My Scumbag System

The Fox dropped from the roof onto the creature’s face like a white comet, all claws and tails and feral joy. Six needle-sharp points sank into the creature’s jaw and held. The A-Rank screamed again, that frequency-word vibrating through my skeleton, and tried to shake the Fox loose. Soomin’s tails wrapped around its horn-like protrusions and locked.

Four seconds.

I planted my feet on the creature’s trapezius, raised the bat overhead with both hands, and drove it straight down into the control sigil.

Spatial Cleave. Ember. Every ounce of accumulated Kinetic Absorption buff. Every permanent percentage point Rockstar Made had granted. The Dragon Witch’s Ring blazing so hot the metal went white and the air around it combusted. All of it channeled through a point no wider than the bat’s end cap, focused on one spot where reality had been carved open and something foreign had been bolted into place.

The sigil shattered.

The light that erupted from the breach was not light. It was information. Dense, compressed, alien data that flooded outward in a sphere of pure white that erased shadows and bleached the dawn sky to bone. I felt it wash through me and the integration recognized it, parsed it, translated the edges of what my human brain could process.

A frequency. A signature. A return address.

Someone had signed their work.

The creature convulsed beneath me, every joint locking simultaneously as the control node’s destruction cascaded through its nervous system. I jumped clear before it toppled, hitting the pavement in a roll that ended with my back against someone’s mailbox. The mailbox was shaped like a dolphin. I took a moment to appreciate this.

The A-Rank fell like a building with its demolition charges fired in sequence. First the good leg gave out. Then the torso twisted. Then the arms went limp and the massive head dropped forward and the whole structure simply collapsed, spreading across the intersection in a landslide of dead meat and broken bone. The carved symbols on its spurs flickered twice and went dark.

Behind the creature, the seam pulsed.

Sixty signatures still queued behind the membrane.

"Nat. Close the seam."

"I can’t. It’s not a normal Gate. There’s no boss inside. There’s nothing to kill that makes it close."

"Jacob?"

"She’s right. The architecture is wrong. The seam is being held open from the other side. It’s like someone propped open a door with a brick and the brick is in another dimension."

I stared at the tear in reality hanging above the storm drain. White light bleeding from its edges. Things moving behind the membrane. Waiting.

The Olympian Skeleton Key sat in my inventory. One use per week. Opens any door. Even metaphysical ones. Even doors propped open by trans-dimensional bricks placed by people who built monsters in their spare time.

"Nat. I’m going to close the seam. Pull everyone back to the pharmacy. Full retreat. Three-block perimeter."

"What are you going to do?"

"Something stupid."

"Be more specific. You do many stupid things."

I pulled the Key from inventory. The ancient bronze materialized in my palm, warm and heavy and humming with recognition. The green patina caught the white light from the seam and threw it back in fragments. The symbols on its surface rearranged themselves, rotating into configurations I’d never seen before, responding to the seam’s frequency like a tuning fork finding its match.

"Satori." Natalia’s voice had gone quiet. The bond between us was wide open and her fear poured through it like ice water. "Don’t walk through that door."

"I’m not walking through it. I’m closing it."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

The Key pulsed once. Twice. Three times. Each pulse synchronized with the seam’s oscillation, matching its frequency, cancelling it out. I stepped toward the tear in reality with the Key extended and felt the membrane resist. The creatures behind it sensed what was happening. Their movement became frantic, sixty or eighty bodies pressing against the dimensional barrier, desperate to push through before the door shut.

I pressed the Key against the seam.

The effect was instantaneous. Reality snapped back together like a rubber band released from tension. The white light contracted to a point, then a line, then nothing. The air pressure equalized with a pop that made everyone’s ears ring. The queued signatures vanished from Jacob’s readings. The pre-formation lattice that someone had carefully constructed beneath the asphalt dissolved, its energy dissipating into the atmosphere like heat from a cooling engine.

The Key went cold in my hand. Used. Done. One per week.

I stood in an intersection littered with dead monsters and broken ice, surrounded by smoke that was already beginning to thin. Dawn painted the empty buildings in shades of gold. Somewhere a car alarm wailed. The community center’s daycare sign swung gently in a breeze that smelled of ozone and copper and something sweet that I couldn’t name.

"Seam is closed," Jacob reported. His voice was shaking. "All readings normalizing. Pre-formation signatures at zero. We’re clear. We’re actually clear."

Emi’s comm clicked on. "Satori, your heart rate just dropped to forty-seven. That’s medically concerning."

"I’m relaxed."

"You just killed an A-Rank and closed an artificial Gate with a magic key. Nobody should be relaxed."

"I’m a relaxing person."

"You are the least relaxing person I have ever met and I once spent three hours with Raphael in a confined space."

The Fox howled from somewhere above, a sound of frustrated hunger at prey denied. Soomin’s voice broke through a moment later, small and apologetic. "Sorry. She’s upset about the door closing. She says the things behind it smelled delicious."

"Tell her I’ll find her something else to eat."

Akari materialized beside me. Her chains had retracted but golden light still clung to her fingertips. She looked at the dead A-Rank, looked at me, looked at the empty space where the seam had been.

"I’m going to need a significantly larger cut than we discussed."

"Akari."

"I’m serious. That thing was at least A-Rank. The VHC pays Guild Standard plus hazard plus anomaly bonus for A-Rank neutralization. I did the math. You owe me approximately forty-seven thousand credits for my contribution tonight."

"You tripped it."

"I tripped an A-Rank that would have killed you if it had stayed standing. That’s called being essential. Forty-seven thousand."

"Twenty."

"Thirty-five."

"Twenty-five and I buy your dinner for a week."

"Done. But I pick the restaurants."

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