The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 485: 485 | The Buffet Is A Trap [CASTLE BONUS]

I collapsed Joyful Cloud back to a rod and slid it into my belt, because a glowing white staff is the opposite of what you want when you’re the one doing the finding. Then I picked my way down the rubble slope on the balls of my feet, listening.

The structure kept talking to itself in that low settling groan, but under it, faint and getting less faint, came voices. Men’s voices. Bored the way a shift is bored.

I crouched behind a slab that had folded over another slab and made a wedge, and I let the noise resolve.

"—wanna find one of the little ones before it’s over."

"Butler said don’t kill ’em."

"Didn’t say don’t hurt ’em." A laugh, wet and pleased with itself. "You seen the roster? Kids. Fourteen hundred applied and these forty are the cream, right, the special ones. I wanna crack a special one open and watch its face figure out it ain’t special."

"You’re a sick bastard."

"I’m a patient bastard. There’s a difference."

Four of them, spread across the debris field below me, moving in a loose sweep pattern with the discipline of people who had done this before and the enthusiasm of people who enjoyed it. Masks like the butler’s but rougher, cheaper, the kind you buy in bulk when you’re issuing them to men whose faces don’t need protecting.

Grown men. Adult men with muscle and weapons and years, spread across a collapsed building hunting for teenagers so they could break something before the schedule ran out.

Something in my chest went very quiet and very cold, and it was not fear.

I have done a lot of unpleasant math about myself since I woke up in this body. I know what the System thinks I am. I know what my Defiance counter looks like and I know exactly how many lines I’ve crossed with women who trusted me, and I have gotten reasonably comfortable with the idea that I am not a good person, just a practical one, and that the overlap is bigger than people give it credit for.

But there is a specific flavor of disgust that lives underneath all of that, and these four had found it. A grown man who wants to hurt a kid for the way the kid’s face falls apart is beneath even my standards, and my standards are, generously, a basement.

I was still sitting on that, jaw tight, when a hand touched my shoulder.

I came off the ground about a foot.

To my genuine and lasting shame I made a sound, small and startled and undignified, the kind of noise you make when your enhanced nervous system, debuffed or not, spends its entire threat budget on the men below and gets flanked by the one person who can move without disturbing air.

I spun with Joyful Cloud already half out of my belt.

Suki Tanaka looked back at me. Deadpan. Cerulean eyes, brown bob with the side-swept bangs falling right, the deep blue and white bodysuit dusted grey along one shoulder from her own landing. She had her small notebook clutched in one hand like a lifeline and an expression that suggested she found my reaction the mildly interesting kind of data.

She raised her free hand. Waved. Two fingers, slow.

My heart was trying to relocate to my throat, so I waved back. Same two fingers. Same slow.

Right. Voice-command Aspect. Every syllable she spoke carried a frequency that could stop a person mid-motion and cost her body feedback for the privilege, which meant she’d spent her whole life learning to say nothing, which meant that of all forty of us she was the single best-equipped person to move through a stealth situation and the single worst-equipped to tell me what she’d found.

She pointed. Down and left, past my wedge slab, into the debris field where the four men were sweeping.

I followed her finger.

Ren Ashida sat slumped against a fallen support column maybe forty feet down the slope, one leg pinned under concrete, his dark head hanging. Even from here I could see he was dazed, that specific loose-necked wobble of someone who had eaten a hard landing and not fully rebooted. His grey and charcoal costume was torn open across one hip. His hands twitched at the rubble like he was trying to remember what his own Aspect did.

And the four grown men who wanted to crack a special one open were sweeping directly toward him.

I looked back at Suki. Whispered, barely air.

"I’m gonna go help."

She nodded once. Then she gave me a thumbs up, small and precise, the same energy she brought to eating a melon, and something about the total flatness of it while men circled a downed kid below us was so perfectly her that I almost laughed.

I did not laugh. I had somewhere to be.

I stood up on the slab, rolled my aching shoulder one more time, and looked down at the four of them, and I felt the cold thing in my chest lean forward.

Here is the read I’d been sitting on since the Oracle Feed said collapse zone. These men had come to a facility to hunt Hero students. They had a roster. They knew our names, some of us, because the butler had rattled Camille’s file at her like a party trick.

But knowing a name and knowing an Aspect are two different files, and the one thing you would never, ever guess about the kid slumped against that column, torn up and dazed and defenseless, was that they had dropped him into the single most dangerous room in the world for anyone standing near him.

Terrain. Ren Ashida generated and shaped earth constructs from the material around him. Barriers, platforms, spikes, whole architecture out of thin ground.

And the static, the butler, the whole clever machine of the Twilight Society, had looked at a building made of nothing but concrete and rebar and stone, a four-hundred-million-dollar cathedral of raw construction material, and dropped a Terrain user into the middle of it like it was an inconvenience.

It was a buffet. They’d set him at the head of a buffet and called it a trap.

They just didn’t know. Nobody reads the whole file. You skim the names and the threat ratings and you go hunting, and the last place your brain expects to find a landscape-artist is inside a landscape.

I filed that. It mattered. But it mattered in about six seconds, and right now there were four men and one dazed kid and a slope, and I had been holding back at Halloran for three straight weeks until my own instructors started building files on the gap.

Odette had told me to stop constructing evidence against myself and start being what I actually was.

Nobody in this dome was on camera in a way that counted anymore. The evaluation was over. The only witnesses down there were about to be unconscious.

I let a grin come up. It felt good. It felt like the first honest thing I’d done all morning.

"GERONIMO!"

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