My Scumbag System-Chapter 438: Soreness Loves Company

The hallway was quiet. Everyone else was presumably still sleeping off their own exhausting nights. Morning light came through the window at the far end, soft and unremarkable, very normal for a Sunday at the academy.

Emi stood against the wall hugging her hoodie to her chest, not wearing it yet, her hair a disaster, her cheeks still visibly warm.

Skylar leaned against the opposite wall and looked at her.

"Hi," Emi said.

"Hi."

A beat of silence.

"Are you," Emi started, stopped, pressed her lips together. "Are you okay?"

Skylar blinked. Of all the opening moves. She looked down at herself, at the basketball shorts rolled three times at the waist, at Satori’s black t-shirt hanging past her hips, and felt the soreness radiating from approximately every part of her body.

"Sore," she said.

Emi made a sound that was half laugh and half something more complicated. She pulled the hoodie on, zipped it to her chin, and hugged herself. Her antennae drooped. "Me too."

They stood there.

"I didn’t know," Emi said finally, "that it would be like that."

"Yeah."

"I mean. I knew it would be." Emi’s brow furrowed slightly. "Intellectually. I knew what we were doing. But then it was actually happening and it was so much more..."

"Intense," Skylar supplied.

"I was going to say real." Emi looked at her hands. "Is it always like that with him?"

Skylar thought about a balcony. About a simulation full of shadow monsters and a moment where something had clicked between her and Satori that had nothing to do with a quest objective. About last night, about his hands in her hair and the way he’d looked at her after, just for a second, without any performance in it.

"Getting there," she said.

Emi absorbed this. Her fingers picked at the hoodie zipper.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You’re going to anyway."

A small smile crossed Emi’s face, there and gone. "How do you do it? The sharing. Knowing that he’s also..." She gestured vaguely, encompassing the closed door behind Skylar.

"Everyone else?"

"Yes."

Skylar considered the question honestly, because Emi deserved honesty and also because Skylar was too tired for anything else.

"I don’t not care," she said. "Don’t get it twisted. There were about six moments last night where I wanted to stab someone." She paused. "Mostly him."

Emi’s eyes went wide.

"Not actually. Calm down." Skylar pushed off the wall and moved to sit on the floor, back against it, knees pulled up. After a second, Emi slid down to sit beside her. "But jealousy exists. I’m not going to pretend it’s some zen arrangement where everyone floats around feeling nothing negative." She picked at a loose thread on the basketball shorts. "That’s not what last night was."

"What was it?"

"He told us the truth." The words came out simpler than she intended. Flatter. "About all of it. The System. The quest mechanics. The fact that half of what we feel is enhanced chemistry that he accidentally or deliberately dosed us with."

She looked at the far window. "He could’ve kept playing the game. Would’ve been easier. More points, probably. Just kept running his little empire of half-truths and let everyone stay comfortable in their corners."

Emi was very still.

"But he didn’t," she said.

"He didn’t."

Emi was quiet for a moment. Then, softly: "I cried."

"I know. I was there."

"During the third round." Emi pressed her hands against her face briefly. "I was so embarrassed."

"You also said some other things."

The embarrassment that crossed Emi’s face could have powered a small city. "Please don’t."

"I’m not going to hold it against you." Skylar glanced sideways at her. "For what it’s worth, Akari said something similar and she doesn’t even have the Nectar excuse from last night. She was just like that."

A sound escaped Emi that was involuntary and slightly hysterical, the beginning of a laugh she didn’t mean to have. It spread into something more genuine, and for a second she pressed her forehead to her knees and laughed quietly in the way people laugh when the alternative is something harder.

Skylar let her.

"I love him," Emi said finally, to her knees.

"I know."

"That’s terrifying."

"Yeah."

"Is it." Emi lifted her head. "For you?"

Skylar thought about this. About being the daughter of Jett Amane, who had spent thirty years collecting adoring people and burning through them and calling it artistic necessity. About growing up understanding that charisma was a weapon people used on other people and that charm was a costume anyone could rent.

About sitting across from Satori Nakano at a simulation pod and watching him fight shadow monsters and thinking, for the first time in her life, that someone had cracked her particular code.

"Ask me again in a month," she said.

Emi nodded. She looked at the closed door.

"He’s still asleep," she said.

"He earned it."

Another small laugh, less hysterical this time. Emi tucked her hands into her hoodie sleeves and leaned her head back against the wall. In the morning light she looked young and genuinely happy in a way that Skylar found mildly inconvenient to witness because it made it very difficult to maintain any residual irritation about last night’s logistics.

"Natalia told me something," Emi said.

"When."

"When I first got here. Before. She said." Emi paused, choosing words. "She said I was the warmth. That he needed that."

Skylar looked at her.

"You are," she said. It came out less grudging than she intended.

Emi blinked. Like she’d expected resistance and gotten none.

"Don’t make it weird," Skylar said.

"I’m not making it weird."

"You have a look on your face."

"I’m just." Emi turned back to the door. "I’m glad you’re here too. In this. Whatever this is."

Skylar exhaled. The soreness in her body hummed, her jaw ached, her legs protested the floor. She had a headache building behind her left eye that was going to require multiple sports drinks and probably complete silence to address, and she was sitting in a hallway in someone else’s basketball shorts having a morning debrief about shared romantic arrangements with a girl who had cried during sex and meant every word of it.

Her father would absolutely love this.

She hated that she didn’t hate it.

"We should eat something," Skylar said.

"Yes." Emi started to stand, joints cracking. "Ow."

"Welcome to the other side of whatever last night was."

"Is it always this sore?"

Skylar stood, tested her legs, found them functional if vocal about their grievances. "You’ll stop noticing after the third time."

Emi looked at her with the expression of someone processing information on multiple levels simultaneously, her antennae both at extremely crooked angles, her hair still a full disaster, her cheeks pink.

"Third time," she repeated.

"Don’t read into it."

They stood in the hallway together for a moment, two people in borrowed clothes, sore and hungry and still somewhat stunned by their own choices.

"Should we wake them up?" Emi asked.

Skylar considered the image of Satori in the center of that bed, still sleeping, his ridiculous morning wood cheerfully refusing to acknowledge the concept of rest.

"Give it another hour," she said, and started for the stairs. "He needs it."