The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 479: 479 | The Lukas Tingle

The coaches emptied into a staging area under the dome’s shadow. For the first time all semester I watched 1-A and 1-B stand in the same space without a table or a monitor between us. Forty teenagers in costume. Half of them Class 1-A, moving with the settled confidence of people who executed protocol as reflex. Half of them mine. The improvisers.

The ones the faculty kept comparing us to unfavorably, usually while we were in earshot. Koda was already loud somewhere to my left, her voice cutting through the general ambient noise in ways that suggested she’d found something worth competing about.

I caught the flash of pink that meant Sloane had positioned herself where she could see the whole crowd, which was tactically sound and also meant she’d probably spotted me before I’d finished stepping off the coach.

Percy found me before I’d taken four steps.

"You look worse than you did at breakfast." He had his notebook out, pen moving, blue hair dark at the temples with the specific dampness of someone who’d been awake since four calculating something nobody asked him to calculate. His eyes flicked up to mine for half a second before dropping back to the page.

"Your gait’s off by a measurable margin. Reaction latency, based on how long it took you to notice me, is up roughly a fifth from your Monday baseline. I’m documenting this because the environmental compatibility grids I ran last night assume baseline performance from every participant in the exercise."

"Good morning to you too."

"I’m not making conversation." He didn’t look up. The pen kept moving in small, precise strokes that suggested he was annotating something in real time. "I ran the environmental compatibility grids against every plausible squad configuration last night. Sample of one hundred and nineteen permutations. Your squad, whichever one you got, has a survivability curve that assumes you perform at your documented ceiling. The documented ceiling is what I used for the calculations because that’s the only data I have access to."

His pen stopped. He looked at me directly, and the blue of his eyes carried the flat quality of someone who’d already decided this conversation mattered and was going to have it whether I cooperated or not. "You are not going to perform at your documented ceiling today. I can see it in how you’re standing. I can see it in the micro-adjustments you’re making to compensate for fatigue you think you’re hiding. You’re not hiding it. You’re managing it poorly."

That was the problem with Percy. He never accused. He observed, out loud, in a format that made denial pointless.

"Rough night," I said.

"That is the fourth time this week you’ve offered a version of that answer." He finally looked at me, and there wasn’t judgment in it, just the flat concern of someone who’d decided I mattered and hadn’t figured out what to do with the decision. "I don’t need the real one. I need you to know that if this exercise gets difficult and you’re at reduced capacity, the person who dies is not a dummy. It’s whatever fiction you’ve built holding you back."

He walked off toward Rina before I could respond, which was its own kind of mercy.

I turned toward the faculty cluster, and that was when I noticed it.

They looked annoyed. Not exam-day tense, not the controlled irritation Steele wore when a student underperformed. This was different. Steele stood with her tablet lowered, her pink eyes cutting toward the road every few seconds, and Cole Dravid leaned on his cane beside her with his blue-black head bent close to hers, and they were whispering. Whatever Dravid said made Steele’s jaw tighten. Whatever she said back made him look at the sky like the sky owed him an explanation.

I have a hundred Intelligence and a passive that reads faces for a living, and I still couldn’t parse it. Dravid’s mouth moved and I caught the shape of it, of all the irresponsible things, delivered in that flat register he used for observations he’d already decided were true.

Something crawled up the back of my neck.

Not the debuff.

The debuff sat lower, heavier, a wet weight at the base of my skull that I’d gotten used to carrying since the moment the counter ticked to forty-seven. This was different. This was higher and sharper, a prickle crawling up the top of my spine like static building before a storm, the kind of sensation that made every nerve in your body stand at attention without you giving it permission.

I’d felt it exactly once before. Three months ago. One in the morning in a training room. A magic stick sending a heavy bag through a wall. The moment I’d understood, for the first time, that the System had opinions about consequences.

I’d privately started calling it the Lukas tingle. Which was a profoundly unhelpful technical term and also the only one my brain could come up with when my body was insisting on it this hard.

The hell.

I turned my attention back toward the faculty cluster just in time to see Dravid straighten, tap his cane once against the concrete with a sound like a gavel hitting wood, and then his voice cut across the entire staging area without rising above conversational volume.

"Quiet."

Forty teenagers went silent in the space of a breath.

It wasn’t the volume. It was the way he said it, like the word cost him nothing and disobeying it would cost us everything we had. The kind of flat authority that came from someone who had already decided the outcome and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up to the reality he was operating in.

"Class 1-A. Class 1-B." His grey eyes moved across us with that surgical indifference that made me feel like I was being catalogued for a file he’d already started. "You are about to enter the Verano Crisis Response Facility. Some of you will be reassigned out of Combat Operations based on what happens in the next four hours. I would tell you not to be nervous, except nervous is correct, and I have no interest in lying to you before an evaluation specifically designed to reveal what you do when lying stops working."

He turned toward the dome and gestured with his free hand, and the enormous doors at the base of the structure began to grind open with a sound like tectonic plates shifting, the kind of deep mechanical rumble that rolled across the lot like something ancient waking up and deciding whether it was in a cooperative mood.

The tingle at the top of my spine intensified.

Great.

"Follow me," Dravid said, already moving toward the entrance. "Stay in your assigned squads. Do not touch anything until you are told. This is not a request."

We went in.

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