The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 486: 486 | A Standing Ovation From Suki Tanaka [CASTLE BONUS]

I stepped off the slab.

Forty feet of drop, and I did not brace for it and I did not slow it, I just let the fall happen and the fall was fast, and the four men below jerked their masked heads up at the shout, and one of them got as far as raising an arm before I landed in front of Ren hard enough to crack the concrete in a starburst and throw a wall of red dust in every direction.

The impact rang up through my heels and my ribs filed a fresh complaint and I did not care. I came out of the crouch with Joyful Cloud already extending, three ivory sections snapping out to full length, chains whispering, the whole six feet of it settling into my grip like it had been waiting three weeks for exactly this.

"Hi," I said to the four of them. "Sorry, is this a private hunting party, or."

The nearest one recovered fast, I’ll give him that. Big man, forearm the size of my thigh, some kind of hardened-skin Branded thing going grey and dense across his knuckles as he swung.

I channeled Strength Resonance into the lead section and met his fist with the staff.

The sound was not a good sound. Not for him.

CRACK.

Amber light flared down the ivory as the Resonance amplified everything I had, and I have a hundred Strength before the debuff and even at eighty-eight the number is obscene, and the staff took his hardened-skin fist and folded it back the wrong way and kept going through his forearm and lifted all two-hundred-and-some pounds of him off his feet and put him into a slab twelve feet away. He hit it and slid down it and stayed down it.

"Okay," I said. "So that’s how these are going to go."

The other three came at once, which was smart, and it did not help.

I moved. Even debuffed I moved, eating the distance to the second one before his brain finished processing the first one dying against a wall, and I put the butt end of Joyful Cloud into his solar plexus with a sound like a dropped watermelon and watched him fold in half around it. The third had a weapon, some kind of energy blade, and I let one chain-linked section come off my forearm in a whipping arc that caught the blade, wrapped it, and yanked it out of his hands into mine, and then I hit him with the flat of it across the temple hard enough to rattle his mask.

"You gotta be kidding me," the fourth one said, backing up, and there was a shake in it now, the specific shake of a man revising his afternoon. "You’re a Hero. Aren’t you supposed to be one of the goddamn heroes."

I collapsed the loose section back with a flick of my wrist and rolled my shoulders and considered the question honestly.

"Eh." I tilted my head. "I’m still in training, technically."

Then I hit him too.

He went into the rubble slope and did not get back up, and the dust settled, and for a second the only sound was my own breathing and the building groaning somewhere overhead and the faint drip of water from a burst simulation pipe. Four grown men, down, none of them dead because I am practical and dead men attract attention and living ones can be interrogated later by people whose job it is.

Behind me, Ren made a noise.

I turned. He’d pushed himself upright against the column, leg still pinned, and he was staring at me with those sharp grey eyes gone wide, the deadpan cracked wide open, dust in his dark hair and blood at his temple. Ren Ashida, who had looked at me exactly once on move-in day and decided I was uninteresting, was now looking at me like the file had changed.

"You," he said, and his voice was rough from the smoke and the landing. "Your registration says fifteen feet. Mid-tier. Force manipulation."

"It does say that," I agreed, and crouched to look at the slab on his leg.

"That was not fifteen feet." He was doing the same thing Percy did, the same thing everyone with a working brain in Class 1-B did around me eventually, adding up a column of numbers that refused to sum. "That was not mid-tier. You dropped forty feet, you crossed thirty in a blink, and you put four Branded through concrete with a stick."

"Legendary stick," I said. "It’s very nice. Diane would love it. It matches nothing I own."

Suki dropped down the slope behind me, light as a leaf, and crouched on Ren’s other side without a word. She flipped her notebook open, wrote something fast, and held it up.

You yelled Geronimo.

"I did," I said. "It felt right. Whole thing lacked a soundtrack, I improvised."

She wrote again. Held it up.

It was cool.

That was, from Suki Tanaka, roughly a standing ovation, and I filed it next to the melon-noise as one of the great compliments of my brief second life.

I got a hand under the slab pinning Ren’s leg and started to lift, and the debuff dragged at me, and the ribs screamed, and I lifted it anyway because a Terrain user with a working leg is worth more than one without. It came up slow and ugly and I got it off him and he dragged the leg free and hissed through his teeth, and it moved, which meant it wasn’t broken, which was better luck than the rest of my day.

"Can you stand," I said.

"Give me a second." He was flexing the leg, testing it, and even dazed he was doing the thing he always did, reading the space, and I watched his sharp grey eyes track up the slope and across the folded slabs and the jutting rebar and the whole cathedral of raw material we were kneeling inside, and I watched the exact moment it landed.

His breath changed.

"They put me here," he said, slow. "In here."

"Yeah."

"In a building made of..." He looked at his own hands. Looked at the four hundred million dollars of concrete and stone stacked in every direction as far as the red light reached. "They dropped me into the middle of it."

"They read your name," I said. "They didn’t read your file."

Something moved across Ren Ashida’s face that I had never once seen there, not in three weeks of watching him be the coldest person in the cohort, and it took me a second to recognize it because it was so far from his usual register.

It was hunger.

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