My Scumbag System-Chapter 410: F-Zero, S-Class

I fell asleep first.

I know because I remember the moment it happened, that specific threshold where thought dissolves into something formless, and the last coherent thing in my head was the weight of her against my side and the slow steady rhythm of her breathing.

No dreams. Just dark.

When I came back, the room was still night-dark and Natalia was a warm weight against my chest, one hand loose in mine, her purple hair spread across my collarbone. Her breathing had the particular depth of someone genuinely unconscious. Not the performative version she sometimes deployed when she didn’t want to have a conversation. The real thing.

I lay there for a moment and did nothing.

This was rare enough that I noticed it. The absence of calculation. Just the room and the dark and the sound of her sleeping and the distant hum of the Atoll at three in the morning, whatever skeleton crew of administrators and security worked the hours when the students were supposed to be unconscious.

Then the quiet broke.

Not a sound. More like a pressure behind my eyes, the specific sensation I’d learned to associate with the System, like someone knocking on the inside of my skull.

I eased Natalia’s hand down onto the mattress, careful not to shift her shoulders. She made a small sound and curled slightly, finding a new position without waking, and I watched her settle before I moved.

I sat up.

The room resolved around me in the dark. Natalia’s room was tidier than mine, which said something about the fundamental difference between us. Her desk had actual surface space. Her uniform hung on the hook by the door rather than draped over whatever furniture had been closest when she’d taken it off.

I touched my forearms where the burn scarring pulled the skin tight. Still sore if I pressed. Less than last week. The regenerator brace had done its work and what remained was more texture than damage, a map of the Arborist’s chamber drawn in healed skin.

I exhaled quietly and pulled up the System.

The interface materialized in the dark, that familiar blue luminescence that existed only behind my eyes, visible to no one else in the room. Nel’s presence settled around the edges of it like someone leaning over my shoulder to read along.

Good morning, she said. You lasted almost eight hours. Impressive restraint.

"Don’t start."

I make no promises. You have things to look at.

I pulled up STATUS first, the way I always did. Force of habit from the early weeks when my stats had been the most concrete thing I owned, the only evidence that any of this was real and not an extended dissociative episode.

SATORI NAKANO

Level: 3 | Title: KOGH, TSP, BK, TGB, BGS | Class: None | Schema Points: 2,015

ATTRIBUTES:

Strength: F-0 | Endurance: F-0

Dexterity: F-0 [+150] | Magic: F-0

Agility: F-0

I stared at that for a moment.

F-0 across everything. Visible F-0. The same flat line it had shown since I leveled up after the Necropolis.

Then I pulled up the secondary screen. The real one.

HIDDEN ATTRIBUTES [LEVEL 3 - MAXED MULTIPLIER ACTIVE]:

Strength: 6,250 | Endurance: 6,250

Dexterity: 6,250 [+150] | Magic: 6,250

Agility: 6,250

Hidden Multiplier: 2.5x [Level 3 Ceiling: ~7,750 per stat]

For context, Nel offered, with the tone of a woman handing someone a loaded weapon while making sustained eye contact, the average combat-rated B-Rank Hunter sits between 600 and 799 in their primary stats. You are operating at a value that, if visible, would place you in the top tier of A-Rank. Approaching the floor of S.

I let that settle.

Six weeks ago I had been fighting Braxton in the basement and losing spectacularly, my body a collection of ambitious bruises and wounded pride. I had been a C-Rank on paper and something fragile underneath it.

Now.

Now I sat in the dark at three in the morning, in a dormitory on an island that functioned as a forge for the country’s next generation of weapons, with numbers behind my eyes that would reclassify everything about my position in this world if anyone saw them.

They couldn’t see them.

That was the point.

"Level 4," I said quietly. "What does it look like."

Nel made a sound that was either contemplative or deeply satisfied. Probably both.

Assuming you max all stats before ascending again, which given your current trajectory and frankly appalling tendency to get into life-threatening situations I’d estimate as likely, Level 4 would establish a base of 11,875 per stat with a ceiling near 13,375. You would become, for lack of a more precise term, a problem requiring S-Rank response.

"And Level 5."

Don’t push your luck. A pause. 20,312 base. 21,812 ceiling. You would stop being a problem and become an event.

I thought about that.

Natalia shifted behind me, resettling without waking. The Cryo-Lich Ring on her finger caught the blue light of the interface and for a second her hand looked like it was glowing, which was appropriate because in every way that mattered it was.

Level 10 bond. Covenant. Permanent.

I’d thought about that too, in the small hours after the Necropolis when she’d been unconscious in a hospital bed and I’d had nothing but time and the particular horror of a man realizing he’d done something irreversible.

I’d made her dependent through mechanics she didn’t know existed, through a System she believed was a metaphor I’d invented for her benefit. The Nectar. The bond. The invisible architecture of connection that the gods had designed and I had wielded.

And then she had stopped a death beam with her bare will.

Because she’d refused to lose me.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I was still figuring out what to do with that. The version of me that was Kaelen Leone looked at it analytically and filed it under useful and leverage maintained. The other version, the one that was getting harder to locate the edges of, sat with it differently.

"Pull up the full titles," I said.

ACTIVE TITLES:

[King of the Glass House] — Rank: Unique

Passive: Veil of Lies (+10% manipulation effectiveness) | Curse: The Matriarch’s Gaze

[The Social Predator] — Rank: Common

Passive: Pack Dynamics | Predator’s Allure (+15% social weight)

[Blitzkrieger] — Rank: Uncommon

Passive: +8% movement and reaction speed during team operations. Coordination buffs stack faster.

[The Gardener’s Bane] — Rank: Rare

Passive: Increased damage against botanical entities. All plant life within range recognizes you as liberator or friend. Verdant Command unlocked.

[Black Gate Survivor] — Rank: Rare

Passive: Resistance to dimensional anomaly effects and psychic intrusion. Enhanced mental fortitude in irregular Gate environments.