The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 509: 509 | The Aspect Classification Does Not Apply

Steele’s left ear was still ringing when she got both feet under her.

The white thing had already covered thirty feet from its starting position, and it was not running. Running implied urgency. This was migration. The joints that bent in directions no skeleton should permit carried it forward with a locomotive regularity that made Steele’s hindbrain want to crawl into a hole and pull dirt over itself. Each footfall cracked the plaza tile into radiating spiderwebs, not from weight alone but from the sheer wrongness of how the force distributed through those misaligned limbs. The longer arm swung at its side, fingers grazing concrete, gouging trenches without apparent effort.

Dravid was up.

She knew this because the air changed. Suppress rolled out across the plaza like a cold front, silent and absolute, and Steele felt the familiar dead zone settle over the space between them and the creature. Within that radius, Aspects did not work. Channelers could not project. Flux users could not transform. Branded individuals reverted to their biological baseline. Dravid had held three simultaneous suppressions in the field during his active career and managed five twice, both times classified.

He locked onto the white thing with everything he had.

Nothing changed.

The creature kept walking. Same pace. Same horrifying regularity. The black bands across its skin did not flicker or dim. The six horns did not retract. The proportions did not normalize.

"It’s not an Aspect." Dravid’s voice came through her earpiece, flat and final. "Whatever that thing is, Suppress does not register it. There is no Core signature. There is nothing to nullify."

Steele’s stomach went cold in a way it had not gone cold in thirteen years.

"Say that again."

"That creature is moving at that speed under its own biological power. The Aspect classification does not apply."

The white thing turned its head toward Dravid, and the motion traveled wrong through its cervical vertebrae, the skull rotating further than any neck should allow before the shoulders followed in a secondary correction that made Steele’s eyes water. It changed direction and accelerated toward Cole with the same terrible smoothness, like a freight car switching tracks.

Steele did not think. Thinking would have cost a quarter second she did not own.

She ran. Not away. Forward, angling across the plaza to intercept the creature’s path before it reached Cole, building charge with every step. Bom Ba Ye fed on commitment. The further she ran, the harder she committed, the more the kinetic payload accumulated in her bones and tendons and the particular architecture of her Aspect that turned forward momentum into an event horizon. Twenty feet. Thirty. The gold jacket caught every scrap of emergency light and threw it back red.

She hit the white thing at full charge from the flank, driving her shoulder and the compressed sum of a forty-foot sprint into the place where its rib cage should have been.

The impact registered in her skeleton before it registered in her ears. Sound came late again.

The creature skidded. Not far. Six feet across broken tile, leaving white furrows where its dragging fingers caught the surface. Steele’s shoulder screamed. Her teeth clanked together hard enough to send a jolt through her jaw. The shock traveled down her spine and into her heels and kept going, seeking ground that would absorb it, and the ground did not absorb enough.

But the thing had moved. She had displaced it.

"Again," she said to nobody, and launched.

Bom Ba Ye builds. That was the rule. That was why she had spent her entire career learning to aim correctly the first time, because once the projection committed, it went where it went and God help anything standing there. Second impact hit harder than the first. The creature’s longer arm came around in a sweeping backhand that would have taken her head off her neck if she had been standing still, but she was not standing still, she was moving, always moving, and the arm passed over her shoulders close enough that displaced air snapped her ponytail sideways.

Third impact sent it into the plaza fountain. Water erupted in a column that splashed across fifty feet of tile and came down like filthy rain. The fountain’s central pedestal broke at the base and toppled with a grinding crash that added to the symphony of things going wrong.

Steele landed in a crouch, breathing hard, blood in her mouth from where she had bitten the inside of her cheek on the second hit. Her knees ached. Her collarbone felt loose on the left side in a way that would require medical attention within the hour.

The white thing stood up out of the fountain wreckage.

No damage. No deformation. No visible mark where three fully charged Bom Ba Ye projections had landed on target with the kind of commitment that had once relocated a transit van forty meters in front of a news helicopter.

It tilted its head at her, and the six horns caught the red light, and the movement contained curiosity.

Dravid arrived beside her without sound. His cane rested against his shoulder and his grey eyes held the creature in their field, Suppress still running at maximum output, still doing absolutely nothing.

"The fountain was load-bearing," he said.

"I noticed."

"We are buying time for the students."

"I know what we are doing, Cole."

"I am confirming that you know, because your last three attacks suggest you believe you are winning."

She wiped blood from her lip with the back of her hand and hated him for being right. Three maximum projections had achieved six feet of displacement and zero structural compromise against a target that was not using a power. The creature’s raw physiology could absorb Legendary-tier kinetic output and remain upright. Nothing in Steele’s career, nothing in the file she kept on her own ceiling, had prepared her for the sensation of landing clean and having the universe shrug.

The creature began walking again. Same speed. Same awful patience.

Thatch stood where she had last seen him, thirty feet behind the thing, hands clasped at the small of his back. The burn scarring around his eyes still glowed faint amber. His leg bounced in a four-beat rhythm that had not changed since the conversation began.

"You hit it three times," Thatch said. "That was very committed of you."

The tone landed somewhere between genuine admiration and the kind of pity reserved for animals in shelters.

Steele felt her jaw lock.

"Thank you. Want to try your luck next?"

"It would not matter." The tapping shifted registers, accelerated. "Nexo does not have an Aspect. What it does, it does because that is what it is. Your friend over there with the expensive eyes has been trying to suppress a creature that does not possess the thing he suppresses. It must be very frustrating for a man of his reputation."

Dravid said nothing. His silence was louder than most people’s shouting.

"I watched the entry footage," Thatch continued, and his voice had that recitation quality again, the cadence of someone who had been given talking points and delivered them because delivering them was the only structure his morning contained. "Two A-rank retirees, both past their operational prime. A nullifier who cannot nullify. A kinetic who cannot damage. The mathematics are not complicated."

The butler’s voice cut in from somewhere. Not from a portal. From a small speaker clipped to the inside of Thatch’s collar, a detail Steele catalogued and filed and hated.

The voice was warm and polite and carried the particular clarity of a man accustomed to being heard without repetition.

"Young master. The interlock on sublevel two has been severed. Communications are live. The channel is open."

Thatch went still. Every part of him went still at once, the leg, the fingers, even the breath, and for one full second he looked like a mannequin somebody had left standing in an expensive coat.

Then his mouth opened and black fire came out.

"Fuck!"

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