My Scumbag System-Chapter 436: Five Covenants
Her smile returned, brilliant and sharp. "Yes! Your rewards!"
Golden light erupted around me, and the System interface blazed to life with notifications scrolling faster than I could read them.
[QUEST COMPLETE: THE SCUMBAG’S PERFECT GAME]
[ALL OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED]
[BONUS OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: Two participants declared love during intercourse]
[REWARDS DISTRIBUTED]
The Schema Points hit my account like a tidal wave. One thousand points flooding in, bringing my total to something absurd. The numbers kept climbing as the System processed everything, and I felt the exact moment the Nectar of the Gods trait transformed into something new.
[TRAIT EVOLVED: NECTAR OF DEVOTION]
[Mythical-Tier]
The difference was immediate. The chemical hooks I’d felt in my saliva, the artificial enhancement that made every touch addictive, it didn’t disappear exactly. It transformed. Smoothed out. Became something that felt less like a drug and more like... possibility. Like genuine attraction with the volume turned up just enough to matter.
[TITLE ACQUIRED: THE HONEST TYRANT]
[Unique-Rank]
[Effect: Your transparency about manipulation makes people trust you more, not less. Bond advancement rates increased by 25%]
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The sheer audacity of earning a title for being honest about being a manipulative bastard broke something in my chest that felt dangerously close to hysteria.
"Is this a joke?"
"Not at all," Aphrodite purred, clearly pleased with herself. "Mortals are strange creatures. Tell them you will lie and they trust you. Tell them the truth about your intentions and they forgive you. It’s delicious irony."
More notifications scrolled past.
[FAMILIAR CONTRACT (MYTHICAL-TIER) x2 ACQUIRED]
[ALL ENSEMBLE MEMBERS UNLOCKED: RANK 10 COVENANT REWARDS]
That last one made my brain stutter.
All of them? Even Emi and Skylar who’d been at Rank 5? Even Cel who’d just jumped to Rank 7?
I pulled up the Ensemble tab with shaking fingers.
[NATALIA KUZMINA - RANK 10: COVENANT - THE PSYCHIC SOVEREIGN]
[EMI AOYAMA - RANK 10: COVENANT - THE RADIANT HEART]
[SKYLAR AMANE - RANK 10: COVENANT - THE PHANTOM BLADE]
[CELESTE VANCE - RANK 10: COVENANT - THE WINTER QUEEN]
[AKARI MIYAMOTO - RANK 10: COVENANT - THE GOLDEN CHAIN]
Five Covenants.
Five women whose souls were now permanently tethered to mine.
Five living, breathing people whose fates I’d just tied to my own through a combination of honesty, sex, and divine interference.
"Aphrodite," I said carefully, "what exactly did I just do?"
She smiled, and this time it carried weight. Knowledge. Something that looked almost like sympathy.
"You forged a proper court, darling. Not through deception or cold-blooded manipulation alone, but through that rarest of things." She reached out and tapped my chest, two fingers pressed lightly against the skin above my sternum, right over my heart. The touch was weightless, almost maternal. "Truth, seasoned with genuine feeling. They know precisely what you are now. They know the System, the bonds, the imbuements. They know the shape of the cage. And they looked at all of it—looked at you—and chose to remain inside it anyway."
"Because of the Nectar," I said.
"No." The amusement drained from her expression, replaced by something that sat closer to sincerity, perhaps the most unsettling thing a goddess of love could possibly wear.
"The Nectar of Devotion does not enslave, Satori. It does not manufacture feeling from nothing, does not pour false wine into empty cups. It amplifies what is already present, what already lives and breathes inside the heart of the one it touches. What they feel, they feel because they have chosen to feel it. Every one of them. You simply made everything..."
She tilted her head, searching for the precise word with the patience of someone who had watched ten thousand love stories unspool from beginning to ruin. "More."
I looked back at the glowing interface hanging in the air before me, at the five names pulsing in sequence with a soft silver radiance, each one a weight I could feel settling across my shoulders.
"So they can leave," I said. "If they wanted to."
"They could always leave," Aphrodite corrected, gently but without any room for negotiation.
"Even under the old Nectar, even in the grip of a dependency I designed to be thoroughly irresistible, they still possessed the fundamental architecture of free will. The choice was always there. They simply would have needed to want freedom more than they wanted you."
Her smile returned then, slower this time, and edged with something knowing enough to be almost cruel. "And not a single one of them does. That, my darling scumbag, is the real victory tonight. Not the quest. Not the title. Not the SP sitting in your account." She looked at the glowing names with an expression I couldn’t fully read.
"That is."
She stepped back, her form beginning to shimmer at the edges.
"Enjoy your rewards, Satori Nakano. You’ve earned them fairly." She paused, her expression flickering to something complicated. "And..." She shook her head. "Never mind. Wrong lifetime. Wrong story."
Then she was gone, leaving only the scent of roses and the faint warmth where she’d touched my skin.
I stood alone in the kitchen, drinking an electric blue sports drink at three in the morning, wearing nothing but sweatpants and the evidence of five separate sexual encounters.
The quest timer had vanished.
The rewards sat in my inventory like treasure I’d stolen from the gods themselves.
And upstairs, five women slept in my bed with my cum still inside them, their bond ranks maxed out, their souls bound to mine through mechanics I barely understood and choices I’d made anyway.
The Honest Tyrant.
I rolled the title around in my head, tasting it.
It fit better than I wanted to admit.
I finished the sports drink and tossed it in the recycling. My legs felt like someone had replaced the bones with wet noodles. My back ached. My ribs screamed. My arms still throbbed from the Arborist’s burns.
And I’d never felt more alive.
I headed back upstairs, each step a small victory against gravity and exhaustion. The door to my room stood slightly ajar, spilling warm light into the hallway. I pushed it open quietly.
They were exactly where I’d left them.
Breathing softly. Thoroughly ruined. Completely mine.
I crawled back into the center of the pile, Emi immediately gravitating to my left side, Cel to my right. Natalia draped herself across my legs like she owned them. Skylar kicked me once in her sleep, probably on principle. Akari just kept drooling on the pillow, dead to the world.
A notification pulsed once in the corner of my vision.
[Your girls are waiting.]
I smiled, closing my eyes.
Yeah.
They were.
