My Scumbag System-Chapter 437: Casualties and Snails

The first thing Skylar registered was weight.

Warm, soft, annoyingly heavy weight pressing against her left side, and something wet against her shoulder that was absolutely, categorically, not acceptable at ten in the morning.

She opened one eye.

Akari Miyamoto was drooling on her.

Naked. Completely, aggressively naked, one tan arm thrown across Skylar’s stomach, her black hair spread everywhere like she’d personally declared war on personal space. Her face was slack and peaceful in a way Skylar had never witnessed when the girl was conscious, none of the sharp calculation, none of the predatory glinting. Just a pretty girl with her mouth slightly open, leaving a wet spot on Skylar’s shoulder.

Skylar stared at the ceiling for three seconds.

Then she peeled Akari off her with the careful efficiency of someone defusing a bomb.

Akari made a sound, something small and protesting, and immediately latched onto the nearest pillow, wrapping herself around it with the dedication of someone who had decided the pillow was now her entire personality. She didn’t wake up. Just redirected, seamless as water finding a new path, and kept sleeping with her cheek mashed against the pillowcase and her expression serene.

Skylar sat up.

Bad idea.

Everything hurt.

Her jaw ached from the hinges forward. Her throat felt like she’d swallowed sandpaper and then apologized to the sandpaper. Her legs were sore in a way that made stairs feel like a theoretical concept. Her ass stung in four distinct places that were absolutely finger-shaped, and the area between her thighs felt like it had been through something that warranted a formal incident report.

She breathed through her nose until the soreness settled into something manageable.

Then she looked at the bed.

Satori Nakano was unconscious in the center of the mattress, one arm above his head, one sprawled across Emi who was curled against his ribs. Celeste lay on his other side with her silver hair tangled across his chest and her expression unguarded in a way Skylar suspected would horrify her when she woke up. Natalia was draped across his legs like a territorial throw blanket, silk shorts missing in action, the Cryo-Lich Ring still glowing faintly against the white sheets.

Every single one of them looked thoroughly wrecked.

Red marks on throats. Bite impressions on shoulders. Hair that had clearly lost a war sometime around hour three.

And Satori, that absolute menace, lay in the middle of all of it looking stupidly peaceful, breathing slow and even, completely unconscious to the damage he’d caused.

And he had morning wood.

Skylar stared at it for a longer moment than she intended.

The sheet had shifted. She could see the outline. Couldn’t not see it, really, it was just there, asserting itself with the confidence of something that had spent the previous four hours asserting itself and apparently hadn’t gotten the memo about rest.

Scumbag, she thought, with considerably less heat than she meant.

Does that thing have an off button?

She looked at it another second, felt something warm move through her that she refused to examine in daylight, and forcibly redirected her attention to finding her legs.

Standing was a production.

She got there. Barely. Her legs held, which she considered a personal victory worth noting. She stood in the early light coming through the curtains, wearing nothing but Satori’s oversized black t-shirt that hit her mid-thigh, and took stock of the floor.

Her shorts were gone.

She looked. She actually looked, scanning the carpet with her eyes, checking around the mattress edge, near the desk. Nothing. The shorts had ceased to exist somewhere between round two and round three and had apparently decided they preferred being missing to witnessing round four.

Skylar padded over to Satori’s dresser and opened the second drawer.

She found basketball shorts immediately. Black, drawstring, would fit like a dress on her but would function. She grabbed them and was halfway through pulling them on when she noticed Bartholomew.

The immortal snail sat in his terrarium on the dresser, level with her face, and stared at her.

She stared back.

He was a very normal brown snail. He had no expression. He had no capacity for judgment or observation or opinion. He was a snail.

He absolutely stared at her anyway.

"Hello, Bartholomew," Skylar said.

He didn’t move.

"Yeah," she said. "Me too."

She finished tying the drawstring and looked back at the bed, at Satori surrounded by women who had all made deeply questionable choices alongside her, and felt something shift in her chest that she didn’t have a word for yet.

She crossed the room.

She was going to kiss him. She’d already decided before she registered the decision, was already leaning down by the time her brain caught up with her body, bracing one hand on the pillow beside his head. She could feel the Nectar sitting differently in her now, not like the desperate chemical pull from the night before, but something quieter, something that wanted without needing to consume. Aphrodite’s new version. Genuine feeling with the volume adjusted slightly upward.

She kissed him.

Not hard. Not the way she’d kissed him on the balcony at Vortex, all teeth and challenge. Not the way she’d kissed him last night, which had been several things she’d need months to sort through. Just slow and warm, her mouth on his, breathing him in for a moment.

He didn’t wake up.

The sound that woke someone up was quieter. A small intake of breath from his right side.

Skylar pulled back and looked. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Emi Aoyama was awake.

Her sapphire-blue hair was absolutely destroyed, tangled across the pillow in every direction, the little antenna pieces hanging at tragic angles. Her eyes were open, reddish-brown and startled, going from the ceiling to Satori to Skylar in the span of about two seconds.

The flush that followed was spectacular.

It started at her hairline and went south, spreading down her neck and disappearing under the sheet, turning her face the approximate color of a sunrise. She pulled the sheet up to her collarbones and looked at Skylar with the expression of someone who had just remembered every single thing that had happened and was now performing a full audit.

Skylar considered her.

Then she tilted her head toward the door.

Emi looked at Satori. Back at Skylar. Then she did a careful, mortified extraction from the bed that involved a lot of not waking anyone else and locating her yellow hoodie from the floor with the quiet desperation of someone who felt the universe owed her at least one piece of clothing.

They made it into the hallway.

Skylar closed the door behind them.