The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 470: 470 | My Beautiful Blue-Haired Walking Spreadsheet

"Rough night."

"Define rough."

"That new hero versus game dropped a patch at midnight." I grabbed a protein bar from the communal basket and tore the wrapper with fingers that moved at eighty-eight percent of their usual speed. "Played until my eyes stopped working."

Caden turned around. His expression shifted from casual concern to something brighter and more dangerous, the particular grin that preceded observations Caden had no business being sharp enough to make. He leaned one hip against the counter and crossed his arms and his hazel eyes crinkled at the corners with the specific frequency of a man about to say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong volume.

"Gaming." Caden nodded slowly. "Sure. Gaming." He uncrossed his arms and executed a series of hip thrusts against the kitchen counter, his entire body rolling forward in a motion so aggressively suggestive that Percy’s pen stopped moving and Finn opened one eye from the couch. "Or were you up all nighttttttt?"

"It was the game, Holt."

"Was it though?" The thrusting continued with escalating commitment. "Was it the game, or was it the four separate women I watched walk into your hallway between nine and midnight from the common room couch where I was eating cereal and watching everything?"

Percy’s pen started moving again with redoubled intensity.

"Four is a strong word."

"Four is a number, Lukas. An accurate number. I counted them. Felicity first at approximately nine oh eight, then Camille at nine thirty-one, then Lang with the planner at eleven forty-seven, and Cross trailing behind her at eleven forty-eight." Caden stopped thrusting and held up four fingers. "Four women. Your room. Saturday night. And you come downstairs looking like someone drained you through an IV."

"We played cards."

"Cards."

"Wavelength, specifically."

"Is that what the kids are calling it?"

Finn sat up from the couch with the boneless fluidity of someone whose spine operated on suggestions rather than structural requirements. "I heard laughter through two walls at approximately twelve-thirty. Multiple voices. Then I heard a sound that was either Lang protesting something or Lang experiencing something, and I made the informed decision to put my earbuds in and accept that whatever was happening in room 205 was none of my business."

"That was the game," I said. "Petra lost a round."

"Petra does not lose at things."

"She lost at this."

Caden settled his chin on his fist with the posture of a man who had arrived at a restaurant and discovered the menu exceeded his expectations. "So you’re telling me that you hosted a Saturday night hangout with Hardy, Ortega, Lang, and Cross, in your room, and played party games until one in the morning, and nothing happened."

"Card games. Party card games. With a point system and everything."

"Was the point system clothing-based?"

"No, Caden, the point system was not clothing-based."

"Was there alcohol?"

I paused for exactly one second too long, and Caden’s grin split his face wide enough that his molars caught the overhead light.

"Knew it. I knew it. Marco owes me twelve dollars."

Percy looked up from his notebook. "I have documented an eighty-three percent correlation between Belmont’s proximity to multiple female classmates after nine PM and subsequent mornings where Belmont’s reaction time during conditioning drops below his established baseline. The current sample size is four incidents. I am not making judgments. I am providing data."

"Percy."

"The data arrives regardless of whether I request it."

Caden clapped Percy on the shoulder with the full-bodied enthusiasm of a man who had found his spiritual home in this specific moment. "My guy. My analyst. My beautiful blue-haired walking spreadsheet."

I bit into the protein bar and chewed while Caden returned to his coffee with the satisfied energy of someone who had won a game I didn’t realize we were playing. The protein tasted like cardboard compressed into the shape of nutrition and marketed to people who confused suffering with self-improvement. Boundless Stamina would have made the caloric intake irrelevant three days ago, but Boundless Stamina was gone and the Demigod recovery rate was running at seventy-five percent of normal, which meant my body actually needed the fuel in a way it hadn’t since the early weeks of the System’s activation.

The walk to Field Epsilon took longer than it should have. Not because the distance changed but because my stride length had contracted by a barely perceptible margin that my brain registered as wrongness at every step. My legs moved through the motions of walking at the pace I’d established over three weeks of campus navigation, and each step landed a fraction of a second behind where my nervous system expected it to land, creating a rolling desynchronization between intent and execution that felt like wearing someone else’s shoes.

The morning fog hung low across the training fields and the grass was still wet with dew that soaked through my trainers within the first thirty seconds of standing on the field. Other students gathered in the usual pre-conditioning clusters, some stretching and others simply existing in the specific misery of six AM awareness. Camille stood near the equipment shed with her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and her compression uniform fitting exactly the way it always fit, which was to say in a manner that made the standardized outfit look like it had been custom-tailored by someone with opinions about her body that they’d expressed through fabric tension. She caught my eye across forty feet of wet grass and something passed between us that contained the memory of her hand on my stomach and the dare she’d accepted and the way her laugh had sounded at one in the morning when she forgot she was competing and just existed.

Felicity materialized at my elbow. The girl possessed the navigational instincts of a guided missile calibrated to my specific coordinates on any campus surface.

"You look terrible."

"I’m aware."

"Like, significantly terrible. Not your usual artfully disheveled thing that makes girls in the cafeteria stare at your jaw. Actually terrible. Like you might fall over."

"Gaming last night. The patch dropped at midnight."

Felicity studied my face with the attention of someone who had spent enough time in close proximity to my expressions that she could distinguish between fourteen distinct varieties of Lukas Belmont bullshit. Her blue eyes moved from my left pupil to my right, checking for dilation asymmetry, then down to the shadows under my eyes, then to the set of my shoulders, then back up.

"Gaming," she repeated.

"Gaming."

"Okay." She linked her arm through mine with the casual possessiveness that had become her default physical vocabulary whenever we occupied the same space. Her bare forearm was warm against my compression sleeve and her vanilla shampoo registered at the edge of my olfactory processing, softer today because my senses were running at reduced capacity and the world had lost approximately eight percent of its definition. "I’m going to pretend I believe that because you look like you need someone to pretend for you this morning."

"You’re a good friend, Hardy."

"The best friend." She squeezed my arm. "The best friend who noticed you moved through the doorway at two percent reduced speed and whose hands haven’t formed fists since arriving on the field, which is unusual because you usually start conditioning with your hands already clenched like you’re looking forward to hitting something."

"Percy’s corrupted you with pattern analysis."

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