My Scumbag System

Chapter 538: Bring Your Sister

I was looking for the pattern in the formation. Natalia’s briefing had been precise and thorough, seventeen matches annotated and time-stamped, and somewhere in the data she’d noted that Reyna’s constructs clustered inward on the left when she was genuinely concerned about a threat getting through. The tells were subtle, a half-degree shift in the nearest marionette’s shoulder angle, a fractional delay in the adjustment timing.

I feinted hard left.

The two leftmost marionettes moved inward. A gap opened on the right for exactly three quarters of a second.

I was already going right.

The bat came through the gap with everything the absorbed kinetic buffer had built up behind it, Dragon Witch’s Ring burning the metal white-hot, and it caught the nearest marionette dead centre and detonated it in a shower of electrical sparks. The formation wavered, a cascade disruption as the spatial geometry collapsed, and I was inside it before Reyna could close the gap.

She was right there.

Her eyes went wide. Not with fear, with something that looked much more like recognition.

I swung.

She got her forearm up. The bat connected. Something in her arm made a sound I felt more than heard, and Reyna’s body curved away from the impact on pure athletic instinct, momentum carrying her sideways, turning what might have been a clean knockout into a stumbling retreat that still left her standing.

Barely.

Her arm hung slightly wrong at the elbow.

I’d broken something in there.

She looked at it. Then she looked at me.

"Okay," she said, which was a fascinating response to having a bone damaged.

"Reyna." I held the bat down, not posturing, just watching. Her mana reserves were low, the marionettes thinning, the electrical glow around her hands flickering with the specific instability that came from running on fumes. "You can yield."

"I can," she agreed. "I won’t."

"Your arm."

"Both my arms have always worked," she said. "I’ve never needed two." And she raised the damaged one anyway, crackling light gathering around the hand despite the angle being wrong, despite the obvious strain in her expression from the effort. "I’ve been wanting a real fight since I was fourteen. You hit as hard as I hoped."

I almost said something honest, which would have been embarrassing for both of us.

I said, "Same," instead, which was only slightly less honest.

Then Isabelle’s voice cut across the arena from the far end. "I have Tanaka."

I glanced right. Kira was down on one knee, Isabelle’s spear pressed lightly against her shoulder in the universal gesture for "I could end this and we both know it," and Kira’s hands were raised.

Isabelle raised an eyebrow at me across the distance.

Tag team rules meant both members had to be incapacitated or yielded.

Reyna heard it. Her jaw shifted. She looked at Kira, at Isabelle, at the state of her own arm, at the marionettes guttering out one by one as her mana finished its slow collapse.

She looked at me.

"One on one," she said. "Right now. No constructs. Just you and me."

I considered this for approximately half a second.

Then I looked at Isabelle, who looked back with an expression that said she had Kira completely controlled and could hold that position indefinitely if I needed her to.

"Tell me something," I said to Reyna. "You ask because you want to prove something, or because you actually want to know?"

She didn’t answer immediately. She was honest enough that lying would have taken longer. "Both," she finally said.

I rolled my neck. My ribs were complaining. My ear was still ringing slightly from the elbow. My shoulder had a quality to it that promised interesting physiotherapy conversations in the near future.

"One condition," I said.

Her chin lifted slightly.

"You stop holding back."

Something shifted in her face, and for a moment Reyna Cabana wasn’t La Sirena or the Crimson Comet or Veronica’s little sister performing on a stage built for her. She was just a girl who’d trained her entire life to fight people worth fighting and finally found one who hadn’t broken yet.

"Deal," she said.

The remaining marionettes dissolved.

She hit me in the face with her good hand and I blocked with the bat and the impact was significant enough that both of us staggered slightly.

We fought without tricks for sixty seconds.

It was brutal and honest and completely devoid of strategy in the way that the purest moments of violence sometimes are, both of us at the edge of our reserves, running on Kinetic Absorption buffs and athletic conditioning and the kind of specific human stubbornness that has no tactical justification and makes complete sense anyway.

She was faster than me. Genuinely, technically faster, the product of seventeen years of professional training.

I was stronger, the product of a divine cheat system and accumulated punishment.

She hit me six times. I absorbed every hit. My stats climbed.

I hit her twice.

The second time she didn’t get up immediately.

She got up anyway, because of course she did, one hand braced on the volcanic rock and her crimson braid coming loose and her emerald eyes burning with something that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with wanting this to mean something.

I was breathing hard.

She was breathing harder.

We looked at each other across three metres of damaged platform.

"Yield," I said.

"Make me," she said, and she was smiling.

I pointed the bat at her, Dragon Witch’s Ring glowing faintly in the afternoon light.

She raised her good fist.

Professor Hanae’s voice cut between us like a blade.

"Tanaka has yielded. The match continues as a two-on-two until conclusion. Cabana, on my count of five, if you cannot continue, I will call this."

Reyna’s eyes didn’t leave mine. "I can continue."

"One," said Hanae.

Reyna’s knees were shaking. Not much. But they were shaking. freewebnøvel.com

"Two."

I lowered the bat.

"Three."

"Reyna," I said.

She heard something in my voice she wasn’t expecting. Her expression changed.

"Four."

"You fought well," I said. Which was inadequate and also the only true thing I had available.

The shaking in her knees got worse. Her good arm lowered fractionally.

"Five."

She looked at the platform. At her arm. At the twelve thousand people in her sightline who had watched every second of this.

She looked back at me.

"Cabana yields," she said, and her voice was steady, which told me more about her than an hour of fighting had.

Hanae announced the result. The arena didn’t erupt the way it had for the preliminaries. This was quieter, the crowd processing what they’d seen, the specific kind of silence that follows something worth remembering.

Reyna walked toward me.

I walked toward her.

She stopped two feet away and extended her good hand. I shook it, and she gripped with real pressure despite everything her arm had been through in the last three minutes.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Individual events. I’ll be waiting."

"Bring your sister," I said. "I’ll say hi."