The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 493: 493 | A Room Full Of Us

The vertigo faded as whoever had caused it got dropped by a red-white streak that turned out to be Koda Brynn arriving with both fists cherry-hot, and the equilibrium came back, and I got my feet under me.

Eleven left, maybe ten, hard to count through the rain and the bodies floating peacefully in Rina’s wool.

I spat blood. Rolled my ruined shoulder and felt it grind and decided the grinding was tomorrow’s problem.

The cold thing in my chest was fully awake now, and it wanted the rest of them, and the terrible truth that Odette Reyes had already figured out and that Steele had filed and that Dravid had documented in eleven separate incidents was that I wanted them too, that some part of me that predated Lukas Belmont and belonged to whoever I’d been before had always been good at this.

"Dash!" I shouted it through the rain. "Suppress the north side, don’t let them cluster!"

"On it!" Dash’s bolts painted the rain yellow, four in a second, and the north cluster broke apart.

"Koda, the metal ones don’t have gaps at the throat, go for the throat!"

"COPY!" Koda hit somebody with enough force that the impact sent a wave across the intersection.

I moved into the center of it, Joyful Cloud spinning, and I stopped counting out loud because counting out loud was cocky and cocky was how you got hit, and instead I just fought, the staff finding jaws and knees and solar plexuses, the chain wrapping weapons and yanking them free, Blitz closing gaps that shouldn’t have been closeable, and every clean strike poured stamina back into legs that should have been failing and weren’t, because Sadism didn’t care about my debuff and Sadism didn’t care about my ribs and Sadism just kept feeding me every time I made contact.

A man with an Aspect that turned his fists into concussive shockwaves caught me square in the chest, and I felt something in my sternum protest, and I coughed blood into the rain and hit him back so hard that Joyful Cloud left a dent in his tactical vest shaped like the future.

Another one, a woman whose Aspect let her stretch her body like taffy, wrapped her elongated arms around my throat from behind and squeezed. I couldn’t break the grip because you can’t break a grip that flexes, so I stopped trying, dropped my weight, and slammed us both backward into a submerged car with enough force that she let go and went limp and I stood up spitting flood water and blood in roughly equal measure.

The rain kept hammering down. My vision doubled and cleared and doubled again. My shoulder had stopped grinding, which either meant it had healed or meant I’d stopped noticing, and I genuinely couldn’t tell which and didn’t have time to find out.

Six left.

Above me, on the balcony, Rina had stopped crying.

I noticed it in the gap between one strike and the next. The specific absence of the sound that had been threading under everything since I arrived.

I looked up through the rain and saw her standing at the railing. Her tail wasn’t wrapped around her waist anymore. Her purple eyes were wide and fixed on me, and something in her expression that I didn’t have a name for and didn’t have time to find one, because she was watching me take a beating for her, watching me get thrown through a wall and dropped underwater and hit in the temple hard enough to rattle whatever was left of my registered identity, watching me get back up every single time.

Whatever Devotion’s Echo did with Sloane, it didn’t do with Rina.

But I didn’t need a bond to read the way her hands had gone still. The wool had stopped churning. Her whole body had turned toward me like a compass finding north.

The Oracle Feed pulsed at the edge of my vision.

I didn’t read it.

I already knew.

Instead I caught the fifth-to-last man across the jaw with Joyful Cloud’s lead section. Felt the satisfying crunch of a mistake being corrected. Turned toward the remaining five with blood running down my face and a legendary weapon spinning in my grip and the cold thing in my chest grinning wide enough to hurt.

Above me, on that balcony, Rina Soleil had stopped apologizing for existing.

She was watching me prove she was worth it.

"So here’s the thing," I said.

My voice came out rougher than I meant it. Torn up from the flood water and the strain and the specific exhaustion of a body operating past its debuffed limits. The cold thing in my chest had control now. It had control and it was talking.

"You came here to make a Hero look bad. You wanted footage. Scared kids drowning while the number one guy caught sedans downtown." I spat blood. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and smeared it pink across my jaw. "Problem is you brought it to a room full of us."

The five of them looked at each other through the rain.

One of them, the smart one, took a step back toward the corridor Ren had sealed. Remembered it was sealed. Looked genuinely upset about the logistics of that situation.

I watched him process his options and find them limited.

Somewhere three hundred meters north, an entire wall exploded.

Sloane’s fury spiked so hot through the bond that it burned. I felt her turning. Felt her locking onto something. Felt the specific frequency that meant my girlfriend had just found a target worth the walk and was heading that direction with the kind of focus that meant whoever had put their hands on those civilians was about to learn what Detonation looked like when you made it personal.

The rain kept falling. The five men shifted their weight. And high above the flooded plaza, from the balcony where a girl with sheep horns had finally stopped apologizing, Rina spoke one word into the storm.

"Behind you."

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