The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 497: 497 | Arithmetic [CASTLE BONUS]

Eleven seconds. Twelve. On thirteen his shoulder dropped a half inch further than it had the previous three swings, and Sloane put a fully charged fist into his armpit where the density Aspect ran thinnest.

The detonation lifted him off the grating, spun him, and dropped him on the rail hard enough that the rail lost.

He fell. She let him.

Sloane stood in the ruin of the mezzanine, breathing harder than she wanted to be, and did the arithmetic. Five confirmed. Two unaccounted for. She’d used maybe eight full-force detonations already and the buildup lag hadn’t kicked in at all, which was another thing she was going to yell at Lukas about, because six had been her hard ceiling since she was fifteen and she had worked for every single one of those six.

"You are so annoying," she muttered.

Then she felt him.

The bond went hot in her sternum, a fast spike of something ugly, and Sloane’s whole body locked up around it because she knew that flavor. That was pain. That was Lukas taking a hit he hadn’t been able to slip.

"No," she said.

She turned south and her legs were already moving before she finished the word, and she got exactly four steps before the wall in front of her opened up and let three more men through, and she was so unbelievably furious about the delay that she cleared all three in under six seconds and didn’t remember doing it.

The bond flickered again. Weaker. Then steadier.

He was up. He was always up. That was the whole insufferable thing about him.

Sloane made herself stop.

Three hundred meters. Through a collapse zone and a flooded district. She could get there in maybe ninety seconds if she overclocked the whole way and arrived with nothing left in the tank, or she could stop being a child about it and do the thing that actually mattered, which was that the entire dome was sealed and nobody could call for help and every single person in this building was going to keep bleeding until somebody fixed that.

"Fine," she said to the empty corridor. "Fine. I hate this."

She was halfway to the security substation when the laughing started.

It came from the east ramp, and it was a man’s voice, and he was laughing the way people laugh when they think they’ve cornered something small. Sloane went flat against the wall and looked.

Four of them, wading up the ramp after a girl in white and pink who was walking backward and giggling and absolutely, one hundred percent, not there.

"Aw, you guys are so fast," the fake Felicity said, and her voice did the thing Felicity’s voice always did, that upward lilt that made everything sound like a compliment and a dare at once. "It’s giving predator energy. Love that. Keep going, you’re doing amazing."

"Get back here."

"Bestie, I am literally right here."

She stepped left. The whole illusion slid three feet and turned transparent for half a second at the shoulder before catching itself, and Sloane clocked the seam immediately because she’d sparred against sensory Aspects since she was twelve.

The four men did not clock it.

They followed her up the ramp, around the corner, and into the loading bay, and Sloane understood the geometry about one second before the orange light started.

Camille Ortega was standing on top of a stack of shipping crates with both palms already glowing, and she had the high angle, the sightline, and forty feet of open floor to work with.

The volley took two point four seconds.

Eleven rivets. Sloane counted them on the way out because she couldn’t help herself. Two through a kneecap, three into a shoulder joint, four punched clean through a chest plate that had been rated to stop a rifle round, and the last two went into the concrete on either side of the fourth man’s head as a suggestion, and he took it, and sat down.

"Clear," Camille said.

The illusion of Felicity blew apart into soft gold light, and the real Felicity leaned out from behind a pillar on the far wall with her ponytail sticking to her neck and her white hero suit soaked through at the collar.

"That’s four more," she called. "Are we counting? I feel like we should be counting."

"We’re not counting," Camille said.

"We’re counting."

Sloane stepped out of the corridor.

Both of them turned, and there was a very specific second where nobody said anything and Sloane became aware of every single thought she was having.

Felicity had spent three hours in Lukas’s room on Saturday night in shorts that could not reasonably be described as clothing. Camille had gone to his door at midnight and Sloane knew that because Sloane had made him tell her, and he had, which was somehow worse.

They both wanted him.

They were both very good at this.

Those two facts were sitting in her chest at the same time and she resented every ounce of it.

"Your illusion’s shoulder desyncs when you move it laterally," Sloane said.

Felicity’s eyebrows went up. "Rude."

"It’s information. Fix it or someone smarter than these guys is going to shoot the real you." She jerked her chin at Camille. "And you’re firing from a static elevated position with one exit. If they’d had a ranged Aspect you’d be dead on that crate."

"There were four of them and they were all melee," Camille said. "Clearly I checked."

"You checked."

"Obviously I checked. I’m not Eden."

Sloane wanted to argue. She actually opened her mouth to argue, and then the honest part of her brain, the part that had spent nine years learning to read a fight before it happened, put its foot down.

The funnel had been clean. Felicity had picked a route with a blind corner and a chokepoint and had baited four armed adults into it while making it look like she was panicking. Camille had held her fire until every single one of them was inside the kill box and then had ended it without hitting a load-bearing wall or a vent line or the ceiling.

They had done that. Together. Without a comms channel or a plan or a faculty member telling them how.

It was good work.

She hated that it was good work.

"It was fine," Sloane said.

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