The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 487: 487 | One Liar Clocking Another

"Okay," I said, and stood, and offered Ren a hand. "So before you build a fortress and become a god, quick thing."

He took the hand. Pulled himself up on the bad leg, tested his weight on it, and it held, which was one problem solved and about thirty remaining.

"They wanted you here," I said. "You, specifically, in a collapse zone. That’s either the dumbest tactical decision in the history of dumb tactical decisions, or they didn’t have you flagged as a threat at all. My money’s on the second one."

"Meaning what," Ren said, already rolling his shoulders, already drawing a slow test-current of dust and gravel up into a spiral around his forearm like he’d forgotten he had a leg to be hurt about.

"Meaning they think you’re a set piece." Suki’s notebook flicked to a fresh page beside me, pen moving, and I kept going. "A Terrain guy in a room that already collapses. Redundant. Furniture. They put you here to be found, not to be a problem."

The spiral of gravel tightened. The whole cathedral of broken concrete around us groaned like it had opinions.

"So I should be a problem," Ren said.

"I mean, eventually." I glanced up the slope, listening past the settling, listening for the next sweep team, and there was always a next sweep team. "First we find people. You’re gonna want to hold the structure open. This whole sector is one bad load-shift from folding, and there are thirty-eight other idiots scattered through it who did not land next to a walking cheat code."

Something flickered across Ren’s face at cheat code. Not offense. Recognition, maybe, the specific look of one liar clocking another.

He didn’t say anything. He just planted his good foot, spread his hands, and the sublevel changed.

I have watched a lot of Aspects. Sloane’s detonations, Camille’s rivets, Hiro’s stupid beautiful beam. I had not watched anything like this, because Ren Ashida had spent the entire semester at maybe forty percent, same as me, same as Caden, all of us hiding in our own particular ways, and here in the dark with four unconscious men and no cameras he stopped hiding.

The floor rose.

Not a piece of it. All of it. A twenty-foot span of fractured concrete under our feet leveled itself with a grinding roar, the jutting rebar folding down flat, the debris field around us reorganizing like someone had grabbed the whole mess and shaken it into order. Above us the tennis-court slab that had been balanced on one fractured column suddenly had four columns, thick as trees, rising out of the rubble to catch it and hold it, and the groaning overhead cut off mid-complaint.

"Huh," I said.

"The material’s already here." Ren’s voice had gone flat again but there was a low warmth under it now, the same warmth I’d only heard once when he talked about structural engineering in Dravid’s class. "I don’t have to generate. I just have to redirect. This is..."

He trailed off, and I watched his sharp grey eyes go up and up, cataloging the four hundred million dollars of raw stone stacked in every direction, and I recognized the exact moment a person understands they are, for the next several hours, the most dangerous thing in the room.

Ping.

The Oracle Feed slid a line across the corner of my vision, dry and unhurried.

Ren Ashida, Terrain, Legendary, deployed at approximately eighty percent for the first documented time. Structural stability of Sector Two: improving. Recommendation: keep this one alive, he is useful.

Yeah. No kidding.

"We move together," I said. "You hold the ceilings, I hit the things, Suki does the terrifying voice thing when it counts. Sound good."

Suki flipped a page. Held it up.

Terrifying voice thing.

Underneath, a second line, smaller.

Accurate.

"See, she gets it." I collapsed Joyful Cloud into its rod and dropped it back at my belt, saving the shoulders, because even a Legendary stick is heavy when your ribs are a war crime. "Come on. Sloane’s three hundred meters that way and getting angrier by the second, and when Sloane gets angry, walls stop being load-bearing on a philosophical level."

The bond confirmed it as I said it, a hot spike of pure murder resonating against my sternum from the far side of the dome, and it was almost funny, the specific way I could feel my girlfriend deciding to reduce a building to gravel from three hundred meters out. She was fine. Furious, but fine, and furious-fine was Sloane’s factory setting, the state she operated best in, and I loved her in a way the System had quantified and locked and that had grown, honest to god, in the space where I kept things I didn’t examine.

We started up the slope Ren had leveled into a ramp, and that was when the second sweep team found us.

Six of them this time, coming over the ridge of a folded floor, better geared than the first four, one of them with a rifle already up and tracking. The one in front saw the four unconscious bodies first, saw the impossible ordered geometry of the sublevel Ren had rebuilt, saw me standing in the middle of it with my hands empty, and made the mistake all of them were going to make today, which was assuming empty hands meant unarmed.

"There," the rifleman said, and swung the barrel toward me.

I did not have Joyful Cloud out. I did not need it.

Ren moved first.

He didn’t even look like he was trying. He flicked two fingers and a wall came up out of the ramp between us and the sweep team, four feet of solid reinforced stone, and the rifle round smacked into it and did nothing, and then Ren flicked his fingers the other way and the wall was not a wall anymore, it was a fist, a battering ram of stone the size of a car that punched out of the vertical and caught three of them center-mass and folded them backward off the ridge.

"Show off," I said, delighted.

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