The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 483: 483 | The Schedule Resolves Itself

The System, which had spent the last four hours saying absolutely nothing while I limped through conditioning at eighty-eight percent of factory spec, chose that moment to remember I existed.

〘 EMERGENCY QUEST — MANDATORY 〙

"Nobody Leaves"

Hostile incursion confirmed. Facility sealed. Forty unlicensed candidates, two faculty, one agency observer, one unknown quantity in formal wear.

Objective: Survive.

Bonus Objective: Zero student fatalities.

Reward: Unspecified. Scaling.

Failure: Self-explanatory.

Note: Host is currently operating under Systemic Suppression. The System declines to comment on the timing.

Declines to comment. The System had been ninety-nine percent snide commentary since the day it moved into my skull, and the one time I would have paid actual money for it to be a smug little gremlin about my life choices, it went tactful.

Unspecified reward. Scaling. That was System language for we do not know how bad this gets either.

I dismissed the panel and looked at the butler.

He was still standing on the middle landing with his gloved hands folded, patient as furniture, and the emergency lighting turned the white of those gloves into something closer to bone. The mask had no eyeholes. That was what my brain kept circling back to while forty teenagers breathed too fast around me. No eyes, no mouth, no seams. Just a smooth polite oval where a face should have been, tilted at the exact angle of a man waiting to take your coat.

Below us the city was coming apart in four directions at once. Steele had built enough momentum to fold a masked figure into a bus shelter, and the sound of it reached the platform a full beat after the impact. Dravid was somewhere in the smoke near the fire zone, doing his terrible quiet arithmetic on somebody’s Aspect.

None of that mattered to the man on the stairs. He hadn’t looked at either of them.

"You’ll want to be sensible about this," he said, and the warmth in his voice was the worst part, because it was real. "Sit. Cooperate. You’ll be released once the schedule resolves itself."

Sloane moved before he finished the sentence.

I felt it through the bond half a second before I saw it, a spike of white heat behind my sternum that had nothing to do with fear, and then she was over the railing with both palms already crackling. Amber pops chased down her forearms and gathered in her fists. She dropped the twenty feet without slowing, hit the landing three steps above him, and drove her right hand down at the crown of his head with the full charge behind it.

The blast went off. KRRRAKOOM. Concrete shattered outward in a ring and the stairwell rang like a struck bell and dust punched up past the railing in a grey column.

He was standing four feet to her left with his hands still folded.

He hadn’t blurred. I was watching, and I have a hundred Intelligence and eyes that catch things most people file under coincidence, and even choked down to ninety-two percent processing I should have caught the transition. There was no transition. He had been there, and then he was there, and the space between contained nothing at all.

"Firmly aimed," he said. "You committed. That’s rarer than you’d think at your age."

Hiro came off the platform on Sloane’s flank with his chest already blazing.

His Corona lit the whole stairwell gold, that gorgeous impossible-to-miss beam of his tearing out of him in a column two feet wide, and he’d angled it perfectly, cutting off the retreat lane behind the butler so the man had exactly one direction to move. It was a good read. It was genuinely a good read, the kind of thing Dravid would have grunted at approvingly, and I hated that Hiro Sato had produced it under this much pressure while I stood on the platform doing math.

FWWOOOOOM.

Gold light hit the stairs, hit the wall, hit the railing and melted it into a slumping orange lip of steel. The heat came up at us in a wave that made my eyes water. It did not hit anything wearing a tailcoat.

"Beautiful," the butler said from the far side of the beam, and the compliment landed like a hand on Hiro’s shoulder. "Truly. You’ve chosen your silhouette very carefully. Someone taught you to consider the framing."

Camille’s volley arrived while he was still talking.

Eight rivets, orange and screaming, fired from the platform in a spread pattern that didn’t leave a gap for a person to occupy. She’d read the whole geometry in the time it took the rest of us to blink, her Precision Read finding every stress line in the stairwell and every possible dodge angle a body could commit to, and she’d painted them all shut. That was the thing about Camille Ortega. She did not miss. It was not a boast when she said it. It was a load-bearing fact about the universe.

The rivets punched into the wall behind the landing in a neat orange constellation.

Every single one.

"Ortega," he said, and my stomach dropped through the floor of the dome, because he’d used her name. "Your trajectory control is remarkable. I read your file twice." A small, courteous tilt of the mask. "Twice is not something I do."

Camille went very still beside me. I have never once seen that girl go still.

Something in my chest did the cold thing it used to do in my old life, back when I’d learned that the moment a stranger knows your name is the moment you stop being a bystander and start being an item on a list. I ran the read anyway, because that is what I do instead of panicking, and the read came back ugly. Three separate students had committed at full output from three separate vectors inside two seconds. Legendary-tier explosive, Epic-tier radiant beam, Epic-tier precision projectile. Any one of those should have removed a human being from the conversation.

He hadn’t moved fast. That was the part I couldn’t file. Fast leaves a shape. Fast leaves displaced air and a stride and a landing.

He had simply not been where the attacks were, the way an answer is not where the wrong guess is.

"That was your window," he said, gently, and the gloved hands finally came apart. "I do appreciate that you used it. Children who freeze are so much sadder."

Steele’s voice came screaming up from the floor below, and for the first time since I’d met the woman there was no laughter anywhere in it.

"BELMONT, GET THEM BACK FROM THE STAIRS."

I moved. I got maybe two steps.

The air behind the butler tore.

Not one patch this time. All of it. The grey came apart from the stairwell wall in a sheet, spreading sideways with a sound like a television that has been screaming static in an empty house for years and only just now got loud enough to notice, and it didn’t crawl, and it didn’t billow. It arrived. Twenty feet, forty, ninety, a colorless wall folding up over the landing and the platform and the whole northern arc of the crucible, and it swallowed the emergency lighting as it came so that the last thing I saw clearly was Odette Reyes with her silver clip and her charcoal jacket, standing perfectly upright with her folio still tucked under her arm, watching the wall reach her with the expression of a woman filing it for later.

Someone screamed. Rina, probably. Percy said a number.

"Do try to make it a good show," the butler said. "It reflects poorly on everyone if you don’t."

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