My Scumbag System Chapter 735: The Drainage Tunnel Contingency

He breathed. Barely.

I looked at the faces around the room. Natalia, whose hand rested on the holographic table with her Ring casting frost across the wireframe tower. Skylar, who leaned against the doorframe like she did on every morning before violence. Emi, whose green aura pulsed in time with my heartbeat because she had mapped my rhythm so thoroughly that her body defaulted to it. Soomin, whose Fox pressed behind her eyes with a patience that would have terrified me six months ago and now just made me grateful. Raphael, whose fists said everything his mouth wouldn’t.

And behind them, the ones who would not enter the tower but who made the entry possible. Isabelle, running command from the van with the authority of a deposed monarch reclaiming her throne. Jacob, threading needles through digital infrastructure with the fervor of someone who had discovered their purpose three days earlier when a stranger asked him to commit a felony. Juan, asleep on the couch, whose datapads would run tactical analysis whether he was conscious or not.

"Formation check," Natalia said, and her voice shifted into the register that made walls obey. "Raphael takes point. Satori center. I hold right flank. Skylar holds left and ranges forward when terrain permits. Emi at Satori’s back at all times. Soomin scouts ahead by one floor minimum."

Each person nodded.

"If the lattice destabilizes." Natalia paused. The room temperature dropped three degrees. "If Satori’s readings spike beyond threshold, Emi calls it. Not Satori. Not me. Emi."

Emi’s chin lifted. "I’ll call it."

"If Emi calls it, Raphael extracts. You grab him and you go up. You do not stop. You do not look back. You follow Jacob’s markers to the drainage tunnel and you put him in the van and you drive to the house."

Raphael’s jaw worked. "And if whatever’s down there follows us out?"

"I stay." Natalia’s voice held no drama. No tremor. Just the flat bedrock certainty of someone who had already made the calculation and accepted the result. "Skylar stays. We hold the stairwell until you’re clear."

"That’s a suicide play."

"That’s a queen’s play."

The silence that followed had weight. Physical mass that pressed against my chest and sat on my lungs and squeezed.

I opened my mouth to object and Natalia pointed at me without looking.

"Do not."

I closed my mouth.

Skylar spoke from the doorframe. "The Key opens one door. We don’t know what’s behind it. We don’t know if there are more doors. We don’t know if the floor is a laboratory, a prison, or a weapons cache. What we know is that someone built it beneath the most surveilled building in the country and filled it with something important enough to construct an artificial Gate to protect." She pulled a knife from her thigh sheath and flipped it once. "So assume everything wants to kill us, move fast, and grab whatever isn’t nailed down."

Soomin raised her hand.

"You don’t have to raise your hand, Soomin."

"The Fox wants to know if she can eat whatever we find."

"The Fox can wait in line."

Soomin’s cheeks went pink. The Fox’s gold flickered behind her irises and retreated.

Maki shifted on my shoulder, her twin tails tightening. "The basement smells old. Even from here. Through the island and the ocean and the city. Something down there has been breathing for a very long time."

I looked at the Key in my palm. The symbols had stopped shifting. They pointed in a single direction now, all of them, like compass needles aligned to true north.

Toward the mainland. Toward the Apex Tower. Toward whatever my father had hidden beneath the feet of the woman who erased him.

"Isabelle."

"Sir."

"If we go dark for more than forty minutes, you abort. You take Jacob, Juan, and anyone else in the van and you drive to the Academy. You tell Braxton everything. All of it. The lattice, the Sector Twelve formation, Prometheus, the entity. Everything."

Her wine-red eyes held mine.

"And if you come back?"

"Then I’ll tell him myself and you can watch him yell at me."

"Acceptable." She almost smiled. "Try not to die. I’ve grown accustomed to your particular brand of catastrophe."

I shouldered my bat. The Dragon Witch’s Ring flared warm. The pendant pulsed cold, Natalia’s heartbeat transmitted across the three feet between us.

"Move out."

We moved.

The van waited on Pine Street, a white unmarked panel with tinted windows and a driver’s seat that Jacob had rigged with enough datapads to run a small intelligence agency. Isabelle claimed the passenger seat and began syncing comms before the door closed. The entry team loaded into the back: Raphael on the bench, Soomin pressed against the wall with her knees drawn up, Emi arranging her kit on the floor between her feet, Skylar already invisible in the corner she had chosen.

Natalia sat beside me. Her thigh pressed against mine. Her Ring threw cold across my sweatpants.

"Six months ago," she said without looking at me, "I wanted you dead."

"Six months ago I was worth killing."

"You’re still worth killing." Her hand found mine. Her fingers threaded through mine and squeezed once, hard enough to grind bone. "But now I’d burn the world to keep you breathing."

"That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said."

"I’ll put it on your headstone if you don’t shut up."

The van pulled away from the curb. Through the tinted windows, Onyx House shrank against the dawn sky, its peeling paint and crooked shutters and hand-drawn three-headed dog emblem growing smaller until the turn swallowed it.

Forty minutes to the ferry. One hour across the water. Twenty minutes to the Apex Tower’s service entrance.

Two hours until I put the Key in a door that shouldn’t exist and found out what my father buried beneath the heart of everything.

In my chest, the thirty-fourth primary channel hummed. The fifth node pulsed. The lattice grew.

I was becoming a door. And in two hours, I was going to walk through one.

Emi’s hand landed on my knee. Warm. Steady. Her aura bled through the contact and soothed something in my ribs that I hadn’t realized was hurting.

"I packed twelve onigiri," she said quietly. "In case we get hungry."

Raphael snorted. "We’re breaking into the VHC’s secret basement and you brought lunch."

"Proper nutrition supports cognitive function under stress."

"She’s right," Soomin whispered. The Fox grinned behind her eyes.

Skylar’s voice came from the darkness of her corner. "If I die on an empty stomach, I’m haunting all of you."