath in for me. Hold it. Okay, let it out slow."

The aura went into me and it went deeper than it has ever gone, and I felt her flinch through it.

"Emi."

"Shh. Counting."

She counted for a long time. Longer than she should have needed. Her brows drew together, and then they came apart, and then her eyes went wide and unfocused and she pulled her hands back and stared at them like they had lied to her.

"What," Natalia said.

"They’re not random." Emi’s voice came out small. "I thought it was chaos. Structural expansion under stress, that’s what I told him this morning, and expansion under stress is messy, it grows toward demand, it thickens where you use it and thins where you don’t." She looked at me. "Yours is not growing toward demand. It’s growing toward a shape."

The fluorescent over the squat rack flickered.

"What shape," I said.

Emi wiped her palms on her shorts, twice, and did not answer, and got the tablet off the cart instead and started drawing with her finger.

She drew fast. Sloppy. A trunk line up the spine. Branches off it that did not branch like a nervous system branches, but split at angles and then rejoined, closing loops. Four heavy nodes, one at each shoulder and one at each hip, and a fifth at the sternum where a pendant currently sat cold enough to sting.

She turned the tablet around.

I looked at it and my stomach dropped straight through the floor and kept going.

"Jacob," I said.

"What?"

"Get Jacob. Now."