The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 463: 463 | The Floor Under the Scumbag’s Path [CASTLE BONUS]

Page seven. Environmental compatibility grids for the flooded sublevels. Petra said it like it was the most natural request in the world, like there weren’t three other people arranged around me in various states of undress and interruption, like the sake bottle sweating a ring into my nightstand was a decorative choice.

I love how the universe operates.

You spend three weeks holding a lie together with insurance loopholes and federal favors, you finally get one clean evening of card games and warm skin and a girl’s laugh vibrating against your ribs, and the moment your body relaxes enough to enjoy it, four women fill your seven-hundred-fifty-square-foot apartment and the System drops a mandatory quest that would require me to be in two contradictory relationships with the same eight hours.

I took the planner. Read page seven. Didn’t absorb a single word of it.

"The grids look fine," I said.

Petra’s pen stopped moving. "You didn’t read them."

"I read the shape of them. They’re good grids."

Felicity made a sound into her sparkling beverage that was almost a laugh, and Camille shifted her weight on my bed, the mattress dipping under her hip, and I felt the warmth of her leg return against mine as she settled back into the position she’d claimed before Petra’s knock rearranged the entire atmosphere.

Vivienne watched me from the desk chair with those clear green eyes, and I understood with cold specificity that she’d already read the room in a way that had nothing to do with sight.

Her Resonance Read pulled emotional signatures out of everyone within ten feet, and there were three people within ten feet radiating things I very much did not want catalogued.

Sloane hummed at the edge of my awareness across campus, warm and settled and blissfully unaware that her boyfriend was currently the center point of a geometry problem with too many contact surfaces.

"There’s a discrepancy," Vivienne said. Her voice landed measured, each word chosen instead of assembled. "Sublevel two. You flagged Rina Soleil as high compatibility for the flooded environment because her wool displaces water. But you didn’t account for the fact that her wool loses tensile integrity past a certain saturation threshold. It works until it doesn’t, and when it fails, it fails all at once."

Petra turned toward her. "That’s in the appendix."

"It’s in the appendix as a footnote. It should be in the grid." Vivienne tilted her tablet toward Petra without breaking eye contact with me. "The difference matters when someone’s making a call under a two-hundred-forty-second clock and reads a green cell instead of a footnote."

I liked Vivienne Cross. That was the problem with almost everyone in this building. They were too smart to dismiss and too interesting to ignore, and every one of them came attached to complications I wasn’t equipped to price.

"She’s right," Petra said, and the concession cost her something visible, a tightening at the corner of her mouth. She made a note in emerald ink.

Camille leaned toward me, and her voice dropped into the low register she’d been using since she came out of the bathroom a changed woman with a plan I hadn’t decoded yet. "So this is what class reps do," she said. "Argue about wool at midnight."

"This is what Petra does," I said. "I mostly hold the flashlight."

Petra didn’t look up from her planner. "You mostly provide moral support and inside-out shirts."

Felicity laughed then, full and bright, the sound bouncing off the walls the way it always did, and I watched Petra’s jaw tighten at the ease of it, at the way Felicity took up space in my room like she’d been issued a key.

Petra’s eyes went to the space between Felicity and me, to the cards scattered across my comforter, to Camille’s bare shoulder six inches from mine, and I watched a woman who organized her entire life around accurate assessment try to build a model of what she was seeing and come up short.

"I need these signed," Petra said. Sharper now. "Tonight. Steele reviews the brief at oh-eight-hundred Monday and I will not walk into that room with gaps because my co-representative was occupied."

She said occupied like it was a diagnosis.

The System notification pulsed gold at the edge of my vision, patient and horrible, reminding me that the quest didn’t care about Petra’s brief or the flooded sublevels or the fact that I now had four women in my room and a fifth one wired directly into my nervous system from across campus. Complete a full intimate encounter with both Felicity Hardy and Camille Ortega before sunrise. Both willing. Both present when it begins. Same room.

The System had built the perfect scenario and then made it structurally impossible by adding two more people to it.

I read that quest the way I’d read every quest since the beginning. Fast, cynical, already calculating the failure state. Forty Defiance Points. Stat debuffs at twenty-five. Functional compromise at forty. A Penalty Quest at fifty. The math ran itself.

Here’s the thing about the Scumbag’s Path that the System conveniently omitted when I picked it out of spite in a hallway with a countdown clock ticking: it has no guardrails, which sounds like freedom until you realize it also has no floor.

The Hero path had structure. The Villain path had a script. I chose the one where the interface makes it up as it goes and bills me for the consequences.

And this quest, this beautiful catastrophic quest, was one I was going to fail.

Not out of nobility. Let’s be honest about the version of myself in the room. If Felicity and Camille had been the only two people here, if Petra hadn’t knocked with her rhythmic precision and her cream silk and her leather planner, if Vivienne wasn’t currently reading the emotional signature of everyone present and filing it somewhere I couldn’t reach, I don’t know that I’d be thinking about failure at all.

But they were here. Petra with her state documents and her mouth still on my neck forty minutes of memory ago. Vivienne with her green eyes and her catalog. And Sloane, humming steady and warm across campus, who’d made me promise this morning that I would tell her before, not after. Not the diplomatic version. The unedited one.

Four women in the room. One woman in the bond. And the honest truth, the one under the calculation, was that even if I could thread this needle, I didn’t want to be the guy who threaded it tonight. Not with Petra sitting there pretending her planner mattered more than the fact that she’d signed her family name onto my file. Not with Vivienne watching me decide.

The quest was going to fail. I knew it the way I knew my own stats. And for once the System had built a scenario where failing felt less like weakness and more like the only move that didn’t set fire to something I wanted to keep.

"Give me the pen," I said.

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