The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 492: 492 | You’re Welcome

Blitz carried me through the hole in the wall before force-guy finished processing that I was upright. Ten feet compressed into a fraction of a second, the world blurring, and I arrived inside his guard with Joyful Cloud already moving. He tried to raise the density wall. Too slow. The staff caught him across the ribs with Strength Resonance channeled through it, and at eighty-eight percent of a hundred with a legendary weapon multiplying the output, the impact folded him around the ivory like a napkin and threw him back into the plaza.

Clean hit. Stamina flooded back into my legs, the Sadism feedback loop paying out, and the cold thing in my chest purred.

"Two," I said.

Sixteen left, and the rain kept falling, and somewhere three hundred meters away Sloane’s fury spiked through the bond in a way that meant she’d found a room full of people to be furious at.

They came all at once. Smart play. I could only be in one place and there were a lot of them and the water slowed everyone down the same. A woman with four extra arms sprouting from her torso closed from the left. A man whose skin had gone metallic came from the right. Two more waded up the center with weapons drawn. The electric one had gotten back up. The whole cluster converged in the flooded intersection with the coordination of people who’d finally understood that numbers were the only advantage they had left.

I want to tell you I handled it clean.

I didn’t.

Six-arms got a grip on my left shoulder and squeezed. Something ground against something that shouldn’t grind. I heard myself make a sound I wasn’t proud of. Mirror-guy came in while I was compromised and caught me across the temple with a fist that felt like getting hit with a car door. The world went white at the edges. My ears rang. The debuff meant my recovery lagged just enough that mirror-guy got a second hit in before I cleared the first.

His knuckles split my eyebrow open. Blood ran hot down the side of my face, mixing with rainwater, and I tasted copper.

Six-arms twisted the grip. Mirror-guy wound up for a third hit.

The two in the center were three steps out.

The electric one was coming up fast behind them.

My stamina was at sixty percent and dropping.

The Oracle Feed wasn’t saying a word.

Down I went, into the water, black flood closing over my head.

For half a second I floated in the black water with blood leaking from my temple and six-arms’ grip still echoing through nerve endings that couldn’t decide if the damage was structural or just deeply insulting. My shoulder screamed. The debuff sat on my chest like a passenger who wouldn’t get out. Eighteen percent of my reflexes were somewhere else, filing a complaint, and some quiet part of me ran the numbers on what a lesser body would look like right now and concluded that a lesser body would already be unconscious.

The Oracle Feed stayed silent. The System wasn’t weighing in. This one was mine to figure out.

I thought about Rina on that balcony, crying because her Aspect wouldn’t turn off and she’d convinced herself that made her a monster. I thought about grown men in a dockside room talking in bored voices about breaking a teenager before the operation wrapped. The cold thing in my chest that had been purring this whole time stopped purring.

It started laughing instead.

I planted both feet on submerged concrete and shoved upward.

The water broke. I came out fast.

Blitz ate twenty percent of my remaining stamina and deposited me directly in front of six-arms, who still had her grip reflex primed and was already reaching for me again. Grips make you predictable. The first section of Joyful Cloud caught her lead wrist. The chain wrapped. The trailing section came around in an arc that sang through rain and broke the second arm at the elbow. Then the third. Then the fourth. The sequence was so fast the cracks overlapped into something that sounded like a drumroll. She went down screaming.

The stamina poured back in faster than I was spending it. Sadism paid out on every clean hit and suddenly sixty percent felt like eighty.

Mirror-guy came in next. His reflective skin was clever. Strikes glanced instead of landing, force redirecting into angles that didn’t matter. So I stopped trying to hit the metal and started hitting the joints instead. Elbows. Knees. The places where reflective plating had to flex or he couldn’t move. Joyful Cloud found every gap because Dexterity at eighty-eight was still surgical and the debuff couldn’t take my aim, only my speed, and I didn’t need speed when I had precision and a three-section staff that turned every opening into three separate problems.

His knee buckled. He went down sideways into the water. I didn’t wait to see if he got back up.

Electric-guy tried the water trick again. I let it hit me. I walked through the arc, closed the distance while he stared at the fact that his one good idea didn’t work on me, and put the butt of the staff into his solar plexus hard enough that he’d remember this specific morning for a long time.

"You already tried that," I told him as he folded. "Come up with new material."

Something hit me from the side that I didn’t see coming, an Aspect I didn’t clock in time, a wave of pressure that wasn’t force and wasn’t sound but did something to my inner ear and turned the flooded plaza upside down and sideways at once. Vertigo-guy, somewhere in the cluster, an Aspect that scrambled equilibrium, and it hit at exactly the moment my debuff couldn’t compensate.

I staggered. Went to one knee in the water. Blood in my mouth, blood at my temple, the world spinning in a way my body couldn’t correct, and two of them saw the opening and came in to close it.

That should have been the end of that particular sequence.

It wasn’t, because a car-sized fist of reinforced stone erupted from the flooded street and caught both men mid-lunge, folding them backward off their feet and into the wall Ren had built to seal the corridor. The stone retracted into the water as smoothly as it had appeared.

"You’re welcome," Ren said flatly from two stories up.

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