My Scumbag System-Chapter 286: Symphony of the Scumbag

Pale, bloated humanoid figures erupted from the surface like nightmares breaking through the membrane of a bad dream.

They came from everywhere—in front, behind, from the sides, rising from the murk in numbers that defied easy counting.

Their skin was gray-green and peeling, sloughing off in sheets to reveal pale, bloodless muscle underneath. Their eyes were milky white and sightless, but somehow they knew exactly where we were, their blind gazes fixed on us with hungry intensity.

Where their mouths should have been were gaping maws that stretched far too wide, unhinged jaws lined with row upon row of needle-like teeth that glistened with something that wasn’t saliva.

Webbed fingers ended in claws that could probably gut a man with a casual swipe.

They wore the tattered, rotted remnants of ancient servant livery, scraps of fabric that might once have been fine silk now reduced to moldering rags.

Drowned Retainers. Just like the briefing said. D-Rank aquatic ghouls.

"Less taxonomy, more killing!" I shouted as the first wave lunged at us, reaching hands outstretched to grab and drag and drown.

Raphael met the attack head-on.

He didn’t even try to dodge. That wasn’t his style. Defense was for cowards, in his book—you didn’t win fights by not getting hit, you won them by hitting harder. Instead, he plunged both fists directly into the water, channeling every ounce of kinetic energy he’d been building since we entered the corridor.

The release was catastrophic.

A shockwave rippled outward from the point of impact, invisible but devastating. The physics were brutal and beautiful in their simplicity. Water, being incompressible, carried the force with near-perfect transmission, amplifying it into something terrifying.

Three ghouls simply came apart.

Their waterlogged bodies couldn’t withstand the hydraulic pressure. They burst like rotten melons dropped from a great height, their bloated flesh rupturing in sprays of pale tissue and black ichor. Limbs separated from torsos. Skulls cracked open like eggs. One ghoul’s head simply popped off its neck, launching into the air like a particularly disgusting cork before splashing down somewhere in the darkness.

"Hell yeah!" Raphael roared, his amber eyes wild with battle-lust, reflecting the chaos he’d just created. "Who wants some?! Come on! I’ve got plenty more where that came from!"

Not to be outdone, Hikari swung her flail in a wide, sweeping arc.

The weapon’s head—easily thirty pounds of enchanted metal covered in glowing spikes—moved so fast it cut a whistling sound through the stagnant air. The momentum she’d built up, enhanced by her Aspect’s virtual mass effect, made it hit like something weighing ten times as much.

When it connected with the water’s surface, it created a miniature tidal wave. The displaced liquid crashed into a cluster of four ghouls, catching them completely off-guard. They were lifted off their feet and hurled backward, tumbling end over end through the water before slamming into the far wall with bone-shattering impacts that left dark smears on the ancient stone.

"Smaaaash!" Hikari yelled, her smile never faltering even as one particularly fast ghoul got close enough to rake its claws across her arm. The creature’s nails opened three parallel lines in her flesh, blood welling up immediately.

She didn’t even acknowledge the wound. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Instead, she headbutted the thing so hard its skull caved in. There was a wet crunch, a spray of something dark and viscous, and then she was already spinning into her next attack, laughing with genuine delight as she went.

I could see why these two were our vanguard. They didn’t just fight; they created chaos. Walls of violence that nothing could pass through without being utterly destroyed. Between Raphael’s explosive kinetics and Hikari’s devastating impacts, the front line became a meat grinder that the Retainers kept feeding themselves into with mindless persistence.

But chaos, while effective, wasn’t always efficient.

Raphael’s next shockwave went wide, the force of it nearly catching Isabelle in the splash zone. She had to leap backward to avoid the hydraulic pressure, losing her perfect striking position and forcing her to start building momentum for her Aspect from scratch. Her wine-colored eyes flickered with irritation, though her face remained composed.

Hikari’s wild swings, while devastating, had no regard for friendly fire. Natalia had to constantly redirect her telekinetic attacks to avoid intersecting with the flail’s unpredictable arcs, her concentration fragmenting as she tried to track both enemy positions and her ally’s chaotic movements.

