The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 503: 503 | The Leash-Holder’s Name

TEN MINUTES EARLIER

Imara Steele came off the observation platform at a dead run and cratered the plaza floor with both boots, and she was grinning before the dust finished lifting, because her face had exactly one setting on the way into a fight and it had never once been fear.

Bom Ba Ye needed movement. That was the whole contract. Every step she took loaded another increment into something that could not be intercepted once she committed it, and she had been building charge since the second she cleared the railing.

The first masked man turned toward her with his hands coming up and a mineral sheen crawling across his forearms.

She did not slow down for him. She put her palm on his sternum at full stride and let go of everything she had gathered on the fall, and the man left the ground in a straight line that ended forty feet away against a support column. The column held. He did not. His body slid down it and folded at the base like a coat coming off a hook.

Two more converged from her left, coordinated, actually coordinated, which she noted with something that felt insultingly close to approval.

She pivoted into them instead of away, because away was for people whose Aspect worked backward, and drove her shoulder through the closer one’s guard. The impact rolled up her arm and out through her teeth. He came apart from his own momentum, spun off her, hit the water pooling at the plaza’s edge and stopped being a problem. The second one got a hand on her jacket. She let him. Then she rotated her hips, and forty feet became fifteen, and the wall he hit developed a new architectural feature.

"Three," she said, to nobody, out loud, because she liked the sound of it.

Cole Dravid arrived without hurrying. He came down off the platform stairs at a walk, cane tucked under one arm, and he crossed the debris field like a man taking a shortcut through a garden he had opinions about.

Six masked figures came at him from the north approach.

He looked at them.

That was all. His grey eyes moved along the line, unhurried, and one by one the Aspects went out. A Flux user two seconds into a transformation reverted mid-motion and screamed at the sensation of his own bones deciding to be bones again. A Channeler’s projected blade dissolved into nothing while her arm was still swinging. A Branded man with plated skin watched his plating peel back into human flesh in front of him and had time to make one small, appalled sound before the cane came off Dravid’s arm and put him on the ground.

Steele had watched Cole Dravid work exactly twice before today. She had told him both times that his form was boring. She had been lying both times.

Suppress at his level did not fight anyone. It removed the reason anyone had shown up.

He handled the six in eleven seconds, four of them without changing pace, and he did not once look at what he had already dealt with.

"Steele."

"Busy."

"You are showboating."

"I’m charging." She caught a fourth man out of the air with an elbow, and the crack came back off the dome ceiling twice. "There’s a difference. Take notes."

She tore across the plaza in a long arc, because arcs let her keep the charge alive, and she took the eastern cluster the direction they were not looking. Ring Presence went with her, twenty feet of field that made her students faster and steadier and had absolutely no idea it was not supposed to work on the other team. She felt the masked men sharpen inside it. She felt their reaction times pull in tight and clean.

It made no difference at all. That was the point she wanted them to understand, in whatever seconds they had left with a functioning inner ear.

She dropped the last four of them with two strikes and a sweep, and then the plaza was quiet except for water moving and something structural complaining two levels up.

Steele stopped, planted, breathed out. Sweat ran down the inside of her jacket. Her forearms sang.

Thirty-one bodies. She had counted them the whole time, because counting was free.

Dravid came to a halt eight feet away and set the cane’s tip on the concrete. Neither of them looked at the bodies.

"Not one of them broke B-tier output," he said.

"No."

"None of them attempted to reach the students in the flood sector. Two of them ran from you toward the collapse field, which is where the cameras have the best angles."

Steele rolled her shoulder and heard something in it pop. "They’re not here to win."

"They are here to be seen losing."

"Yeah." She spat to one side. "So who’s actually here."

They turned at the same time, which was the sort of thing that had been happening between them for three years and which she had decided a long time ago not to examine.

Two figures stood in the plaza’s center. Behind them, twenty feet of empty floor that nobody had walked through.

The butler had not moved once during the entire engagement. Black tailcoat, white gloves, that smooth featureless oval where a face was supposed to be, hands folded at the front. He watched with the posture of a man attending a recital.

And beside him, the other one.

Steele had eleven years of active field work and she had never had to talk her own eyes into holding on something. The thing stood twelve feet, maybe thirteen. Dead white, the white of a fish belly, wrapped in black bands that curled and reversed across its skin in patterns her brain kept trying to read as writing and kept failing. Six horns out of the skull at angles that hurt to track. One arm hung longer, fingers brushing the knee. The joints bent wrong. Not damaged. Designed by somebody who had been given a description of a person over the phone.

It had not moved. Not in ninety seconds of combat, not for the boy standing beside it, not for anything.

The boy was the one Steele decided to talk to.

He was young. That registered first and it registered badly. Early twenties at the outside, pale to the point of translucence, black hair unmanaged and hanging past his jaw. Silver-grey eyes, and around each of them a ring of old burn scarring in lines too clean to be accidental. A long dark coat over combat gear, silver threading down the seams. His right hand tapped against his thigh, four beats, pause, four beats, pause.

She started walking. Dravid moved with her, off her left shoulder, saying nothing, which was what she wanted.

"Hey!" She let her voice fill the dome, warm and loud and unbothered, because that had worked on worse men than this. "You’re the youngest person in this room who isn’t one of my kids. Somebody sent you in here with a butler and a nightmare. Who’s holding your leash, sweetheart?"

The tapping did not change. He looked at her with genuinely nothing behind his face.

"Thatch," he said. "If you need a name for the report."

"Imara Steele. Class 1-B, Combat Operations." She stopped at thirty feet and put her hands on her hips. "You want to tell me why the number one Hero in America has to die today specifically?"

"Not really."

"Try anyway. I’ve got time. You clearly do."

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