The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 488: 488 | The Apology Is Breaking

"You dropped forty feet and yelled Geronimo," Ren said, flat, and honest to god I think that was the first joke Ren Ashida had made in the entire semester.

I Blitzed.

Even debuffed the world blurred, thirty feet compressed into a fraction, and I came out of it inside the guard of the two on the left flank before the ram had finished folding the others, and I did not have a weapon so I used what I had, which was a hundred Strength dressed down to eighty-eight and a lifetime in another world’s worth of not fighting fair.

I caught the first one’s wrist and broke the grip and put my elbow through his mask, and the second one got a hand on my shoulder, dug in, and something cold ran up my arm from the contact, some kind of drain Aspect trying to sap the strength out of me.

Which would have worked, on a person.

It fizzled off the Demigod trait like a match against a bonfire, and his eyes went wide behind the mask when the drain gave him nothing back, and I put him down with a strike to the temple I calibrated very carefully to not kill him, because I am, whatever else I am, practical.

The last one ran.

I let him. Ren’s fist-wall came down across the ridge and sealed the gap he’d fled through, and the sound of the man’s boots faded, and the sublevel went quiet again except for the drip of the burst pipe and Ren breathing hard and Suki, up on a ledge, calmly writing something in her notebook like she was taking exam notes.

"Okay," I said, and blew out a breath, and touched my ribs and regretted it. "So that’s two teams. There are more. There are always more."

Ren looked at the wreckage he’d made, the bodies I’d put down, the way I’d moved through the space like the debuff wasn’t wearing me down to nothing. Looked at his own hands, then at me, and I watched him choose to ask the question directly instead of dancing around it, which I respected.

"What are you," he said.

Not who. What.

Everyone got there eventually. Dravid, Steele, Odette, Petra, Percy, and now the coldest kid in the cohort, standing in a room he’d rebuilt with his mind, looking at me like I was the anomaly. Which, fair.

"I’m the guy who’s going to get everyone out of here," I said, and it wasn’t an answer and we both knew it, and I saw Ren decide to let me have it for now and add the non-answer to whatever file he kept behind those grey eyes. "Including Rina, who I need to get to before the water does or before she has to use her Aspect on actual people instead of training dummies. So. Time pressure."

Suki dropped off the ledge and landed between us and held up her notebook.

Rina is close.

My stomach bottomed out in a way that made the Oracle Feed’s ping register as weight.

Because Rina in a collapse zone was manageable. Rina in a flood zone was a girl who couldn’t swim being asked to survive rising water. And the flood zone bordered this sector. And if the sweep teams found her first, she would apologize to them, she would actually apologize while the water climbed past her knees, past her waist, right up until the second she couldn’t apologize anymore and something pink and soft and terrible happened to people who were just following orders. I did not want her to have to find out what existed on the other side of that apology breaking.

"How close," I said.

Suki didn’t write this time. Pointed through the gap Ren’s ram had punched in the far wall. Down. Toward the black water I could just see glinting at the bottom of the slope two levels below, reflecting red emergency lights that hadn’t died yet.

"Great," I said, feeling the Blitz reserves in my legs and the stamina bar I’d been burning since the east platform collapsed. "Water. My absolute favorite environmental hazard. Ren, you want to build me something resembling a bridge or do I have to do the thing where I fall and hit everything on the way down again? Because I’ll do it. It’s worked three times today. But my ribs would prefer option one."

"I can build you a bridge." Ren was already flexing his fingers, already reading the structural load down toward the flood line, calculating platform placement in a way that made him the single most operationally useful person I’d been dropped next to all day. His Aspect hummed through the earth below us in a frequency I could feel more than hear. "The Geronimo approach is optional."

"See, that’s where you’re wrong," I said. I meant it. I started down toward the water with a Terrain god at my back and a girl who couldn’t speak beside me. The bond flared hot again from three hundred meters out, Sloane’s rage climbing toward the specific ceiling where load-bearing became a suggestion. Somewhere in this sealed dome a woman with static in her hair was watching trauma numbers she now had every reason to trust.

The water got closer. The red light bent across it like broken glass. And down there, faint through the concrete and the static hum of dying electronics, I heard a voice.

"I’m sorry." Small. Frightened. Rina. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please, I don’t want to hurt you, I’m so sorry, just, please, don’t."

The apology was breaking. I could hear it fracturing at the edges in the specific way that came right before the terror turned into something else. Right before soft pink wool became the thing people like Petra had spent entire training sessions learning to counter. Right before Rina stopped being the girl who apologized and became the girl who couldn’t stop, who tried to help and hurt instead, who drowned people in comfort they hadn’t asked for while she cried and said she was sorry, she was sorry, she didn’t mean to.

I stopped hearing the joke I was about to make.

I Blitzed.

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