The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 491: 491 | Cocky Theatre

The first man reached me before the others could organize themselves into anything resembling tactics. His forearms had transformed into serrated bone blades that gleamed pale white even through the murky water, which looked genuinely impressive in that specific way that body-horror transformations always do until you realize the guy wielding them has never actually fought someone who knows what they’re doing.

He came in high and telegraphed, the kind of overhead swing that might work against someone who panics when they see bone knives coming at their face.

I wasn’t that person anymore, not after four evenings of getting systematically dismantled by Hiro Sato in training sessions that had taught me more about reading incoming attacks than any formal instruction ever could have.

The blade met Joyful Cloud’s lead section with a metallic shriek that cut through the rain, and I felt the impact travel down the staff’s length, dispersing through the chain links in a way that made the whole weapon flex like a living thing.

I rotated my grip, let the momentum carry through, and brought the trailing section around in an arc that caught him square across the jaw with the kind of satisfying impact that told me something in his face had just broken in a way that wasn’t going to heal quickly.

He went sideways into the water with a splash, arms windmilling, and didn’t come back up under his own power. The current from Rina’s wool constructs caught him almost gently, like a mother’s hand guiding a child, and nudged his unconscious body toward the pharmacy wall where he could float in relative peace until someone with a medical certification showed up to collect him.

"One," I said, which was a mistake.

Terrible idea, actually. Counting your victories out loud in the middle of a fight was the kind of cocky theater that got heroes killed in every combat manual ever written and definitely every movie I’d ever watched. It was the universe’s way of announcing that you were about to get jumped from behind by someone you’d forgotten to account for, usually right before the dramatic irony of your own arrogance came due.

Two of them jumped me from behind.

I felt them coming through the specific wrongness of displaced water and changing pressure at my back, the way the rain’s pattern shifted when bodies moved through it with violent intent.

The debuff was taxing my reaction time by its full eighteen percent, making everything feel like I was moving through syrup, but my body compensated anyway with muscle memory it had no business possessing.

I dropped low, let my knees bend, and both attackers swung through the empty air where my head had been half a second earlier with the kind of confused momentum that told me they’d expected an easier target.

One of them had hands that sparked and crackled with electrical current, bright blue arcs jumping between his fingers like miniature lightning strikes, and when his fist hit the floodwater instead of my skull, the current dispersed outward in a crackling wave that lit up the entire intersection in a flash of blue-white brilliance.

Everyone flinched, including his partner, the kind of full-body recoil that happens when your nervous system registers a threat it can’t intellectually override.

Everyone except me.

Because Demigod meant poison immunity and disease immunity and a body that treated a few thousand volts coursing through standing water the way it had treated Maribelle’s Apathy Toxin during our first encounter, which was to acknowledge the sensation existed, catalog it as vaguely pleasant in that tingly way static electricity sometimes is, and then move on with its day completely unbothered by what should have been a legitimate threat.

The electricity washed over me like warm bathwater. My muscles didn’t seize. My heart didn’t skip. I just stood there in the middle of his best offensive output and waited for him to realize that his signature move had accomplished absolutely nothing.

The electric guy realized his signature move had accomplished nothing approximately half a second before Joyful Cloud’s collapsed nunchaku form caught him in the sternum and folded him backward off his feet.

His partner had better instincts. He backpedaled, hands coming up, and the air in front of him shimmered and thickened into something solid, a wall of compressed density that I couldn’t see through the rain but could feel pushing against the ambient pressure. Force manipulation. A real one, the kind my fake registration pretended to be.

"Oh, that’s cute," I told him, and I meant it, because the universe has a specific sense of humor about handing a genuine force-manipulator to the guy running the world’s most elaborate force-manipulation lie. "We’re basically colleagues."

He pushed the wall at me. It hit like a truck, which was a problem, because the debuff meant I ate more of the impact than I would have at full capacity, and the force lifted me off my feet and threw me twenty feet backward into the submerged pharmacy’s brick facade.

The brick lost.

I went through the wall in a spray of masonry and dirty water and landed in what had been a store aisle, floating merchandise bumping against my ribs, and the ribs sent up a flare of genuine pain because they’d already been complaining since the forty-foot drop and now had opinions about the brick.

Blood filled my mouth. I spat it into the flood and pushed myself up on the sunken shelving and thought, with the specific clarity that arrives when your body has been damaged and adrenaline hasn’t caught up yet, that this was going to be one of those days.

Through the hole I’d made in the pharmacy wall, I could see the force-guy wading toward me, confident now, because he’d put a Hero through a building and heroes who go through buildings tend to stay down.

I stood up.

The water sluiced off me. My shoulder screamed. The debuff hummed at the base of my skull like a bad tenant who wouldn’t leave. And underneath all of it, underneath the pain and the pressure and the eighteen percent slower reflexes, the cold thing in my chest that I’d been carrying since a training room three months ago leaned all the way forward and grinned.

Sadism. The trait I hadn’t wanted, the one that made hurting things feel good, the one that turned clean strikes into stamina and turned momentum into a snowball rolling downhill. I’d never had a reason to let it off the leash. Every fight at Halloran had cameras. Every spar with Hiro had rules.

This wasn’t Halloran anymore. This was a sealed dome full of grown men who’d come here to hurt children.

I let it off the leash.

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