We were winning. That much was clear. Bodies were piling up, the water turning dark with spilled ichor, the number of attacking ghouls diminishing with each passing second.

But it was ugly.

And in a Gate, messy got you killed. Every ounce of energy spent on poor coordination was energy you wouldn’t have when the real threats showed up. Every injury sustained from friendly fire was healing Emi would have to expend. Every moment of chaos was a moment we weren’t making progress toward the boss room.

We needed to be better.

I felt something stir within me. A warmth that started in my chest and spread outward, settling over my shoulders like a mantle I hadn’t known I was wearing. The [Kingmaker’s Aura] pulsed, warm and heavy, like a crown suddenly materializing on my brow—invisible to the eye but impossible to ignore.

The sensation was strange. Powerful. Like I’d suddenly gained access to a muscle I’d never known I had.

I could feel them. All of them. Not their thoughts, nothing so invasive, but their... presence. Their potential. Like I was holding a fistful of puppet strings, except the puppets were also masters of their own movements, and the strings were made of something like mutual understanding.

My teammates were scattered notes, each playing their own melody. Beautiful individually, but discordant together.

I could make them sing.

"Raphael, left flank! Three o’clock!" I barked, my voice carrying a weight it hadn’t possessed before. An authority that bypassed conscious thought and went straight to the lizard brain—the ancient part of human cognition that recognized pack hierarchy, that knew when an alpha was speaking and demanded compliance.

His head snapped toward me. For just a fraction of a second, something flickered in those wild amber eyes—recognition, maybe, or submission. Then he was moving, pivoting on his heel with surprising grace for such a bruiser, redirecting his next shockwave exactly where I’d indicated.

"Hikari, center smash! Create a gap in their formation!"

Her response was instantaneous. The massive flail swung in a perfect overhead arc, all that chaotic energy focused into a single devastating blow. It came down like the hammer of an angry god, and where it struck, ghouls died.

"Isabelle, suppress the archers on the ledge! Upper right quadrant, six targets!"

I’d spotted them a moment ago—skeletal figures that weren’t Retainers, their bones fused with coral and rusted armor. Calcified Wardens, but these ones carried primitive bows, positioning themselves on a natural stone shelf that jutted from the wall about twenty feet up.

Isabelle’s spear was already moving before I finished speaking. Green wind screamed as she launched it in a blur of motion, guiding its trajectory with her Aspect. The weapon took the first archer through the skull, continued through its body, and impaled the one behind it. She recalled the spear with a gesture, adjusting its path mid-flight to slash through three more on the return journey.

"Natalia, lift and drop! Clear the center!"

Her hands rose, fingers spread, and I felt her telekinetic power surge through my awareness like heat from a bonfire. Five ghouls were lifted from the water in one smooth motion, their waterlogged bodies rotating slowly in her invisible grip. For a moment, they hung there, suspended and helpless, milky eyes somehow managing to convey confusion.

Then she brought her hands down with a vicious gesture.

The ghouls slammed back into the water with enough force to send spray shooting ten feet in every direction. But she hadn’t just dropped them—she’d driven them down, using her telekinesis like a hydraulic press. The impacts didn’t just kill them. It turned them into paste, into smears of organic matter that scattered across the water’s surface like oil.

Everyone was moving in sync now, their powers synchronized in a way that magnified their individual effectiveness exponentially. Raphael’s shockwaves created openings that Hikari exploited with her devastating charges. Isabelle’s ranged attacks eliminated threats before they could get close enough to complicate the melee. Natalia’s crowd control kept the enemy formations broken and disorganized.

It wasn’t mind control. I wasn’t puppeting their bodies or overriding their wills. It was more like... I was a conductor and they were virtuoso musicians, finally playing from the same sheet music. Each of them was still themselves, still making their own choices, but somehow my commands provided a framework that let them slot their individual brilliance into a greater whole.

The [Kingmaker’s Aura] wasn’t making them stronger. It was making us stronger. Together.

"Satori, behind you!"