The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 480: 480 | A Textbook on Urban Catastrophe

I’ve seen expensive rooms. I grew up in the Fitzgerald estate, I’ve stood in Halloran’s cafeteria and watched a chef torch nigiri with a device that cost more than a car, I’ve been inside a home theater with tiered seating and a popcorn machine. None of it prepared me for what was under that dome.

The interior opened into a space that defied every assumption I had about what could fit inside a building. They’d built a city in here. Not a training set, not a mock-up with cardboard facades and chalk outlines. An actual operational city block, complete and functioning, under a ceiling so impossibly high that the curve of the dome overhead dissolved into artificial daylight that felt too real to be generated. The scale alone made my brain stutter. This wasn’t a room. It was geography.

Directly ahead and below us, accessed by a broad flight of industrial steel stairs descending from the observation platform where we’d been corralled, four distinct disaster environments spread out across the training floor like someone had opened a textbook on urban catastrophe and decided to make it tactile.

To the north, fire. Not simulated. Not projected imagery or heat lamps and stage smoke. Actual controlled flame crawling up the facade of a four-story building reconstruction, licking from shattered windows, curling around exposed support beams.

The heat shimmer was visible even from here, distorting the air above the structure. Smoke poured upward in thick columns before vanishing into a ventilation system so efficient I couldn’t see where the exhaust went. The building looked half-consumed already, and I could see the glow intensifying as whatever fuel source they’d rigged inside continued to feed it.

West of the fire zone sat the collapse site. A multi-story structure folded in on itself like something had reached down and crumpled it from above. Concrete slabs angled at forty-five degrees, rebar jutting from fractured edges, entire sections of wall propped against each other in ways that looked stable until you noticed the gaps underneath where floors used to be. Debris fields fanned out from the base in careful, lethal arrangements. One wrong step and you’d punch through a gap that dropped three stories into rebar and darkness.

To the east, water. An entire residential district submerged to the second floor, the surface dark and unnaturally still in a way that made it worse. No ripples. No current. Just black water sitting there like it had always been there, swallowing street signs and ground-level windows and whatever the hell else was underneath. I could see the tops of cars, half-submerged mailboxes, a streetlight bent at an angle with its top six inches still visible above the waterline. The stillness made my skin crawl more than movement would have.

And south, cordoned off behind thick translucent barriers lined with flashing yellow warning lights, the hazmat zone. Some kind of industrial storage facility leaking colored vapor in shades that didn’t belong in nature. Green-gray mist pooled near the ground, heavier than air, creeping outward in slow tendrils before hitting the containment and curling back on itself. I could see shapes inside the haze, structural silhouettes that suggested tanks, pipework, catwalks. The barriers had vents at the top, which meant whatever was leaking in there was being managed on a cycle I didn’t want to think too hard about.

"Holy shit," someone breathed, and it might have been Dash, and it might have been half the room.

Elara stood beside me at the top of the stairs, and her pale eyes moved across the collapsed structure with the focus of a chess player seeing the whole board. "The debris fields have clear runs between them," she said quietly, mostly to herself. "I can build speed in there."

Zara had already found the flooded zone and was frowning at it. "Water kills my whole approach. Whoever built this hates proprioception specialists."

Dravid let us look for exactly long enough, then his voice pulled us back.

"The exercise is simple to state and difficult to survive. Civilian dummies are distributed throughout all four environments, each equipped with trauma sensors. Your only metric is lives saved. Not villains neutralized. Not property preserved. Lives." He paused, and his cane tapped once. "You will be deployed by squad to a starting environment and will move outward from there as the situation degrades. And it will degrade. The environments are not static. Fire spreads. Structures continue to collapse. Water rises. The system is designed to punish anyone who thinks the map they see now is the map they’ll be working in ten minutes from now."

He pulled up a display on his tablet and the assignments flickered across a screen mounted above the stairs.

"Squad One. Fitzgerald, Brynn, Park, Osei. Fire zone, north sector, entry through the eastern approach." Sloane’s head came up, and even from across the platform I felt the Echo spike hot with satisfaction, because of course they’d put her in fire, of course they’d give the girl who made things explode the environment where restraint mattered most. "Squad Two. Ortega, Adler, Whitfield, Kaine. Collapse zone." Zara’s jaw set. "Squad Three."

He kept going. The names rolled past and the environments got assigned and I half-listened for my own while I catalogued the four zones and tried, through the wet cement in my skull, to figure out which one I could survive at eighty-eight percent without either failing the dummies or lighting up every trauma sensor in the building with output that didn’t match my file.

"Squad Five. Belmont, Reyes, Camo, Whitfield." No, Zara was Squad Two, I’d misheard, and the debuff had eaten the connection before it landed. "Correction. Belmont, Reyes, Camo, Lang." Dash whooped somewhere behind me. Petra, three platforms over with her planner, went very still. "Flood zone, lower levels."

Flood. The one environment my file had marked as unrated because Petra hadn’t had data on me, and the one where Elara’s momentum-dependent Aspect would either be a coffin or a miracle, and the one where Zara wasn’t going to be with us to carry the physical load.

Cross was in my squad. Vivienne Cross, who’d sat in my room last night and read every emotional signature in it out loud like a weather report, who had an Aspect that let her feel the state of anyone within ten feet, who was going to be within ten feet of me in a flooded building for four hours.

Wonderful. Just an absolutely fantastic development.

Odette Reyes stood on the floor at the base of the stairs beside a bank of monitors, faculty-side, exactly where she’d said she’d be, and she wasn’t looking at the assignments. She was looking at me. Reading trauma numbers she didn’t have yet, off a candidate she’d decided to be early and wrong about.

"You will have ten minutes to descend to your starting positions and prepare," Dravid said. "When the horn sounds, the exercise begins. Radiant will be observing from the—"

He stopped.

He actually stopped, mid-sentence, and looked at Steele, and Steele looked at the entrance behind us where a seven-foot symbol of hope was supposed to have arrived seventy minutes ago and had not, and the annoyance on both their faces finally clicked into place for me. They weren’t annoyed at a student. They were annoyed at Arthur Vance, at Radiant, at the man who’d apparently decided a scheduled evaluation of forty teenagers ranked below whatever fire he was pulling people out of downtown.

Cole Dravid muttered something under his breath that his flat register couldn’t quite contain, and this time I caught all of it. Of all the irresponsible—he chose today.

The static up my spine got worse.

And then the lights went out.

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