The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 489: 489 | Rina Soleil Is A Problem

The Blitz took me off the bridge Ren was still building and into open air.

For a quarter-second I hung suspended over black water that reflected emergency lighting in long red smears, and the debuff screamed through every nerve because eighteen percent slower reaction time turns a controlled descent into a prayer, and then gravity remembered I existed and I dropped two stories into the flood zone feet-first.

The water hit me like a wall of ice.

Not figurative. The flood simulation ran cold, colder than any California municipal reservoir had a right to produce, and the shock of it punched the breath from my lungs before I could lock my diaphragm.

My boots found submerged concrete at about four feet of depth, and I planted, shoved upward, broke the surface gasping, and immediately could not see a goddamn thing.

Rain.

Not the gentle misting kind that turns Creston Hills joggers into Instagram content. The dome’s environmental system had apparently decided that flooding a residential block to the second floor wasn’t dramatic enough and had added driving sheets of simulated rainfall that came down at forty-five degree angles and reduced visibility to about twelve feet in every direction.

Red emergency lighting scattered through the rain and the rippling water surface in patterns that turned the entire zone into a fever dream painted by someone who hated depth perception.

Every building around me stood half-submerged and dark, their ground-floor windows swallowed by black water, their upper stories visible only as silhouettes through the curtain of rain.

Somewhere to my left, glass shattered.

I heard the crack first, then the splash, then a sound I recognized from two months of daily conditioning with a girl whose idea of an alarm clock was kinetic detonation.

BOOM.

Sloane. Three hundred meters had become fifty, and through the Bond Resonance her fury hit me like a physical force against the inside of my sternum, hot and absolute and carrying the specific frequency of someone protecting people she had known for less than a month with the same commitment she’d protect family.

The explosion’s shockwave displaced water in a radial pattern that slapped against my chest, and through the rain I caught a strobing flash of amber light, Sloane’s Detonation Aspect painting the underside of the rainfall gold for half a heartbeat before the dark closed back in.

Then voices. Lots of voices.

I waded forward with Joyful Cloud collapsed at my belt and my constructs tucked tight against my body because amber light in a visibility-starved environment turns you into a beacon for everyone with a weapon, and I rounded the corner of a half-submerged pharmacy with the rain hammering the top of my skull hard enough to make my teeth vibrate, and I saw the fight.

Rina wasn’t alone.

Neither were the villains.

The intersection ahead opened into what had been a residential plaza before the water ate it, a wide space bordered by four-story buildings with balconies and fire escapes now serving as elevated positions for people who needed them.

The water ran thigh-deep across the plaza’s center and waist-deep near the buildings where the grade dropped. Rain obliterated fine detail past fifteen feet but I could read shapes and light and the specific quality of movement that separates trained from desperate.

On the left: Koda Brynn, waist-deep in water with her red hair plastered flat to her skull, her fists glowing with the cherry-red heat of Forge at combat output. A man twice her size floated face-down three feet behind her, his body armor melted at the sternum where she’d punched through it.

Koda’s undercut made her look feral in the red light and she moved through the water with the specific lack of hesitation that comes from being five-foot-two and deciding that physics is a suggestion.

Center: Dash Reyes, standing on a half-submerged car hood, firing energy bolts in rapid succession at a cluster of masked figures trying to flank from the north. Each bolt left a brief afterimage in the rain, yellow-white streaks that painted Dash’s face in rapid pulses and made his warm brown eyes look like they were catching fire from the inside.

Three of his targets were down. Two more kept pressing, their masks streaming water, their movements sloppy and uncoordinated in ways that told me they hadn’t trained in flooded environments.

Right, on a second-floor balcony with her back against a concrete railing and her white hair turned translucent by the rain: Rina.

And Rina was a problem.

Not for the reasons the Twilight Society expected. Rina was a problem because the girl with the sheep horns and the anxiety disorder and the mug with the cartoon detective lamb on it was scared, genuinely scared, and Rina Soleil scared was the single most dangerous person in this intersection by a margin so wide that the people attacking her had no idea they were already losing.

Pink wool billowed from her hands in thick coils that spread across the water’s surface like fog, and everywhere the wool touched, things got strange.

Three attackers had made it to the base of her building and were wading toward the fire escape, and I watched the lead man slow, then stop, then sit down in waist-deep water with an expression of total contentment while the rain pounded his mask.

The second man shook his head and kept pushing, got six more feet, and his knees buckled. He went under. Came back up laughing. Sat against the building’s wall with water lapping at his chest and a smile visible through the gap in his cheap mask.

The third man saw what happened to the other two, panicked, turned around, and walked directly into a floating mass of pink wool that wrapped around his torso and pulled him gently, so gently, into the water until he sat down and stopped resisting and started breathing slow and deep with the serenity of someone who had decided the flood was actually fine.

Rina’s Aspect at full deployment didn’t fight people. Rina’s Aspect at full deployment removed the concept of fighting from people’s operational vocabulary and replaced it with the unshakeable conviction that everything was comfortable and warm and there was absolutely no reason to do anything except sit down and relax and let the nice pink wool take care of everything.

This was the power that Saint Catherine’s Academy in Portland had classified as support-tier. This was what her previous instructors had looked at and decided belonged in search and rescue holding someone’s hand during evacuations.

This was an Aspect that made combat impossible by making combat feel like a bad idea that nobody would ever choose when the alternative was sitting in warm wool and feeling safe.

And Rina was crying.

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