My Scumbag System - Chapter 302

Chapter 302: The Man in the Mirror Has Some Notes
I woke up standing.

Which, for the record, is a deeply unsettling way to regain consciousness. Your brain expects horizontal. It expects the soft embrace of a hospital bed, the beeping of monitors, maybe the gentle touch of a beautiful woman’s hand on your forehead. What it does not expect is to suddenly exist upright in the middle of an infinite void with your feet ankle-deep in black water that stretched in every direction like a nightmare’s swimming pool.

“What the actual hell.”

My voice echoed. Not like a normal echo, bouncing off walls and fading. This one multiplied, fractured, came back at me from dozens of directions at once, each repetition slightly different. Slightly wrong.

I looked up.

The sky was broken.

Imagine someone took a mirror the size of the heavens, dropped it from orbit, and then suspended all the fragments in mid-fall. Thousands of shards hung frozen above me, each one reflecting a different version of something. Some showed darkness. Some showed fire. A few showed faces I almost recognized before they flickered away.

“Okay. Okay okay okay.” I pressed my palms against my chest.

No pain.

I patted down my ribs. The left side, where that tendril had caved in my entire thoracic cavity like a beer can, felt perfectly fine. I took a deep breath. No wet rattle. No stabbing agony. No blood filling my lungs.

I looked down at myself.

“Oh, that’s not good.”

I wasn’t wearing the tactical suit from the dungeon. I was wearing a three-piece suit. Charcoal gray, peak lapels, the kind of thing that cost more than most people’s cars. The shirt underneath was white. Or it had been white. Now it was rust-colored in places, stiff with dried blood.

My blood. From the night I died.

“This is a dream,” I said out loud. “This is definitely a dream. I’m in a coma, and my brain is doing that whole ‘process your trauma through weird metaphors’ thing.”

One of the mirror shards drifted closer.

I could see my reflection in it. Sharp features. Red hair. The face I’d gotten used to over the past few months.

Except the reflection wasn’t moving with me.

I raised my right hand. The reflection didn’t.

I tilted my head left. The reflection stayed perfectly still.

Then it sneered at me.

“Enjoying yourself, thief?”

The voice came from behind me.

I spun around, hands already coming up in a guard position. The black water splashed around my ankles, impossibly cold.

A figure stood about ten feet away.

It was me. Sort of.

The body was technically the same. Same height, same bone structure, same red hair. But everything else was wrong. This version was soft in all the wrong places, carrying an extra forty pounds that sagged around his middle. His posture hunched forward like someone who’d spent their entire life trying to make themselves smaller. Greasy hair hung in clumps over a face marked by acne scars and a permanent expression of resentful entitlement.

His eyes darted around constantly, never settling, the look of a man who expected the world to hit him at any moment and was already planning to whine about it.

Original Satori.

The pathetic little worm whose body I’d inherited.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“She was mine!” His voice cracked on the word. “Natalia was MY stepsister! I was the one who watched her! I was the one who fantasized about her every single night! For years! YEARS!”

He took a step toward me, and I had to fight the urge to step back. Not because he was threatening. Because he was embarrassing. Looking at him was like staring at a funhouse mirror that showed you the worst possible version of yourself.

“I did everything right!” Spittle flew from his lips. “I waited! I was patient! I was going to confess to her eventually! Maybe on graduation, or, or when she started being nicer to me, or…”

“So never,” I said flatly.

“SHUT UP!” His hands balled into fists. “You just waltzed in and TOOK her! You manipulated her! You broke her down! You turned her into… into…”

“A goddess who would burn down the world for me?”

His face went red. “And Emi! Sweet little Emi who always said hello to me! The one nice girl in this whole stupid world! You’re corrupting her too!”

“She’s not corrupted. She’s appreciated.”

“And the goth! The fox girl! The Nigerian princess!” He was screaming now, the words tumbling over each other. “You’re spending MY life like it’s some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet! This was supposed to be MY story! MY harem!”

I let him rage for a few more seconds. Then I stepped forward.

He flinched. Of course he did.

“You want to know the difference between us?” I kept my voice low. Controlled. “You wanted the prize. You spent years drooling over women you were too afraid to even speak to. You fantasized about power you never had the guts to pursue. You sat in your room, playing games, imagining yourself as the hero, while real life passed you by.”

I grabbed the front of his shirt. The fabric was damp with sweat.

“I didn’t steal your life. I salvaged it from the dumpster you left it in. You had every advantage. A loving mother. A decent stepfamily. Proximity to beautiful, powerful women. And you did nothing. You were too scared to play the game, so you sat on the sidelines and cried about how unfair everything was.”

I shoved him back. He stumbled, splashing into the black water.

“You’re not mad that I manipulated Natalia. You’re mad that it worked. You’re mad that someone finally did what you were too pathetic to attempt.”

His eyes were wet now. Tears mixing with the water on his face.

“It’s not fair…”

“Life’s not fair. Die mad about it.”

“He has a point, you know.”

The new voice came from my left.

The temperature dropped. Not metaphorically. The black water around my feet actually started to frost over, thin sheets of ice crackling outward from a point in the darkness.

A second figure emerged from behind a floating mirror shard.

This one was older. Early thirties, maybe. Lean in a way that suggested he’d gone hungry more often than not. His face was a roadmap of violence. Scars crossed his jaw, his cheekbones, his forehead. One eye was slightly cloudy. The other was sharp enough to cut glass.

He wore tactical gear. Not the fancy stuff from this world. Old, battered, patched together from a dozen different sources. The kind of equipment you accumulated over years of operating in places where the only rule was survival.

In his right hand, he held a combat knife. He twirled it absently between his fingers with the easy familiarity of a man who’d killed more people than he could remember.

Kaelen Leone.

The real one. The original. The monster I’d been before the system got its hooks in me.

“You hesitated.”