The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 490: 490 | Can You Hold For Me?

I could see it through the rain because my hundred Intelligence cut through visual noise like a scalpel and because crying was the thing Rina Soleil did best at the exact moments she was most effective, the tears running down her cheeks and mixing with rain while her hands kept producing wool she couldn’t stop, couldn’t control, couldn’t modulate because the fear had taken the wheel and the fear said MORE and MORE meant that the comfort radius kept expanding past the men at the base of the building, past the plaza’s center, and now Dash was blinking hard on his car hood and Koda was shaking her head like she’d walked into a wall of warm honey.

"Rina!" I shouted it through the rain and the noise and the specific acoustic soup that driving water creates in enclosed spaces, and her purple eyes found me across forty feet of flooded intersection, and I saw the moment she recognized me because her tail, which had been rigid with terror against the balcony railing, twitched once.

"I can’t stop it!" Her voice cracked on every word. "Lukas, I can’t, I’m sorry, I’m trying, they keep coming and I got scared and now it won’t turn off and I think Dash is, I think the wool is getting to Dash, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to!"

The apology spiral. I’d heard it in a courtyard at one in the morning when she couldn’t sleep. I’d heard it at breakfast when she bumped into Eden’s elbow. The spiral where sorry became the only word she could find and each repetition made her more afraid and each increase in fear made her Aspect push harder and each push of the Aspect gave her more to apologize for.

Behind me, more splashing. Heavy footfalls through thigh-deep water, multiple sets, coming from the south corridor I’d waded through. More sweep teams funneling into the plaza. I glanced back and counted shapes in the rain and the red light, silhouettes of bodies moving with the bored confidence of adults who expected to find frightened children.

I counted twelve. Combined with the ones Koda had dropped and Dash had scattered and Rina had comfort-bombed into sitting down in floodwater, that put the intersection’s villain count at roughly twenty.

Twenty grown adults with cheap masks and bargain-basement tactical gear, deployed into a Hero Academy’s evaluation facility to what, exactly? Hold forty students hostage until Radiant showed up? Overwhelm two A-rank faculty members and an agency observer through sheer numbers?

I looked at the twelve new arrivals wading toward us, and I looked at Koda Brynn, who had already melted through one man’s chest armor with her bare fist, and I looked at Dash Reyes, who was shaking off Rina’s ambient comfort effect with the stubbornness of someone whose default response to relaxation was to become more energetic, and I looked at the bodies floating peacefully in pink wool, and I thought: were they going to try to beat Radiant with these losers?

These weren’t S-class threats. These weren’t even B-class threats. These were warm bodies in matching masks, cannon fodder with sufficient Aspects to pass a security clearance but insufficient everything else to survive more than forty seconds against a single graduating Hero, let alone forty first-year students who had spent three weeks under Steele and Dravid and Radiant himself learning what their Aspects could actually do when the fiction stopped and the hurt became real.

The Twilight Society didn’t send these men to win.

The Twilight Society sent these men to die on camera.

To generate footage. To create a narrative. To make forty teenagers fight their way through a sealed dome full of low-level bodies while the environmental controls did most of the actual damage, and when Radiant finally arrived, which Radiant would because Radiant always arrived, the story wouldn’t be Radiant saved the day. The story would be why wasn’t Radiant here when his students needed him. The story would be that the Symbol of Hope was downtown catching sedans while children drowned.

The butler’s words landed differently now. "We have made an executive decision to kill the number one Hero today."

Not his body. His symbol. His credibility. The public’s belief that Radiant would be there. Destroy that belief and Radiant becomes just another strong man in a costume who chose wrong.

The rain kept falling. The twelve new figures kept wading closer. Koda cracked her knuckles, and the sound carried across the water with enough clarity that two of the approaching men flinched.

"Hey." I raised my voice over the downpour, addressing nobody in particular and all twenty at once. "Quick question for the people in the masks. Did your boss tell you what school this is?"

Nobody answered. The rain filled the gap.

"Because this is Halloran." I pulled Joyful Cloud from my belt and felt the three sections extend with the familiar whisper of ivory on gold chain, the staff assembling itself in my grip with the specific eagerness of a weapon that had been stored for too long and carried opinions about that storage. "And you brought twenty guys."

Dash fired four bolts in quick succession, dropping two of the approaching figures before they cleared the pharmacy’s corner. The energy pulses lit the rain yellow and turned his grin incandescent.

"Make that eighteen!" Dash called out, and his voice carried the delighted register of someone who had discovered that real danger felt exactly like the arcade, except the targets fell down and stayed.

Koda surged forward through the water toward the remaining cluster with the deliberate momentum of a wrecking ball that had decided to become self-propelled, her fists painting cherry trails through the rain.

Above us, on the balcony, Rina’s wool continued to spread. Her hands shook. Her tail wrapped around her own waist. Her purple eyes found mine through the curtain of water and her mouth formed the word sorry one more time, and the sound didn’t reach me through the rain but I didn’t need to hear it.

"Rina." I kept my voice low, the register I’d used in the courtyard, the frequency she’d told me made the noise in her head get quieter. "You’re not hurting anyone. You’re helping. Look at the ones in the water. They stopped fighting. They’re breathing. Your Aspect did that."

Her hands trembled harder. The wool pulsed, expanding outward in a soft wave that made the rain feel warmer where it touched my skin.

"Now I need you to hold it right there, okay? Don’t push harder, don’t pull back, just hold. Can you hold for me?"

Rina’s breath caught. Her horns caught the red emergency light and turned opalescent and for one second her expression was the one from the bench at one in the morning, the one where she stopped performing anxiety and became the girl underneath who had never once been told she was terrifying.

She nodded.

The wool steadied. Stopped expanding. Held.

I turned back toward the eighteen remaining problems and felt Joyful Cloud hum in my palm with the patience of something that had been promised violence and intended to collect.

"Ren," I said into the rain, trusting the sound to carry two stories up to where I’d left a Terrain specialist with enough raw material to rebuild the entire sector. "If you can hear me, seal the south corridor behind these guys. Nobody leaves."

The ground shook once beneath the water. Concrete groaned. Through the rain, a wall of stone rose from the submerged street behind the approaching figures, cutting off their retreat with the finality of a tomb door closing.

Ren’s voice drifted down from somewhere above, flat and unhurried.

"Done."

I spun Joyful Cloud once, felt the chain sections whisper through the rotation, and stepped forward into the flood.

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