My Scumbag System-Chapter 389: The Devil’s Choice: Poison or Poison

The tunnel stretched forever.

At least, that’s what it felt like. In reality, we’d probably been walking for twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Time got weird down here. The knife’s silver glow barely pushed back the darkness, and every step echoed in ways that made my skin crawl.

The faces in the walls followed us. Not just with their eyes—though yeah, that was creepy enough—but with their entire bodies, sliding through the glass like swimmers keeping pace underwater. Some pressed their hands against the barrier, fingers splayed wide. Others opened their mouths in those silent screams.

One looked like he was laughing.

"Don’t look at them," I said.

"I’m trying not to."

"Try harder."

Cel’s hand tightened around mine. Her fingers were ice cold, like holding hands with winter itself. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve made a joke about it. These were not normal circumstances.

A face appeared directly beside us, keeping perfect pace. This one looked young. Younger than us, maybe sixteen or seventeen. His mouth moved, forming words over and over.

Help me help me help me

I kept walking.

The tunnel curved left, then right, then split into three identical paths. Each one looked exactly the same—smooth glass walls, screaming faces, darkness that pressed against the knife’s light like a living thing.

"Well," Cel said. "This is new."

I studied each tunnel carefully. Protection from Arrows tingled at the base of my skull, that weird sixth sense that usually warned me about projectiles coming for my face. Except right now, it wasn’t telling me anything specific. Just a general feeling of wrong radiating from all three directions equally.

Great. Really helpful. Thanks, cosmic danger sense.

"Middle one," I said finally.

"Why?"

"Because it’s the one I hate least."

"That’s your reasoning?"

"You got a better system? Be my guest."

She didn’t answer. Just pulled me toward the middle path.

We walked.

The faces in the walls changed as we went deeper. They stopped looking scared and started looking... hungry. Their mouths stretched wider than physics should allow. Their eyes reflected the knife’s light back at us like cats caught in headlights.

I recognized one of them.

My blood went cold.

The man looked forty, maybe forty-five. Weathered face. Scars across his jaw. One eye slightly cloudy, the other sharp enough to gut you from across a room.

Kaelen knew this man. Had worked with him. Had watched him die in a botched extraction when a rival family’s enforcer put three bullets in his chest and left him bleeding out in a parking garage.

Takashi Ibuki. Lieutenant in the Yamaguchi-gumi’s enforcement division. Dead for eight years in a world that shouldn’t exist anymore.

But there he was. Pressed against the glass. Staring at me with that one sharp eye.

I stopped walking.

Cel noticed immediately. "What’s wrong?"

"Nothing." The word came out too fast. Too tight.

Takashi’s mouth moved. I couldn’t hear him, but I could read lips well enough after years of reading marks across crowded clubs.

I see you, Kaelen.

My grip on the bat tightened until my knuckles went white.

"Satori." Cel stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the wall. "What did you see?"

"Someone I knew. A long time ago."

"From before? Before you came to NVA?"

"Something like that."

She studied my face. Those periwinkle eyes missed nothing, picking apart every micro-expression, every tell. Years of training under Seraphina Vance made her a human lie detector.

"The Arborist is showing you things," she said slowly. "Things it shouldn’t know about."

"Yeah. I got that part."

"So it’s in your head. Reading your memories."

I nodded. "Or something worse. What if it’s not just reading? What if these people are actually here? Trapped in whatever pocket dimension this thing calls home?"

Cel’s expression went very still. Very careful. The mask she wore when dealing with VHC politics and her sister’s interrogations.

"That’s impossible."

"We’re in a Black Gate with a cosmic entity that collects plants from dying universes and turns people into garden ornaments. Nothing’s impossible anymore."

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"Fair point."

We started walking again, faster now. I kept my eyes forward, refusing to look at the walls. But I could still feel Takashi watching me. Could still feel all of them watching, recognizing something in me that shouldn’t exist.

The tunnel sloped downward. The air grew warmer, thick with humidity that made breathing feel like drowning. My burns throbbed in time with my heartbeat, each pulse sending fresh waves of pain up my arms.

The System remained dead. No Nel. No Apollo. No convenient notifications offering me an escape route in exchange for my soul and three easy payments of Schema Points.

Just me, Cel, a silver knife, and a baseball bat that had seen better days.

The tunnel opened into another chamber.

This one was different.

The walls here weren’t glass. They were mirrors. Floor to ceiling, reflecting everything back at us in infinite regression. I saw myself duplicated a thousand times, each reflection slightly different. In some, I looked younger. In others, older. In one, I still wore Kaelen’s scars.

In another, I was covered in blood that definitely wasn’t mine.

Cel saw them too. I watched her periwinkle eyes widen as she took in her own reflections, each one showing a slightly different version of herself. Some wore the formal gowns from VHC galas. Others wore combat armor. One wore nothing but ice and fury.

"Don’t look too long," I warned.

"Why not?"

"Because the things you see in mirrors aren’t always you. Sometimes they’re what you’re afraid of becoming."

She tore her gaze away, focusing on the chamber’s center instead.

A pedestal stood there. Not stone this time, but something that looked organic. Wood, maybe, or bone. Hard to tell in the knife’s silver light.

On the pedestal sat two objects.

A small vial filled with shimmering liquid that glowed with soft gold light.

And a flower. Black petals, silver stem. The same type that had nearly killed us in the previous chamber.

"Another test," Cel said.

"Another test," I agreed.

I approached the pedestal carefully, watching the mirrors from the corner of my eye. The reflections didn’t move in sync with us. Some turned to face us directly. Others walked away. One of me grinned with too many teeth.

I reached the pedestal and examined both objects without touching them.

The vial radiated warmth. Even from a foot away, I could feel it calling to the burns on my arms, promising relief and healing and an end to the constant pain.

The flower radiated cold. The same killing frost that the guardians had used.

"Bait," I said. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"Obviously." Cel moved beside me, studying the items with the same analytical focus she’d used to map our route. "The question is, which one?"

"Could be both."

"Or neither. Maybe the test is whether we take anything at all."

I considered that. It tracked with what we’d learned about the Arborist so far. Everything here was a test. Every choice, every decision, evaluated and judged by something that had been playing this game for millennia.

"The vial would heal me," I said.

"It would also probably turn you into a tree. Or worse."

"The flower would kill us both."

"Probably." She paused. "Unless..."