The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 494: 494 | The Belmont Kid

I turned.

Behind me stood four men I hadn’t heard approach through the rain, and the only reason they’d gotten that close was because the debuff had my spatial awareness running at eighty-two percent and I’d been too focused on the five in front to register the flanking pattern until Rina called it.

The smart play would have been to feel grateful for the save.

Instead I felt the cold thing in my chest laugh, because now there were nine of them total and nine was a better number than five for what was about to happen.

The lead flanker had stone skin, actual granite texture running up his forearms and across his jaw. The second one wore electrical current like a jacket, blue-white arcs crackling between his fingers and up his neck. The third was a speedster, I could tell from the way his weight sat forward on his toes, coiled and twitchy. The fourth had hands that ended in claws made of compressed air that shimmered visible in the rain.

"Rina," I said it without turning around, keeping my eyes on all nine threats. "When I tell you, pull."

"Pull what?" Her voice came down uncertain through the storm.

"Everything."

I didn’t wait for her to process that instruction.

Blitz compressed the space between me and the electrical guy, and I was on him before his synapses could fire the command to discharge. Joyful Cloud caught him across the throat with the butt end, not hard enough to crush but hard enough that his Aspect flickered out and he went down choking.

The speedster came at me from the left, exactly like I knew he would because speedsters always go left first, some biological preference in the brain that makes them favor that angle. I didn’t try to track him. I just swung Joyful Cloud in a wide horizontal arc at knee height and let him run into it at whatever velocity he’d built.

The impact sent a shockwave up my arms that my ruined shoulder absolutely hated, and the speedster’s legs went out from under him and he hit the flood face-first with a splash that sounded expensive.

Granite skin came at me from the right with both fists raised like hammers, and I recognized the mistake immediately because fists that heavy move slow and slow moves are readable even with my reaction time sitting at eighty-two percent.

I sidestepped, let his momentum carry him past, and brought Joyful Cloud down on the back of his skull with Strength Resonance channeling through legendary multipliers.

The staff bounced.

His head didn’t crack.

He turned around grinning through a mask that suddenly felt a lot less cheap than the others.

"Fuck," I said it out loud because sometimes you have to acknowledge when the math changes.

Behind me the five from before had remembered they outnumbered me and were closing the gap. In front of me granite skin wound up for another swing. To my left the air-claw guy was circling wide, looking for an opening.

My stamina sat at forty-three percent.

My shoulder was filing formal complaints.

My vision kept doubling at the edges where the metallic guy had rattled something important.

The Oracle Feed pulsed but I still wasn’t reading it because reading it meant admitting I needed help and admitting I needed help meant the cold thing in my chest would stop laughing and I was pretty sure that laugh was the only thing keeping me upright.

Granite skin swung.

I blocked with the staff and felt the impact travel through my wrists like a freight train, like blocking a car, like blocking something that shouldn’t be blockable without a Branded-tier Strength stat.

My feet slid back six inches through the water.

He grinned wider.

"Found the special one," he said it through his mask with the confidence of a man who’d been briefed on exactly who to look for. "The Belmont kid who shouldn’t be here."

My blood went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the flood.

He knew my name.

He knew my family.

He knew I shouldn’t be at Halloran because Unmarked kids don’t score third nationally and Unmarked kids don’t drop forty feet without breaking and Unmarked kids definitely don’t fight through nine trained combatants with a legendary weapon that isn’t supposed to exist in their file.

"Rina!" I shouted it up through the rain. "NOW!"

The wool came.

It came from everywhere simultaneously, pink and soft and utterly unstoppable, billowing out from the balcony in waves that spread across the water faster than I could track. It wrapped around the five behind me and they sat down smiling. It caught the speedster and the electrical guy and they stopped moving, stopped thinking, stopped doing anything except floating peaceful in the flood with expressions like they’d found God and God had offered them a blanket.

It reached for granite skin.

He punched through it.

Just drove his fist straight through the comfort field like it was paper, and where his stone skin touched Rina’s Aspect it crumbled into nothing, dissolved into pink mist that evaporated on contact.

"Nullification variant," he said it casual, like he was explaining the weather. "Your little sheep friend’s tricks don’t work on me, and neither will whatever else you’re hiding."

The air-claw guy hadn’t been caught by the wool either. He stood at the edge of Rina’s field with his shimmering hands raised, grinning behind his mask.

Two of them. Two who could resist Legendary-tier output from a terrified girl who’d just weaponized comfort hard enough to drop sixteen grown men into comas.

The math was getting worse.

My shoulder was past complaints and into outright rebellion.

My stamina hit thirty-eight percent.

I could hear Sloane through the bond, three hundred meters and closing, tearing through walls and people with equal enthusiasm, but three hundred meters was still three hundred meters and I had maybe ninety seconds before granite skin decided to stop talking and just end this.

I needed information.

I needed leverage.

I needed these two to make a mistake.

So I grinned, blood running down my chin, and let Joyful Cloud spin once in my grip.

"So here’s what I’m thinking," I said it loud enough to carry through the rain. "Your boss sent you with a briefing on me specifically, which means he knows more than he should, which means someone talked, which means there’s a leak somewhere in Halloran’s infrastructure that I’m definitely going to find once I’m done with you."

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