My Scumbag System Chapter 748: A Rash Across Valoria

I let her stay.

Mistake number twelve hundred of the week, but I’d stopped keeping count somewhere around the time my father signed paperwork beneath the most powerful woman in Valoria while I slept three hundred miles away with no idea that Tuesday at five a.m. was when I got played like a fucking fiddle.

Maki’s body temperature sat at a hundred and two on a good day. Right now, with her draped across me like the world’s most expensive fur coat decided to go human, it was closer to a hundred and five. The heat bled through my shirt and into the lattice, and the thirty four channels hummed at a frequency that almost felt good if you ignored what it was building toward.

"Master is thinking too loud."

"Master is thinking the right amount."

"No." She shifted. Her hip pressed against my stomach and her legs tangled over mine in a way that should’ve been awkward but somehow worked because cats did not give a single shit about geometry. "Master is thinking about jars and doors and fathers and trying to solve all of it before Sunday with two days of sitting still and nowhere to put hands."

"I could put my hands somewhere."

She purred. The vibration went through her whole body and into mine, and the pendant flared hot because of course Natalia was awake two rooms over, because Natalia was always awake when I was doing something that could technically be filed under bad decisions.

"Master likes dangerous things," Maki said.

"Master is a dangerous thing."

"Mm." Her fingers walked up my chest, slow, testing each rib. "This body is breaking down its own structures and rebuilding them into something better. Faster. Sharper. Three hundred years ago, Maki watched a sword monk do this to himself with prayer and iron needles. He died on day six when his heart forgot how to beat."

"Comforting."

"Master has six women who will not let Master die." She tapped my sternum with one claw-tipped finger, directly over the fifth node. "And Maki. Who will bite anyone who tries to interrupt."

The pendant went from hot to scalding.

Natalia’s voice crackled through my skull like ice water down the back of my shirt. The bond carried her mood better than words ever could, and her mood right now was get the naked cat off you or I freeze her tails to the floor and leave her there until dinner.

I sat up. Maki slid off me like water and landed on her feet with both tails swishing through the air.

"Blue one was more fun," she said.

"Blue one also isn’t currently threatening property damage via jealous telekinesis."

"Purple one is possessive."

"Purple one spent six hours thinking I was going to walk into a door and disappear forever. She’s earned possessive."

Maki considered this with the gravity of someone who had lived three centuries and therefore understood context better than most humans managed in eighty years.

"Master should feed purple one," she said. "And blue one. And knife one. And fox one. And gold one. And lightning one." She paused. "And Maki. Maki is also hungry."

"You ate an entire fish yesterday."

"That was yesterday."

The logic was airtight. I grabbed a hoodie off the floor and pulled it on, and Maki dissolved back into shadow with a pleased sound that suggested she’d accomplished exactly what she wanted.

Downstairs the heavy bag stopped.

I counted to ten. When it didn’t start again, I knew Raphael had either collapsed or decided to take his fists somewhere else before they broke something permanent.

The house was too quiet.

Not the normal quiet of seventeen people sleeping. The other kind. The kind where everyone’s awake but pretending they’re not because acknowledging what happened in the last twelve hours meant admitting that we’d walked into a war without noticing and now we were standing in the middle of it wondering when someone was going to shoot.

I walked downstairs.

The common room was still a disaster zone. Schematics on the coffee table. Emi’s abandoned cinnamon rolls on a plate that someone had covered with a dish towel. Soomin asleep in the armchair with her arms wrapped around her knees and her face pressed into the cushion. Bartholomew still climbing his glass with the single-minded determination of something that had outlived empires and would outlive this too.

The kitchen smelled like burnt coffee and something floral that meant Isabelle had made tea at some point between basement infiltration and dawn.

Jacob sat at the counter with his tablet and three external drives daisy-chained together like a bomb waiting for someone to cut the wrong wire. His eyes had that bloodshot look that happened when caffeine became a personality trait and sleep became theoretical.

"You should be in bed," I said.

"You should be not telling me what to do."

Fair.

I poured coffee. It tasted like Juan had made it, which meant it tasted like punishment for sins I hadn’t committed yet.

Jacob’s fingers moved across the tablet with the frantic energy of someone who’d found a problem he could actually solve and was going to solve it even if it killed him.

"The coordinates are Gates," he said. No preamble. No context. Just information delivered at mach speed because his brain had three gears and they were all fast. "Every single entry after number two thousand is a coordinate pair. Latitude, longitude, depth if applicable. I cross-referenced them against VHC’s official Gate registry and got four hundred and twelve matches. Four hundred and twelve naturally occurring Gates that appeared in the last twenty three years."

I sat down. Put the mug on the counter. Stared at the numbers on his screen that were probably supposed to mean something but currently just looked like evidence.

"The rest?"

"Three thousand six hundred and ninety seven unregistered Gates that do not exist in any official documentation anywhere in Valoria or the thirteen neighboring countries."

The coffee sat in my stomach like lead.

"He opened three thousand Gates."

"He logged three thousand Gates." Jacob looked up. His glasses had slid down his nose and he shoved them back up with one finger. "The log doesn’t specify if he opened them or if he found them after someone else opened them, but given that his signature is on every single entry and the entries include integration percentages that match the people in the tanks, I’m going with theory number one where your dad has been popping dimensional holes in reality like bubble wrap for twenty three years and someone has been letting him do it."

"Seraphina."

"Seraphina." He turned the tablet. Showed me a map with three thousand six hundred and ninety seven red dots scattered across Valoria like a rash. Some clustered in cities. More in the mountains. A concerning number offshore in patterns that suggested someone had been testing optimal oceanic depth for Gate stability.

"This is a weapon," Jacob said. His voice had gone flat. "Not metaphorically. Actually. Your father built a database of artificial Gate coordinates and Seraphina Vance kept it in her basement for twenty three years, and whoever owns this information owns proof that the entire political foundation of the VHC is fiction."

I drank more coffee. It didn’t help.

"Copy everything to an air-gapped drive and bury it somewhere that’s not this house."