My Scumbag System-Chapter 387: Please Do Not Feed the Apparitions

"Fine," I said. "We cross together. But if this goes bad..."

"It won’t."

"You don’t know that."

"No." She moved closer, her shoulder brushing mine. "But I know you. And you don’t quit. Even when you should."

The compliment hit weird. Like being punched except the fist was made of validation and it hurt in a completely different way.

I cleared my throat. "Yeah, well. Quitting is for people with better options."

She smiled at that. Small and genuine and somehow sadder than if she’d cried.

Then she raised both hands and pulled.

Ice spread from the shoreline in a path maybe three feet wide, extending over the black water like a scar across dark skin. The surface crackled and hissed where the cold met whatever the river actually was. Cel gritted her teeth, and I could see the effort draining her, could see the way her legs shook and her breathing went shallow.

"Stop," I said when the bridge reached maybe twenty feet. "That’s enough."

"It’s not even halfway."

"It’s enough for now. You’re burning out."

"I can make it."

I grabbed her wrist, gentle as I could manage with my cooked hands. "I know you can. But I need you conscious when we get to the other side, not passed out in my arms like some damsel in a bad novel."

She wanted to argue. I could see it in the set of her jaw. But eventually, she let the ice stop spreading and sagged against me.

"Twenty feet," she said. "That’s pathetic."

"That’s tactical. We’ll do it in stages. You rest, build your energy back, make another twenty feet. Rinse and repeat until we’re across or something eats us."

"That’s your plan? Rest and repeat?"

"Got a better one?"

Silence. Then, "No."

"Then shut up and sit down before you fall down."

She sat. I sat next to her because standing seemed like a lot of effort and my body had filed a formal complaint about all movement.

We rested for maybe ten minutes. The river flowed past our ice bridge without seeming to care about the intrusion. Nothing attacked us. No monsters emerged from the water to make our lives more interesting.

Which meant something was wrong.

In Gates, silence was almost worse than screaming. It meant the danger was patient. Smart. Waiting for the right moment to strike instead of just charging in with teeth and claws.

I scanned the shoreline, looking for movement. The knife’s silver glow didn’t reach far, maybe twenty feet in any direction, and beyond that was just darkness thick enough to taste.

"What are you looking for?" Cel whispered.

"Anything. Everything. Whatever’s waiting for us to get comfortable."

"You think something’s watching?"

"I know something’s watching. Question is whether it’s hungry or just curious."

She shifted closer, and I pretended not to notice how her body heat bled through my ruined shirt. Pretended I wasn’t hyperaware of every point where her shoulder touched mine.

Focus, jackass. Survival first, confusing feelings about the Ice Princess later.

"Ready for round two?" I asked.

She took a breath. Let it out slow. "As I’ll ever be."

The second bridge section went faster. Maybe because she was getting the hang of it, or maybe because desperation made excellent motivation. Twenty more feet of ice stretched across the black water, connecting to the first section in a seamless path.

We waited. Rested. I watched the water and tried not to think about what would happen if the ice broke while we were on it.

Third section. Fourth. Fifth.

By the sixth, we were three quarters across, and Cel looked like death warmed over and then sent back for being insufficiently warm. Her face had gone the color of old snow, and her hands trembled so badly she could barely form the constructs.

"One more," she gasped. "Just one more and we’re there."

"Take a break."

"We’re almost across."

"Cel."

"I can do this!"

The ice exploded from her palms in a jagged, uncontrolled mess. Instead of a clean bridge, we got something that looked like an ice sculpture designed by a drunk toddler. Uneven. Fragile. Sections so thin I could see the black water through them.

But it reached the other shore.

Cel collapsed forward, and I caught her before she could pitch face first into the river. Her skin felt like touching winter itself, cold enough to make my burns scream fresh complaints.

"Okay," I said. "New plan. I carry you across, because you definitely can’t walk this in your current state."

"Can’t carry me. Your arms."

"My arms are fine."

"They’re covered in third degree burns."

"Semantics."

I scooped her up before she could protest further. She weighed almost nothing, which was either concerning or just another side effect of being a cryomancer who burned calories like a furnace to fuel her Aspect.

The ice bridge creaked under our combined weight.

"This is a terrible idea," Cel said against my chest.

"Yeah." I took the first step onto the frozen path. "But I’m full of those today."

The ice held. Barely. I could feel it shifting under my boots, could hear the way it groaned and complained about supporting two people when it was designed for maybe one very optimistic squirrel.

Ten feet. Twenty. The black water flowed beneath us, and I swore I could see shapes moving in the depths. Human shapes. Reaching up toward the surface with hands that had too many fingers.

I walked faster.

Thirty feet. The ice cracked under my left boot, a sound like a gunshot in the silence. I froze, waiting for the whole thing to collapse and dump us both into whatever nightmare flowed below.

It held.

I kept moving, each step a gamble against physics and structural integrity and whatever cosmic force had decided we deserved this particular flavor of hell.

Forty feet. Almost there. The opposite shore was close enough to smell, close enough that I could make out individual rocks and the carved steps leading up the cliff.

That’s when the water started whispering.

Not like wind through leaves. Not like anything natural. These were actual words, spoken in voices I recognized and voices I’d never heard. Some in English. Some in Japanese. Some in languages that had died before humans learned to make fire.

They all said the same thing.

Come down. Come swim. Come remember what you’ve forgotten.

Cel went rigid in my arms. "Do you hear that?"

"Yeah." I picked up the pace, my boots sliding on the ice as I basically ran the last ten feet. "Ignore it. Don’t listen. Just hold on."

The voices grew louder. Insistent. One of them sounded like my mom. Another like Luka. A third like someone I’d killed in my previous life, back when I was Kaelen and murder was just another Tuesday.

The water remembers, they whispered. The water knows. Come down and we’ll show you what you’ve lost. What you’ve left behind. What you could still save if you just let go and sink with us.

My foot hit solid ground. The shore. Actual, blessed shore that wasn’t made of questionable ice over cosmic horror juice.

I set Cel down carefully, and she immediately stumbled to her knees, gasping like she’d been drowning.

"What," she managed between breaths, "what was that?"