My Scumbag System-Chapter 363: The Three Truths of Being Screwed

Black Gates.

The words rattled around in my skull like a pinball bouncing off every worst-case scenario I’d ever imagined. I’d read the Academy briefings. Watched the documentaries. Heard the horror stories from retired Hunters who drank too much and talked too little about the things they’d seen.

Black Gates were the cosmic joke nobody laughed at.

Regular Gates followed rules. You went in, killed the boss, walked out a hero. Maybe grabbed some loot on the way. Simple. Clean. The kind of straightforward violence I could appreciate.

Black Gates? They made their own rules. And the first rule was always the same.

You don’t leave until the Gate says you can leave.

I pressed my hands against the invisible barrier again, pushing harder this time. Nothing. It was like trying to punch through a brick wall made of pure "screw you." The shimmering portal that should have been our exit just flickered mockingly, its surface now displaying that telltale darkness that gave Black Gates their name.

"Okay," I muttered to myself. "Okay, okay, okay."

My brain shifted into crisis mode, pulling up every scrap of information I’d ever absorbed about these nightmare scenarios. Black Gates operated on three certainties. Three absolute truths that nobody argued with because the people who tried to argue were dead.

First: threat escalation. Whatever rank the Gate had been classified as before it went Black, you could safely assume it had jumped at least two full tiers. This C-Rank training exercise we’d been expecting? Now it was A-Rank at minimum. Possibly higher. The monsters inside wouldn’t be the balanced ecosystem of manageable threats described in our briefing. They’d be nightmares wearing the skins of those manageable threats.

Second: time dilation. This one hurt to think about. One day inside a Black Gate equaled approximately four hours in the outside world. We’d been in here for maybe five minutes, which meant... I did the math quickly... barely any time had passed outside. Nobody was coming to rescue us. Nobody even knew we were in trouble yet.

Third: the exit condition. Black Gates stayed sealed until one of two things happened. Either the boss died, or the Gate experienced a break and vomited its contents into the real world. Given that a Gate Break from something this powerful would probably flatten whatever poor city happened to be nearby, I was really hoping for option one.

I ran the numbers again. The briefing said this Gate had manifested three days ago. It had been stable for about sixty hours before we entered. Gates typically had a seven to ten day window before critical pressure buildup, but with the time dilation factored in...

We had roughly a month of subjective time to find and kill whatever boss lurked in this nightmare wonderland before reality decided to catastrophically disagree with our continued existence.

"Nel," I whispered, reaching for the familiar presence in the back of my mind. "Nel, I need a tactical assessment. Enemy threat levels, environmental hazards, anything you’ve got."

Silence.

That was wrong. Nel always responded. Even when I was being annoying, which was often, she’d at least make some sarcastic comment about my life choices.

"Nel?"

Nothing. No voice. No floating windows. No snarky commentary about how I’d managed to walk into yet another death trap.

I tried to pull up my status screen, the familiar mental command that should have summoned a cascade of information about my abilities and stats.

Static.

The interface flickered into existence for half a second, just long enough for me to see my basic numbers, then it dissolved into interference patterns that made my eyes water.

"Apollo?" I tried, reaching for the other cosmic freeloader who’d set up shop in my consciousness. "Hey, sun god, this would be a great time for one of your dramatic entrances."

More silence.

Shit.

Whatever was jamming my System, it was comprehensive. I was cut off from Nel, from Apollo, from the gacha shop that had been my secret weapon. All I had were my baseline abilities and whatever I could remember from before the interference hit.

"Satori?"

Celeste’s voice cut through my internal crisis. I turned to find everyone staring at me. Juan had gone pale, his datapad hanging limply in his hand. Raphael’s fists were clenched so tight I could see veins bulging in his forearms. Jaime had stopped flexing, which was genuinely alarming. Monica clutched her plant like a lifeline, the copper leaves now pulsing with an erratic light that matched her heartbeat.

And Noah. Noah had positioned herself between Celeste and the rest of the world, her entire body coiled like a spring waiting to snap.

"Tell me that wasn’t what I think it was," Juan said. His voice came out too high, too fast. "Tell me you didn’t just say Black Gate."

"I wish I could."

"But the briefing said C-Rank! Standard layout! Balanced ecosystem!" Juan’s words tumbled over each other. "This is supposed to be a training run! We’re not equipped for, for whatever this is!"

"Juan." I kept my voice level. "Breathe."

"DON’T TELL ME TO BREATHE!" He spun in a wild circle, taking in the alien landscape around us. "We’re trapped in a dimensional anomaly with no extraction protocol and no backup and the monsters in here are going to be A-Rank minimum which means we’re all going to die!"

"We’re not going to die."

"You don’t know that! You can’t know that! The statistical survival rate for unprepared teams in Black Gate scenarios is less than twelve percent!"

Raphael grabbed Juan by the collar and yanked him close. "Shut. Up."

"Get your hands off me, you muscle-brained, explosive, idiotic..."

"Both of you, stop!" Celeste’s voice cracked like a whip. She stepped forward, her composure holding together through what looked like sheer force of will. "Fighting among ourselves accomplishes nothing."

"Nothing accomplishes anything when we’re DEAD!"

"JUAN!" I grabbed his shoulders and shook him once, hard. "Look at me."

His eyes were wild, darting everywhere. Classic panic response. His genius brain was running through every possible scenario and finding death at the end of each one.

"Look. At. Me."

He finally focused, his breathing ragged.

"How long do we have?"

"W-what?"

"You said you were up until three tracking spawn patterns. You know more about Gate mechanics than anyone here. So tell me. How long do we have to kill the boss before this thing breaks?"

The question forced his mind into a different track. I could see it happen, the transition from panic to calculation. His mouth opened and closed a few times before words came out.

"The Gate manifested sixty-four hours ago. With standard pressure buildup rates and accounting for time dilation inside a Black Gate environment..." He swallowed hard. "Twenty-nine days. Give or take eighteen hours."

"Twenty-nine days," I repeated. "That’s almost a month. A lot can happen in a month."

"A lot of bad things."

"Also a lot of good things. Like us finding the boss and killing it dead."