The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 482: 482 | The Twilight Society

He stepped off the platform.

Not jumped. Stepped. Like the twenty-foot drop was a curb he hadn’t bothered acknowledging, his cane tucked under one arm and his jacket still buttoned to regulation. He landed on concrete without bending his knees, without rolling, without making a sound that the dome’s acoustics should have carried back to us, and his grey eyes were already locked on the nearest cluster of four before his shoes finished settling.

Steele went over the railing a half second later, but she didn’t fall at all. She launched. The gold jacket caught the backup lighting as her body covered sixty feet of horizontal distance in one fluid arc, building momentum with every inch, Bom Ba Ye charging itself through her own forward motion the way it always had. She was grinning.

The first masked figure raised something that looked like a reinforced baton toward Dravid, and Dravid looked at him.

Just looked.

The baton went dead in the man’s hands. No energy discharge, no visible field, nothing. Suppress simply ate whatever the weapon was channeling, and the man staggered like someone had yanked a power cord from his spine. Dravid closed the remaining six feet with two economical steps and drove the butt of his cane into the man’s solar plexus with a precision that belonged in a surgical theatre. THWACK. The figure folded and didn’t get up.

"Holy shit," Caden breathed behind me.

Steele hit the second cluster like a freight train wearing heels. The first figure in her path tried to sidestep and got caught by a kinetic projection that hadn’t even reached full charge, a casual application that picked the man up off his feet and deposited him twelve feet backward into a concrete planter hard enough to crack the stone. KRRACK. She pivoted without losing momentum, her blonde hair whipping around her shoulders, and the second figure caught a palm strike to the chest that carried enough accumulated force to send him skidding across the floor on his back for a solid eight meters, boots leaving rubber streaks on the polished surface.

"They’re incredible," Rina whispered from somewhere behind me, her voice small and awed.

They were. Incredible didn’t cover it. Dravid moved through his cluster like water through broken glass, never hurrying, every motion exactly sufficient and nothing wasted, suppressing Aspects before the bearers finished activating them and then following through with strikes that put people down permanently.

His cane became an extension of some other kind of economy, the strikes arriving at exactly the necessary angle, exactly the necessary force, nothing decorative, nothing extra.

Steele was the opposite — loud and forward and building with every step, her Bom Ba Ye projections arriving at targets before the targets finished deciding which direction to run.

One of them tried to dodge and she adjusted mid-charge, the projection redirecting with a fluidity that shouldn’t have been possible for something moving at that velocity. The man went down hard, the impact audible across the entire platform.

"OUTSIDE!" Sloane’s voice cut through the spectacle like a blade, sharp and commanding in a register I’d never heard from her in public. Pink hair flying, blue eyes blazing, both hands crackling with contained Detonation energy as she grabbed Eden by the back of his collar.

"Everyone get outside NOW. You want to help? Stop being a liability first!"

The emergency shutters came down.

Steel slabs the size of shipping containers slammed from the top of the doorframe with a boom that shook the platform, sealing the entrance floor to ceiling. Then the same sound rolled around the perimeter of the entire dome as every access point sealed at once, metal screaming against metal, the locks engaging with a finality that belonged in a bank vault, not a public crucible.

The artificial daylight overhead flickered once, twice, then steadied at a lower, redder setting. Emergency lighting. The whole crucible dropped into the color of a wound, the shadows deeper, the faces around me suddenly harder to read, and I felt the static up my spine shift from alarm into something colder, something that understood exactly what sealed meant when there were still grey portals opening at the base of the stairs.

We skidded to a stop in front of two hundred feet of solid steel. Somewhere behind us in the sealed city, more grey portals were still spitting out figures.

The static up my spine had stopped screaming. It had gone quiet instead, the specific quiet of a thing that had already happened, and I stood in a sealed dome with thirty-nine teenagers and two furious instructors and an agency scout who’d come to read my trauma numbers, and I understood with the flat clarity the transmigrant had never lost that today’s numbers were going to be real.

A figure stepped out of a portal at the base of the stairs, unhurried, and walked up to the middle landing where everyone could see him.

He was dressed as a butler. That was the detail my brain snagged on first, because it was so profoundly stupid, a full black tailcoat and white gloves and a mask over his face that was smooth and featureless and polite, and he moved with the crisp economical grace of someone who’d spent a lifetime being invisible in expensive rooms. He clasped his gloved hands in front of him and inclined his head at us, at forty pinned Hero students and the two people responsible for keeping us alive.

"We apologize for the interruption, Halloran Hero students." His voice was even, cultured, warm in a way that made it so much worse, like he was announcing dinner. "I understand you have an important evaluation today. Unfortunately, we of the Twilight Society have made the executive decision to kill the number one Hero. Today."

The word Radiant hadn’t left his mouth and it didn’t need to.

"We had, of course, expected him to be present." The mask tilted, a small performance of regret. "His absence is a scheduling inconvenience. We will adjust." His gloved hands unclasped, spread, indicating the sealed dome, the static portals, the dozens of masked figures now spreading through the burning and flooded and collapsed city below us.

"But you understand, given the effort involved in arranging this morning, that we simply cannot let you leave."

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