Scumbag Fate System-Chapter 22: Night Reveal

"How long?" Yor’s voice was rough from sleep, still thick with it. "How long was I...?"

"About an hour. Since I found you."

She said nothing, but she didn’t move away either.

He did notice she repeated it slowly a few seconds later, like she was testing the weight of the words. "You found me. But helped me... Why?"

"I couldn’t just leave you here."

"I didn’t ask for your help."

"No," he agreed. "But you needed it anyway."

Yor looked away, and he could see her clenching her jaw. "You should have left me."

"Maybe, but I didn’t want to."

"Why?" She turned back to face him, and her eyes were sharp now, bright with something close to anger. "Why do you keep bothering me?"

Reinhard leaned back against the bench and let a moment pass before he answered. "Because you are my clubmate and you were waiting for me. Here. For two hours."

Her face went completely blank. "I wasn’t-"

"No point in lying now."

"I was just resting."

"For two hours? In the same spot you always come to when you’re avoiding people."

Yor stood up quickly, but it was too quickly, leading her to stumble. She grabbed the edge of the bench to steady herself, and Reinhard rose too, slower, giving her room without making a thing of it.

"You don’t know anything about me." She said, her voice quiet but with a hard edge underneath it. "I don’t even know how you were able to touch me without-" Her hand flew up and pressed over her mouth, and her eyes went wide in shock.

Reinhard tilted his head and tapped the bench slowly with his fingers. "Without what?"

"Nothing." She turned away. "It’s nothing."

"You look terrified. That’s nothing."

Her shoulders trembled faintly. "You shouldn’t have been able to..."

"To touch you?" He took one step closer. "Why not?"

"Because—" She spun around with a look of disbelief. "That should be impossible! The void—" She stopped and bit down hard on her lip.

Fate System? Reinhard spoke in his mind as he saw her trembling. Is that the power you mentioned that she means?

A blue screen appeared, visible only to him, and small text moved across it.

[Yes, host! It was her Sigil that tried to influence you earlier.]

What was it supposed to do if it made contact?

[It drains emotions and desires from anyone who touches her skin. It turns them into beings without feelings, empty shells that can still move and talk but feel nothing inside.]

Reinhard’s eyes narrowed slightly. How long does it take?

[Well... It depends on exposure. A brief touch removes small amounts, but extended contact or repeated touches can drain everything completely. The process is slow and peaceful... The victims remain aware throughout, being able to feel themselves changing but not being able to stop it. Just them losing the ability to want things is the start... Eventually, they stop noticing anything at all.]

He looked at Yor trembling hands, at the fear she was trying to keep out of her eyes.

Thank you.

The blue screen faded away.

"The void?" He asked, and this time his voice came out softer, more careful. "What does that mean?"

"I can’t." She shook her head. "You wouldn’t understand."

"Try me."

Yor stepped back, one foot and then another, putting distance between them. "Just forget about it. Forget about me."

But Reinhard closed that distance as quietly as she’d made it, moving forward until he was close again. Then he reached out slowly with one hand, bringing it toward her face.

She flinched back. "Don’t!"

He didn’t stop, and his fingers touched her cheek.

Yor’s whole body shook. Her eyes were wide and stunned, fixed on his hand like she couldn’t make sense of it. "How is this possible? Why isn’t there any...?" She kept staring. "No... my head was on your lap for an entire hour. Yet you’re completely fine?!"

Reinhard smiled. "You could say I’m simply that amazing."

Yor blinked at him and just stared, expression completely flat.

He started laughing, and the sound of it filled the quiet garden and scattered into the dark around them. She kept staring the whole time, her face not moving at all, but then he noticed the confusion and the curiosity in her eyes.

Which only made him laugh harder before it finally faded.

He cupped her chin gently and tilted her face up so she was looking at him properly. "What usually happens when you touch someone?"

Her brows drew together, and she tried to turn her head to the side. His other hand came up to hold her face, just firm enough that she stayed looking at him.

"You know it’s fine to just talk about it, right?" His voice was soft and even. "Don’t you want to tell someone the things you’ve never been able to say before? Especially since I’m not affected?" He paused and let the quiet settle between them for a moment. "Come on, Yor."

