The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 446: 446 | Institutional Irresponsibility [CASTLE BONUS]

"You introduced the concept. You own the consequences."

The boardwalk appeared through the windshield four minutes later, a stretch of weathered planks running along the coast with the Pacific glittering behind it.

At nine twenty on a Saturday morning the place held joggers, dog walkers, an old man with a fishing pole, and the kind of empty commercial charm that suggested the funnel cake stand would be open because funnel cake stands operated according to economic principles nobody had successfully explained.

The Uber driver deposited us at the southern entrance and departed with the quiet efficiency of someone who had already composed his two-star review and was waiting for a stoplight to submit it.

Salt air hit me the second I stepped out. The smell underneath carried the specific coastal California combination of sunscreen, aging infrastructure, distant kelp. Something in my chest loosened by three percent. Enough to notice. Not enough to acknowledge.

The Bond Resonance carried Sloane’s emotional frequency from campus. Warm. Settled. Faintly amused. She had tracked the shift in my mood from anxious to annoyed to reluctantly entertained, and her response was the particular quality of satisfaction that meant she approved of whatever had changed without needing details.

The group assembled on the boardwalk with the organizational discipline of six cats released into an unfamiliar room. Caden identified a funnel cake stand that was, against all reasonable probability, open and operational. The fryer was already producing the sound and smell of dough meeting oil at temperatures that would concern a health inspector.

"See?" Caden gestured at the stand like he had personally summoned it into existence through force of will. "Told you."

"I never doubted," Marco said, which was a lie.

"You specifically said it wouldn’t be open."

"I said it shouldn’t be open. Different concern."

Eden approached the stand with the posture of someone evaluating a tactical position. "The real question is whether we’re committed to the bit or just getting one to share."

"Sharing is what people do when they lack conviction," Caden said.

Finn, who had been quiet until now, spoke without looking away from the ocean. "I want two."

"That’s the energy we need," Caden said approvingly.

I pulled out my phone and checked the group fund we had theoretically established for situations exactly like this one. The fund contained zero dollars because nobody had contributed to it. "We’re paying individually, apparently."

"Capitalism," Caden said sadly. "Ruins everything."

"You introduced the concept. You own the consequences."

"Funnel cake," Eden said with the reverence of a man addressing a religious experience. "So manly."

"It’s fried dough."

"Manly fried dough."

"That’s not a category."

"Everything is a category if you believe hard enough."

We bought six funnel cakes. They arrived on paper plates dusted with powdered sugar and still crackling from the oil, each one a twisted golden architecture of dough that tasted like childhood and institutional irresponsibility. I ate mine while walking along the boardwalk railing, watching the Pacific stretch toward the horizon and feeling the powdered sugar settle into every surface of my clothing like a secondary wardrobe choice I hadn’t planned for.

Finn drifted ahead of the group with his characteristic lack of urgency, his brown hair catching salt wind and his invisible threads trailing behind him in patterns that nobody could see but that I suspected were mapping the structural stress points of the boardwalk’s support system out of pure subcognitive habit.

Marco and Caden walked together in the center of the formation, Marco’s arm draped across Caden’s shoulders in a gesture that looked casual and contained the full weight of a friendship that neither of them had to announce. Caden’s earlier embarrassment had dissolved completely, replaced by a bit about a hypothetical hero-themed restaurant franchise that would absolutely work if someone invested the startup capital.

Percy walked beside me with his notebook balanced on the railing, eating his funnel cake with one hand and writing with the other, a feat of coordination that his Dexterity stat should not have supported but that his determination compensated for. His blue hair glowed faintly in the morning sun.

"The boardwalk was not on the itinerary," Percy said.

"The strip club was not on the itinerary either. The itinerary was fiction."

"The itinerary was not fiction. The itinerary was based on inaccurate premises that produced valid scheduling but invalid destination outcomes." Percy took a bite of funnel cake and chewed with the intensity of someone who treated every caloric input as data. "The strip club had excellent fire code compliance."

"I don’t doubt it."

"The ventilation system alone scored in the ninety-second percentile for California commercial buildings in the entertainment sector. Whatever activities take place inside that building, they take place in well-circulated air."

"Percy."

"I am processing the fact that I peer-reviewed a strip club. The processing requires verbal expression. I ask for your patience while I work through the stages."

"Take your time."

Percy ate the rest of his funnel cake in silence, and I watched the ocean and let the Bond Resonance carry what it carried, a steady pulse from somewhere across the city where a girl with pink hair and blue eyes and an Aspect rated Legendary at seventeen sat in a cafeteria wearing a hoodie she had stolen from my closet, feeling me feel something that wasn’t stress for the first time in four days.

Eden caught up from behind and fell into step on my other side, his red hair vivid against the grey morning sky and his face still carrying powdered sugar in both eyebrows. He had his lighter in his hand, flicking the cap open and closed in the rhythm that meant he was thinking about something he couldn’t quite reach.

"Lukas."

"Yeah."

"Do you think Apis would like funnel cake?"

I looked at Eden Wilkinson, who fought with fire he couldn’t generate on his own, who followed Maribelle Kennedy into every situation because he had decided at nine years old that she was worth following, who manifested late and was called unimpressive and trained every day with the quiet ferocity of someone who had something to prove and no interest in proving it to anyone except the one person whose opinion mattered. Eden loved a Hero he had never met the same way he loved everything else in his life, completely and without protection.

"Yeah," I said. "I think she would."

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