My Scumbag System

Chapter 618: The Old Man’s Game

A chimera. A hybrid. A monster stitched together from the souls of two men who’d never met and never would.

Great. Love that for me.

"The folder." I stood up and grabbed the research notes. "You said this is my only advantage going into the meeting with Seraphina."

"She knows something is wrong with you. The growth rates. The impossible manifestation. The abilities that don’t match your registered Aspect. She’s assembling a case, and when she has enough evidence, she’ll act."

"Act how?"

"Best case?" Finch’s voice was clinical, methodical. "She extends an offer. You work for the VHC directly, under her personal supervision. You submit to controlled testing. Allow their researchers to analyze and document the precise mechanisms behind what your father achieved. If you’re valuable enough—and I believe you will be—she might even provide resources to accelerate your development."

His expression darkened.

"Worst case? She determines you’re an existential threat to the established order and gives the command. The Sanctions Division receives your file, and within seventy-two hours, Satori Nakano suffers a tragic training accident. Gate breach. Equipment malfunction. The details won’t matter because there won’t be enough of you left to question the official report."

The Sanctions Division. The VHC’s ghost operatives. The ones who removed problems too politically volatile for daylight. I’d read about them in passing—always as footnotes, always in the context of "unfortunate incidents" that had eliminated troublesome S-Ranks who’d gotten too ambitious.

"So what’s in this folder that keeps me breathing?"

"Leverage." Finch tapped the pages now resting in my hand. "Irrefutable documentation that Project Prometheus was real. That the VHC didn’t just fund experimental research into artificial Aspect manifestation—they bankrolled it, supervised it, and then systematically buried every trace when the ethical implications became too explosive to contain. This folder proves that Seraphina Vance’s own organization engineered the precise conditions that led to your existence."

I understood immediately.

"Mutually assured destruction."

"Precisely." A grim smile touched his lips. "If she moves to expose or eliminate you, you release the research. The consequences would be catastrophic. The entire societal framework of post-Rupture civilization depends on a single foundational axiom: Aspects are natural phenomena. Genetic lottery. Divine blessing or evolutionary mutation, depending on who you ask. But always natural. Always immutable."

He leaned forward slightly.

"But if the world learned that manifestation could be artificially triggered? That controlled induction of Aspects through exotic particle exposure was not only theoretically possible but had been successfully demonstrated? That the seventy-two percent of humanity classified as Zeroes haven’t been locked out of power because they lack some mystical genetic prerequisite, but because the technology to unlock their latent potential has been deliberately suppressed by the same institutions claiming to protect them?"

"Mass uprising." I said it flatly. Stating fact, not speculation. "Every Zero in Valoria—hell, globally—would demand access to the process. The Hunter monopoly collapses overnight."

"At minimum." Finch smiled thinly. "Seraphina Vance is many things, but she’s not stupid. She’ll recognize the threat those documents represent. And she’ll be forced to negotiate rather than eliminate."

I looked at the folder. At the equations and diagrams and handwritten notes of a man who’d turned his own son into a test subject.

"Why give this to me?" I asked again. "What do you get out of it?"

Finch was quiet for a long moment.

"Kenji was my friend. The only real friend I ever had in this wretched industry. The VHC took him from me, either through death or disappearance. They erased his legacy. Buried his work. Pretended he never existed." His voice hardened. "If his research succeeds, if his son proves that everything they’ve built is based on lies, then at least something of Kenji survives. At least his sacrifice meant something."

Revenge disguised as justice. The oldest motivation in human history.

I understood that better than most.

"Thank you," I said. And meant it.

Finch waved dismissively. "Don’t thank me yet. You still have to survive Thursday’s meeting. And whoever stole my files two months ago is still out there, working toward goals I can’t predict."

"Any guesses?"

"Several. All of them bad." He reached into his desk and produced a business card. Plain white. A phone number and nothing else. "If you survive the next week, call me. I may have more information by then."

I took the card and slipped it into my pocket alongside the folder.

The candles had burned down to stumps. The room smelled like smoke and old paper and the particular mustiness of secrets kept too long in the dark. Somewhere outside, Maki was probably getting bored and considering whether any of the local rats looked tasty.

"One more thing," Finch said as I reached the door. "The transferred consciousness. The criminal personality you inherited. How much of your current behavior is his influence versus your own choices?"

I thought about it. Really thought about it.

The manipulation. The ruthlessness. The willingness to use people and discard them when they stopped being useful. Those were Kaelen’s traits. His instincts. The tools he’d developed across decades of survival in a world that punished weakness and rewarded cruelty.

But the connections I’d built? The women I’d gathered around me? The genuine feelings I had for Natalia and Emi and Skylar and Cel and Akari and now Reyna?

Those weren’t Kaelen’s doing.

Kaelen had never loved anything except himself.

"I don’t know," I admitted. "But I’m working on figuring it out."

Finch nodded like this answer satisfied him.

"Good. That uncertainty means you’re still human."

I left the building.

Maki materialized beside me the moment I stepped outside, her twin tails swaying with agitation.

"You smell like dust and sadness." She wrinkled her nose. "Also the old man was lying about something. I could hear his heartbeat from down here. It spiked three times during your conversation."

"When?"

"When he talked about the missing files. When he claimed not to know where your father is. And when he gave you that folder."

Three lies. Three potential traps.

But the folder’s contents rang true. The research matched what I already knew about my own impossible existence. The theory explained things the VHC’s official models couldn’t.

"He’s not lying about the important parts," I said. "Just the parts he doesn’t want me to know yet."

"Why would he hide information while giving you information?"

"Because he’s playing his own game." I started walking. "Everyone in this city is playing a game. I’m just learning the rules faster than they expected."