The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 484: 484 | A Hard Landing [CASTLE BONUS]

Then the static ate me.

There was no impact and no cold and no falling sensation, which was somehow far worse than any of those, because my inner ear insisted I was standing on solid ground while my eyes reported an absence of everything. No color. No depth. Not darkness, since darkness has a texture and this had less than that. My skin went numb in patches. My teeth buzzed.

Somewhere in the grey I could feel the Devotion’s Echo dragging like a fishing line under tension, Sloane’s fury and terror threaded together and pulling away from me at speed, which meant she was still alive and getting further away, which meant this was transit and not deletion.

The System put up exactly one line.

Passive: Integrity Shield engaged. Bond intact.

Then the floor came back.

Not under my feet. Above my head, apparently, or at least at some angle my body had strong objections to, because I came out of the grey sideways with forward momentum I had not asked for and absolutely no reference point for where down had gone.

Oh shi—

The ground took the thought before I finished it.

I hit shoulder first on something with edges. Concrete, broken into fist-sized geometry, and I bounced, and the bounce spun me, and the second impact caught my hip and turned the spin into a genuinely ugly cartwheel across a slope of rubble that had opinions about my ribs. Boundless Stamina would have shrugged this off. Boundless Stamina had been dead for weeks, traded out for a Legendary trait that made my jaw sharper and did nothing whatsoever about landing on rebar.

I got a hand down. Got the roll going, sacrificed the shoulder, ate the rest with my back, and slid the last twelve feet on the tactical jacket Diane designed while dust and grit found every gap in the collar.

Then I stopped, and lay there, and coughed out a lungful of powdered building.

"Fuck," I rasped at the ceiling. "That was a hard landing."

Nobody answered, which was the first genuinely bad news.

I ran the checklist while the coughing worked itself out, because moving before you know what is broken is how people with superpowers end up as case studies. Shoulder: screaming, functional. Hip: purple by tomorrow, functional. Ribs: two of them had a complaint they were filing in triplicate. Head: intact, which I attributed less to skill than to the fact that Demigod had spent the last month quietly reinforcing everything I was made of while I complained about my reaction time.

At eighty-eight percent, that landing would have hospitalized any normal first-year. At a hundred I wouldn’t have felt it.

I sat up.

The collapse zone.

Of course it was the collapse zone. Somewhere in the sealed dome, four hundred million dollars of reconfigurable disaster architecture had four flavors on offer, and the static had looked at my file, at the twelve percent debuff and the eighteen percent reaction penalty, and dropped me into the one environment where the entire hazard model was things falling faster than you can respond.

Concrete slabs sat at angles that made my Intelligence stat itch, whole floors folded down onto each other with their reinforcement bars jutting out like ribs from something that had been butchered rather than demolished. Dust hung in the emergency light in long red bands. Above me, sixty or seventy feet up, a slab the size of a tennis court balanced on a support column with two visible fractures, and my brain helpfully generated a load calculation I did not want.

The quiet was the wrong kind. Not silence, since the structure was working, groaning somewhere deep and shifting its weight around in small increments the way old buildings do when they are thinking about it. But no voices. No Caden narrating his own terror. No Percy counting.

Alone.

I got my feet under me and let the Oracle Feed do its thing.

〘 Oracle Feed 〙

Location: Crucible — Sector Two, Structural Collapse Environment. Sublevel access confirmed. Exact position unmapped.

Squad proximity: No registered heroines within 50m.

Bond Resonance (Fitzgerald, S.): Signal present. Distance approx. 340m. Emotional state: enraged, escalating.

Note: The other thirty-nine were distributed. They were not removed. Host is advised to stop calculating and start walking.

Distributed. Not removed.

I let out a breath I had been holding since the wall arrived and hadn’t noticed. That was the read I’d been most afraid of, that the grey had been a disposal mechanism instead of a delivery system, and the butler had folded forty Hero candidates into nothing while I stood two steps from the railing with my mouth open. But he had said it himself, in that awful warm voice, with his hands folded like a man announcing that the car was ready.

Do try to survive.

Which meant he wanted us alive and separated. Which meant we were not the objective, we were the schedule. He had come to kill Radiant, Radiant had not shown up, and instead of aborting a plan that cost the Twilight Society enough resources to seal a two-hundred-foot dome and open static holes in the world, they had adjusted.

Forty unlicensed students in a sealed facility. Two instructors. One agency observer with a folio.

You do not scatter your leverage across a burning, flooding, collapsing city block unless you intend for someone to come looking.

I stood in the red dust with my ribs complaining and worked all the way through it, because that is the one thing I am reliably good at, and the conclusion arrived flat and unpleasant. We were bait. Every one of us. Somewhere out there Rina was alone in water she could not stand up in, and Percy was alone with a notebook and a Common-tier physique, and Sloane was three hundred and forty meters away and getting angrier, and the whole point of us was to be found dying on camera by a man in red, white, and blue who could not stand to be late.

Fine. I have been the bait before.

I rolled my left shoulder, which hurt exactly as much as advertised, and reached for the inventory.

Joyful Cloud came into my hand with a weight that settled me more than it should have, three sections of ivory-white linked by gold chain, collapsed down into a rod that fit my palm like it had been measured for it. Three weeks I had carried that thing around Halloran without deploying it once, because a mid-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot leash does not explain away a weapon that relocates load-bearing walls, and because Diane had opinions about my property damage, and because Odette Reyes was going to be standing on the floor reading trauma numbers.

Odette Reyes was somewhere in this dome right now with static in her hair.

Assume the larger number, she’d told me in a visitor lot with the engine already running. Because I do.

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