The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 460: 460 | The Question of Genuineness

I was so cooked.

Not metaphorically cooked, not "oh this is a little inconvenient" cooked, but the kind of cooked where the universe looks at your situation and decides that what you really need right now is a mandatory quest requiring you to sleep with two women who are currently sitting on your bed playing Cards Against Humanity while your girlfriend can feel your emotions in real time through a supernatural bond that neither of you can turn off.

I was staring at a mandatory quest requirement that offered zero room for reinterpretation, zero grace period, zero creative workarounds that turned "physically involved with two women simultaneously" into "had a respectful conversation about personal space while maintaining eye contact."

Forty Defiance Points. The System had listed the number with the kind of finality that suggested the algorithm had run this calculation six times and arrived at the same answer every time.

I processed the implications in the three seconds it took Felicity to select her next white card from the fan in her hand. Forty points on top of my current zero meant I’d hit the first stat debuff threshold at twenty-five. By thirty I’d be operating at reduced capacity in every physical metric the System tracked.

At forty I’d be functionally compromised in any situation requiring coordination, stamina, or the ability to dodge something moving faster than a shopping cart. And at fifty—assuming I somehow managed to refuse my way past forty—I’d trigger a Penalty Quest.

The System’s Penalty Quests were designed by something that thought exclusively in bracketed mission parameters and had never once filed a complaint about participant comfort, social consequences, or the increasingly narrow gap between what I could physically survive and what would destroy every relationship I’d built in the last three months. The interface did not care if I died. It cared if I completed objectives. The difference was academic.

The alternative was obvious, and the alternative was sitting on my bed in matching states of flushed skin and loosened posture while a party game scattered white cards across my sheets like confetti at the worst wedding reception in recorded history.

"Belmont." Camille held up a card. "You’re not paying attention. Felicity just played ’A windmill full of corpses’ on ’What’s that smell?’ and it’s genuinely the funnest thing that’s happened in this room all night and you’re staring at the wall like it insulted your mother."

Felicity tilted her head and the overhead light caught those freckles in a way that made my orbital cortex shut down for a quarter second.

I looked at both of them, one on each side of the scattered cards, Felicity’s bare legs folded beneath her with her white cropped top doing absolutely nothing to conceal the architecture underneath, Camille’s compression leggings painted onto thighs that could crack walnuts and whose tank top had been slowly migrating southward all evening through a combination of movement and what I was now ninety percent certain was the Ecchi Logic trait deciding that gravity should operate differently on fabric within a six-foot radius of my body.

"New game," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"I’m bored of cards."

Felicity’s eyebrows rose. "You were losing."

"I was strategically disengaging from a contest whose scoring metrics no longer served my objectives."

Camille snorted. "That’s losing with more words."

"Truth or dare."

The suggestion landed on the bed between them with the weight of a live grenade and I watched both of them process it in real time, their faces cycling through recognition, calculation, and a specific quality of anticipation that had nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with the fact that everyone in the room understood what truth or dare actually was when played at midnight by three people whose collective sexual tension could power a small city’s electrical grid.

Felicity recovered first because Felicity always recovered first and because recovering quickly from situations that should destroy normal people was her primary survival mechanism. "Truth or dare," she repeated, and the way she said it made the words sound like they were wearing lingerie. "In a locked room. With alcohol. And me."

"And me," Camille added, and the edge was back but it was the new edge, the one I’d been watching develop all evening, warmer and darker and carrying none of the competitive hostility she’d walked in with and all of the competitive hunger that lived underneath it.

"Ground rules," I said, because establishing parameters before executing a plan that required me to seduce two women simultaneously while my girlfriend slept across campus connected to my emotional state through a supernatural bond was the kind of organizational challenge that made me understand why Diane drank sweet tea like it was medication. "Nobody does anything they don’t want to. If someone says stop, we stop. And nothing that happens leaves this room."

Camille crossed her arms beneath her chest and the tank top situation got significantly more complicated. "Those are reasonable."

Felicity reached for the bottle of sparkling beverage and poured three glasses with the efficiency of a professional sommelier. "Those are perfect. I’ll start."

She handed me a glass and her fingers brushed mine with the same casual intent she’d been deploying all evening, the touch lingering one beat longer than necessary, long enough for her body heat to transfer through the contact and for my skin to register the specific softness of her thumb across my knuckle.

"Truth or dare, Belmont."

"Truth."

"Boring but acceptable." Felicity tucked her legs beneath her and leaned forward, and the cropped top fell away from her stomach enough to reveal the shadow of her hip bone and the edge of something pink and lace underneath her shorts that I was not going to examine because examining it would cause my brain to produce sounds that were not appropriate for the conversational portion of the evening. "When you kissed Ortega during the training exercise. Was any part of it genuine."

Camille went still beside her.

I held Felicity’s gaze. Blue eyes, freckles, the particular quality of attention she wore when she wanted information rather than entertainment. "Yes."

The word sat in the air. Camille’s throat moved. Felicity’s smile widened by a fraction and her eyes warmed with satisfaction that suggested she’d expected this answer and wanted it confirmed in front of a witness.

"My turn," I said. "Camille. Truth or dare."

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