The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 442: 442 | The Apis Supremacy

The car fell silent with the specific quality of six men processing something they found simultaneously logical and horrifying.

Caden recovered first. "You’re killing the number seven Hero in the country."

"I’m killing the number seven Hero in the country."

"Roza Guseva. Psychokinesis. Legendary classification. Can lift vehicles with her brain and suppress consciousness through direct neural targeting." Caden leaned over the center console. "You’re killing that."

"Have you seen how she interacts with people?" I held up a hand. "She told Diane to fuck off at a Hero gala four years ago. Direct quote. She eats jerky during guest lectures without making eye contact with anyone, which I respect as a power move but would be unsustainable as a lifestyle feature. Her agency consists of one assistant who was hired specifically so Roza wouldn’t have to handle her own paperwork and that assistant makes mid-six-figures dealing with her personality as a full-time occupation. Sabrina Jane asked her on national television about her approval rating dropping four points and Roza said the critics could do the job themselves if they had such informed opinions about her methods."

I dropped my hand.

"Tempest is magnificent. She is probably the most genuinely capable person operating in the Hero industry outside of the top five and she scares the shit out of me in ways I find personally clarifying. She is also the most exhausting human being alive and I say this as someone who lives with Sloane Fitzgerald. Living with that woman would require a level of emotional endurance that my stats do not cover, which I’m saying figuratively before Finn starts taking notes."

"Your stats," Finn murmured from the window, confirming he’d been tracking the conversation despite the boneless sprawl suggesting otherwise.

"Figuratively."

"Uh huh."

Percy’s pen scratched something into his notebook with a velocity that suggested he was already assembling citations. I did not look to see what because Percy’s notes about my personal life had a documented tendency to become twenty-page research documents that circulated through my social circle at speeds his logistics planning should have predicted but apparently chose not to prevent.

"Okay, so Tempest is dead." Marco waved a hand. "Sad. Moving on. Fuck or marry with Apis and Grande Dame, and let me remind everyone that Grande Dame can be sixty-seven feet tall OR eighteen inches and that both of those facts should factor into your decision-making process."

"Fuck Grande Dame," I said without hesitation. "Marry Apis."

Eden slapped the seat in front of him with enough force to make Finn’s boneless frame actually shift. "THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING. THAT’S WHAT I SAID."

"You haven’t said anything yet," Caden pointed out.

"I was going to say it. Belmont got there first because Belmont understands things." Eden’s brown eyes burned with the specific intensity of a man who had found his intellectual soulmate on the topic of bee-themed Heroes. "Apis is the answer. She’s ALWAYS the answer. Have you SEEN her fight?"

"I have seen her fight."

"The DANCING, bro." Eden pantomimed something that was either capoeira or an aggressive form of stretching. "She moves like she’s choreographed every engagement and the villain didn’t get the script. She’s spinning and kicking and firing those crimson stingers mid-twirl from her fingertips and they regrow in seconds so she never runs out and her antennae do this little twitch thing when she’s excited and she can sense changes in barometric pressure which means she is literally a walking weather forecast who can also pin you to a wall from thirty feet."

"That’s a lot of information about her antennae," Finn observed.

"Her antennae are expressive! They droop when she’s sad! It’s documented!"

"Eden knows about the antennae." Marco nodded slowly, respect bleeding through the mockery. "Eden has been paying attention to the antennae."

"She hums when she’s concentrating," Eden continued at a volume that suggested his internal filter had disconnected from his vocal output system somewhere around the word dancing. "She makes a soft buzzing sound. It’s on the tactical footage. I’ve watched every public engagement recording available through the Hero Network archive. Forty-seven clips. Some of them twice."

The number forty-seven hit me in a place I didn’t expect.

The original Lukas Belmont had watched Radiant’s rescue footage forty-seven times. I knew this because it was one of the first things the transmigrant version of me discovered when accessing the inherited memories, the stubborn repetition of a kid who watched the number one Hero pull twenty-seven people from a burning building and couldn’t stop replaying the moment because it represented everything that kid wanted to become and believed he never could.

Eden Wilkinson, sitting in the back of an Uber with cargo shorts and three lighters, had watched Apis’s footage exactly as many times.

Not because he wanted to be her. Because he wanted to be near her.

"Marry Apis," I confirmed. "Final answer."

"Rock ON!" Eden performed a fist pump that barely missed the Uber’s ceiling. "Apis supremacy! Fire and bees, baby. Fire and bees."

"You understand that marrying a Hero whose costume includes thigh-high boots and a faux-fur collar would involve attending public events where every camera in the room photographs your wife from angles that stress-test the structural integrity of her bodice," Marco said, his voice carrying the energy of a man who had considered this factor and found it enriching rather than problematic.

"I would attend those events proudly."

"In cargo shorts?"

"In whatever she told me to wear. Apis has exceptional fashion sense. Her style is trendy, colorful, and designed for movement. I trust her judgment completely."

"You’ve memorized her wardrobe descriptions," Caden said with the specific tone of a man discovering a religious text.

"Her hero costume features oversized forearm gauntlets patterned with bold black-and-yellow bands that evoke a bee’s abdomen and sleek thigh-high white boots accented near the knees with red honeycomb-patterned ring emblems." Eden recited this without pausing for oxygen. "It is engineered for maximum flexibility and aerodynamic performance with the faux-fur collar being her one concession to pure fashion over function."

The car went quiet.

"He has it memorized," Finn said from the window, his eyes still closed. "Man. Respect."

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