My Scumbag System Chapter 734: The Common Room War Council

Five days.

Five days of Natalia’s handwriting filling notebooks. Five days of Emi’s aura sweeps every eight hours on the dot, her green light sinking into my chest and coming back with numbers that made her lips press into a thin line she thought I couldn’t read. Five days of Skylar sharpening knives on the back porch without speaking, her silence louder than Jaime’s entire motivational catalog. Five days of Soomin’s seashell charm clicking against her gauntlets as she ran the rooftop route Jacob had mapped, the Fox’s blue fire flickering behind her eyes whenever she passed my window.

Five days of my body building itself into something that terrified every person I loved.

The lattice had grown. Emi’s last sweep at oh four hundred this morning counted thirty-four primary channels and forty-nine secondaries. Three more primaries and five more secondaries than Monday. The growth curve had stabilized into a steady upward slope that Jacob’s models projected would reach structural completion in approximately eleven days if left unchecked.

Eleven days until I became a door.

I stood in my room at oh five thirty on Friday morning, pulling the black reinforced suit over limbs that felt wrong in ways I had stopped trying to articulate. The fabric sat differently against skin that ran two degrees hotter than human baseline. The Dragon Witch’s Ring pulsed on my finger like a second heartbeat. My bat leaned against the wall where it always leaned, scarred and dented and smelling faintly of things that used to be alive.

Bartholomew ate his lettuce.

The Skeleton Key sat in my palm, bronze warm against skin, its surface covered in symbols that shifted when I blinked. One use per week. I had burned Friday’s charge closing the Sector Twelve seam. Seven days later, fully recharged, and today was the day.

Sublevel Eleven.

Beneath the Apex Tower. Beneath Seraphina Vance’s office. Beneath the Insight Division and the Sanctions teams and every security protocol the most powerful woman in Valoria had spent twenty years constructing to keep people like me from reaching whatever she had buried down there.

I picked up the bat.

Maki appeared on my shoulder in cat form, her twin tails wrapping around my neck. One gold eye opened.

"Tuna after?"

"If we survive."

"Acceptable terms."

The hallway was dark. Five forty-five and the house breathed around me, sixteen people sleeping in various configurations of exhaustion and anxiety. I mapped them by the heat their bodies threw through walls. Raphael in the basement, awake and hitting the bag at a tempo that said he had not slept. Jacob in the common room, curled around his air-gapped drive like a dragon guarding a hoard of ones and zeros. Juan on the couch. Jaime in bed, probably dreaming about deltoids.

I descended the stairs without making them creak. A skill from Kaelen’s life that had saved my ass more times than any Gacha pull.

The common room had been transformed. Natalia’s work. The coffee table was gone, replaced by a holographic projection of the Apex Tower rendered in blue wireframe that rotated slowly in the pre-dawn darkness. Around it, seven chairs arranged in a formation that matched the entry team plus two command positions. On the table beside the projector: seven comms units, a medical kit with Emi’s handwriting on every label, and a plate of onigiri covered in plastic wrap with a note that read EAT BEFORE YOU DIE in blue marker.

I ate three.

They were perfect. Salmon filling with a hint of something sweet that I would never identify and Emi would never reveal.

Footsteps on the stairs. Multiple sets, coordinated without discussion. They had been awake for longer than I realized.

Natalia appeared first. Purple combat suit. Hair in the tactical braid. The Cryo-Lich Ring throwing blue sparks in the darkness. Cel’s custom gloves covering both hands. A bruise on her jaw from the A-Rank had faded to yellow-green and she wore it like jewelry.

Behind her, Skylar. Hood up. Carbon-fiber trench knives strapped to both thighs. Headphones around her neck, not over her ears. She met my eyes and gave the smallest nod in human history.

Emi came next, her medical kit already assembled over one shoulder, the straps cutting across a chest covered in a standard combat suit that someone had sewn with blue thread at the seams. Her sapphire hair was pulled into twin braids that swayed when she walked. Her healing aura pulsed faintly beneath her skin, green light bleeding through the veins in her wrists.

Soomin descended like a ghost. Pink hair loose. Silver gauntlets on. The seashell charm from her mother hanging around her neck. Her gradient-blue eyes flickered gold at the edges where the Fox pressed close to the surface, eager and hungry and held on a leash made entirely of trust.

Raphael emerged from the basement stairwell with knuckles wrapped in fresh tape. His amber eyes swept the room, found me, and held. He cracked his neck. The sound echoed off every wall.

"We doing this?"

"We’re doing this."

He grunted. Satisfaction.

The door opened and Isabelle entered from the front porch, already dressed in full combat gear with her spear across her back and a tablet in one hand. Her wine-red hair caught the first grey light leaking through the windows. She had been outside since four, running the perimeter check she had designed on Tuesday.

"External comms are clean. No surveillance anomalies within three kilometers. The van Jacob sourced is parked at the service entrance on Pine Street. The plates are registered to a catering company that dissolved six months ago." She placed the tablet on the holographic table. "I’ve confirmed the extraction route twice. The tunnel beneath the Apex Tower’s loading dock feeds into the old municipal drainage system. If you need to leave in a hurry, you follow the green markers Jacob placed on Tuesday night."

Jacob appeared at the kitchen doorframe holding a thermos that smelled like weaponized caffeine.

"I placed seventy-three markers. They glow in the dark. I tested them with Malachi because he can see in complete darkness and he confirmed they’re visible from a prone position which is relevant if you’re crawling." He took a breath that lasted four seconds. "The municipal system maps are loaded on everyone’s comms. I’ve also hacked into the building’s internal sensor net and created a thirty-second loop on floors nine through eleven. The loop activates when you enter the service elevator on Sublevel Three. It will hold for approximately forty minutes before someone notices the timestamp discrepancy."

"Jacob."

"Yes?"

"Breathe."