My Scumbag System-Chapter 287: A Single Ace Beats a Full House of Ghouls

I spun, bat already rising into a defensive position. A ghoul had somehow gotten past the formation—maybe it had been playing dead, maybe it had circled around through some hidden passage.

It didn’t matter.

What mattered was that it was three feet away and lunging for my throat, its jaw unhinged to an impossible angle, needle teeth glistening.

I wouldn’t make it in time. The math was brutally simple. Distance. Speed. Reaction time. The ghoul would reach me before my swing completed.

"Not today," I muttered.

I abandoned the bat swing mid-arc. Too slow. Instead, I raised my free hand and focused. The familiar rush of power flooded through my arm, invisible to everyone but me.

SEVER.

I slashed my hand horizontally through the air, channeling energy into a razor-thin plane of force. The ghoul’s momentum carried it forward into my invisible blade.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened. The creature’s face remained frozen in its hungry snarl, still reaching for me.

Then reality caught up. A perfect line appeared across its neck, impossibly clean, like a pen stroke through wet paper. The ghoul’s head slid off its shoulders and splashed into the ankle-deep water, followed by its body a moment later.

The fight settled into a rhythm after that. The vanguard created openings with overwhelming violence, the mid-guard exploited them with surgical strikes, and the rear guard...

Well, Juan was mostly trying to stay dry.

"This is absurd," he muttered, standing on tiptoe to keep his shoes from getting any wetter, which was a losing battle at this point. The water had risen another few inches since we’d started fighting, now lapping at his knees. His expression was that of a man being asked to do manual labor on his day off. "We’re in a flooded crypt fighting water zombies. On a school night. I could be sleeping right now. I could be playing video games. Instead, I’m ankle-deep—no, knee-deep in undead sewage water watching people I barely like get splattered with corpse juice."

"Less complaining, more helping!" Emi shouted from her position beside him. Her fear had been forgotten in the heat of battle, all her attention focused on maintaining her healing aura.

The soft green glow pulsed rhythmically, washing over the team like gentle waves on a shoreline, sealing minor cuts with whispered caresses, easing angry purple bruises back to unblemished skin, and keeping everyone at peak fighting capacity. Every pulse synchronized perfectly with Emi’s heartbeat, her life force literally pouring into her companions, sustaining them through what would otherwise be debilitating injuries.

"Some of us are actually working here!" she snapped, beads of sweat forming along her hairline from the continuous strain of maintaining the healing field. Her normally cheerful expression had hardened into something more determined, more focused—the face of someone discovering their own strength in the crucible of necessity.

Juan sighed with the bone-deep weariness of a middle-aged tax accountant being asked to work weekends during the height of audit season. His entire body seemed to deflate before my eyes, shoulders slumping dramatically, head dropping forward until his chin nearly touched his chest, as though the very concept of effort was physically weighing him down. "Fine," he muttered, the word carrying all the enthusiasm of a man climbing the steps to his own execution.

He pulled a single playing card from his pocket—the ace of spades, its surface scuffed from use but still pristine enough to catch the bioluminescent light. He held it between two fingers with the casual grip of a man who’d done this a thousand times before.

A new swarm was approaching through the water. Not Retainers this time—something smaller, faster. Leech-like creatures the size of small dogs, their bodies segmented and glistening, their mouths just rings of teeth that spiraled down into bottomless gullets. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds, skimming across the water’s surface in a living carpet of hunger.

Juan flicked his wrist with the same energy one might use to swat a fly.

The card spun through the air in a lazy arc, tumbling end over end before splashing down in the center of the swarm. For a moment, nothing happened. The leeches continued their advance, completely ignoring the piece of laminated paper floating among them.

Then—

CRACK.

The water lit up like a plasma globe.

Blue-white electricity arced across the surface in jagged forks of lightning, finding every leech within a ten-foot radius with unerring accuracy. The creatures convulsed violently, their segmented bodies locking up as thousands of volts coursed through their primitive nervous systems.

Some burst from the inside out. Others simply... cooked, their flesh blackening and curling in the space of a heartbeat.

The water frothed and steamed. The smell of ozone cut through the dungeon’s rot-stench like a knife. When the electrical storm finally subsided, the surface was covered in floating, twitching bodies—blackened shapes that had been living weapons of parasitic destruction three seconds ago.

"Water conducts electricity," Juan said, adjusting his collar with an expression of profound boredom, like he hadn’t just casually annihilated an entire mini-boss swarm with a single card. "Our uniforms work as insulators better than rubber. Basic science. Can we go home now?"

I stared at him.

The card. The kinetic charge. The water as a conductor for the electrical discharge.

Since when could Juan do that? I knew his Aspect was versatile, but this was something else entirely. A level of creative application that suggested depths to the lazy genius that I hadn’t even begun to plumb.

Note to self, I thought, filing the information away for later analysis. Juan is significantly more dangerous than he lets on. Also significantly more useful. Must exploit both facts.

"Not yet," I said, gesturing to the corridor ahead where more splashes were beginning to echo. The welcome party wasn’t done with us—not by a long shot. "We have a scoreboard to top."

"This would be so much easier if I could just nap through it," Juan grumbled, but he was already pulling out another card, this one the three of hearts. "Wake me when we reach the boss room."

"You could try showing a little enthusiasm," Emi suggested, her healing aura flickering as she redirected it toward Hikari, whose arm wounds were finally getting attention. "This is supposed to be exciting! We’re real Hunters now! Fighting monsters! Saving the world!"

"The world," Juan said flatly, "can save itself. I’m here because the alternative was failing out and having to get a real job."