Her eyes went wide, and her lip trembled before she bit down on it. Then her expression shifted and changed like watching clouds move fast across an open sky, anger and fear and sadness and something fragile like hope all moving through her face at once, none of them winning.

"I..." She started, then stopped, then started again. "My power awakened when I was young. Before the academy. Before any of this."

Reinhard’s hands stayed where they were, steady and warm against her face.

"Everyone I touched..." Her voice cracked at the edges. "Everyone who touched me — they all changed."

"How?"

"Their feelings, behaviors, and everything that made them who they were." She reached up and wrapped her fingers around his wrists, not to pull his hands away but just to hold onto something solid. "It drained away from them like water out of a leaking cup. They can still walk around and talk... But they don’t feel anything inside, becoming emotionless."

She pulled in a slow, unsteady breath, and when she spoke again, her voice had gone quieter, dropping into something that sounded more like memory than words.

"At the beginning of the year, there were three third years. They saw me sitting alone, eating by myself at the end of a long table, and they came over." She paused like the memory hurt too much to finish. "They said no one should be alone on their first day."

Reinhard’s thumbs moved in slow, gentle circles along her cheekbones.

"They wanted to mentor me... Help me settle in, walk with me to classes, and have someone to sit with. I felt..." She swallowed hard around the word. "I felt like I belonged somewhere."

"That sounds nice," he said quietly.

"It was." She closed her eyes. "For two whole weeks, it was wonderful. They’d save me a seat at lunch and invite me to their study groups, and I thought maybe... Maybe it will be different this time. That I could just be careful and it would be okay."

"What happened?"

"They questioned why I didn’t want to be close or sit near them. I didn’t know how to answer, and so I played it off, but I shouldn’t have done that." Her fingers tightened around his wrists. "One afternoon at lunch, one of them grabbed my hand as a joke, saying I didn’t need to hide from them."

He said nothing and kept his hands still against her face.

"They just touched me for a second before pulling back with." Yor’s voice dropped until it was barely above a whisper. "But it was already too late."

"The draining started."

She nodded. "Slowly at first, so slowly that they didn’t notice anything. But I did. I saw the light in their eyes dim just a little, and their smiles came out slightly less warm than they had before."

"You tried to stay away after that."

"I stopped eating with them and avoided the study groups. Made excuses every time they tried to include me." Her whole body trembled with the memory of it. "But they kept coming back and kept trying. They thought I was just pushing them away because of nerves, that I needed encouragement, so they kept reaching out even when I pulled back."

Then Yor paused as her fingers tightened around his wrists, and after a moment she continued even faster. As if they had been waiting somewhere for a long time and had found the first available exit.

"Over and over... Pats on the shoulder, a quick high five, the kind of easy, careless contact that normal people never even think about." Yor lightly bit her lip. "And every single time, I felt it. Felt pieces of them flowing out of themselves and into nothing, their joy and their warmth and their care draining away like water through cupped hands that couldn’t hold it."

Reinhard slowly nodded and let her continue.

"I watched it happen over three months," Yor said, and her voice had gone hollow by then, emptied out by the telling of it. "The first one stopped laughing... One day, she went quiet, and her friends asked what was wrong. She said she didn’t know. That she couldn’t feel anything anymore and didn’t understand why."

"The second?"

"He forgot why anything mattered to him. His grades, his hobbies, the things he used to love — all of it felt pointless to him. He’d sit through class staring at nothing, and when people asked, he’d say that everything felt gray, like the color had gone out of the world."

"And the third?"

Yor’s face crumpled, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. "She lasted the longest and fought the hardest, but I still watched her eyes go dead over weeks. Watched her turn into someone who could walk through the halls and answer questions and go through all the motions, but wasn’t really there anymore."

"They realized something was wrong."

"They came to me." Her voice broke apart completely on the words, and she couldn’t smooth it back together. "All three of them, together, and they were crying and begging me to tell them what was happening. Why can’t they feel happy anymore? Why did everything they tried to hold onto seem to crumple?"

Yor let out a bitter chuckle. "And I couldn’t answer them."