The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 510: 510 | A Collision of Concepts

The word arrived with heat. Actual, physical heat that rolled across the plaza and made Steele’s exposed skin prickle. The fire did not behave like fire. It curled inward, seeking Thatch’s own face before dissipating against his cheekbones, and the scarring around his eyes blazed bright enough to throw shadows across his mask.

"Who." The word came out flat, killed of everything except the question.

"Unknown. Three candidates in the sublevel, one of whom demonstrated a sensory Aspect consistent with a Class One Channeler specializing in hard-light constructs. The jammer’s power stage remains active but the broadcast array has been physically severed. Coax line, clean cut, single projectile. The work was professional."

Steele’s brain ran the arithmetic before Thatch finished processing it. Three candidates in the sublevel. A sensory Aspect. A clean projectile cut on a coax line. She knew exactly who had fired that shot and she felt a swell of pride so ferocious it burned worse than her collarbone.

Thatch’s hands opened and closed at his sides, and each time they opened, black flame licked between the fingers and vanished. The four-beat rhythm was gone. Whatever replaced it came faster and uglier and carried no pattern at all.

"If you were not our ticket out of this dome," he said to the speaker, and the temperature rose four degrees in the space of the sentence, "I would burn you to a fucking crisp."

The butler’s voice came back untroubled. "Your frustration is noted, young master."

"Noted." Thatch laughed, and the laugh had edges. "Noted. She cut the line. One of them found it and cut it and now every Hero in California is going to know exactly where we are and what is in this room with them."

"The extraction protocol accommodates accelerated timelines."

"It accommodates nothing! It accommodates a schedule that assumed we would have Radiant on the floor and the building sealed for another twelve minutes!" The tapping came back, both hands now, fingertips striking the seams of his coat with the speed of a pianist whose recital had gone horribly wrong. "No matter."

He turned toward Steele and Dravid with the burn scars still glowing and the fire licking at the corners of his mouth.

"No matter," he said again, quieter. "We might as well take out some pro Heroes and students before we leave."

Steele felt the temperature spike before she saw the fire.

Black flame erupted from both of Thatch’s palms, not projected but exhaled, pouring from his hands and wrists and forearms in ropes of lightless heat that carved the air apart. The fire did not illuminate. It consumed illumination. Where it passed, the red emergency lighting simply stopped, swallowed into something that burned at temperatures the plaza’s tile could not survive. The concrete beneath Thatch’s feet began to glow cherry red and then white and then nothing at all, because the fire ate the glow too.

Steele moved left. Dravid moved right. They had never discussed this particular division and they did not need to discuss it now.

A rope of black fire whipped across the space where Steele had been standing and punched through the fountain’s remaining pedestal. The stone did not shatter. It melted. Liquid concrete ran down the crater walls in sluggish orange rivers that hissed where they met the standing water.

"The students," Dravid said through the earpiece. One sentence. No inflection. The entire operational briefing.

Steele understood. They could not win this fight. They had not been winning it when the creature was the only threat and they were certainly not winning it now with a fire-based Aspect user whose output exceeded anything in the documented S-class threat database and a biological nightmare that shrugged off Legendary-tier kinetic events and did not possess a suppressible power.

The job was not to win. The job was to keep the fire and the monster pointed at them instead of at forty teenagers scattered across a sealed dome.

She ran.

Not at Thatch. At the space between Thatch and the corridor where Steele’s channel had just confirmed twenty-two students were still breathing. She put herself in the gap and let Bom Ba Ye build, and the charge sang through her legs and hips and spine with the familiar promise that forward was the only viable direction and everything she had committed would arrive at the point she aimed at.

Thatch sent two more ropes of black fire toward the corridor.

Steele hit both of them.

Bom Ba Ye against the fire was a collision of concepts rather than physics. Her projection was momentum given form. His fire was heat that sought consciousness. They met in the middle of the gap and the air shattered, concussive force rolling outward in a ring that cracked every remaining tile in a ten-foot radius and sent loose debris skittering across the wet floor.

The fire broke. Not permanently. Not fully. But for two seconds the ropes lost coherence and scattered into hissing embers that fell on wet tile and died.

Two seconds was enough for Cole Dravid to reach Thatch.

Suppress did nothing to the creature. But Thatch was human. Thatch had a Core. And when Dravid’s grey eyes locked onto the boy and the full weight of a Legendary nullification field settled over him like a funeral shroud, the black fire guttered and went out.

Thatch’s mouth opened. Nothing came. His hands opened and closed and the flame that had been living in them was simply gone, cut at the root, the connection between bearer and power severed so completely that for one frozen instant Thatch looked like what he actually was underneath the coat and the scars and the nine years of somebody else’s design.

He looked like a twenty-two-year-old kid who had just lost the only thing that made him feel safe.

"No," Thatch said.

His voice cracked on the vowel.

The creature turned its awful head and looked at Cole Dravid. Looked at him the way something looks at a problem it has been given permission to solve.

Steele did not have time to shout.

Nexo crossed twenty feet in less time than her nervous system needed to register the movement. One arm, the longer arm, swept horizontally at chest height with force that would have distributed Dravid’s internal organs across the remaining architecture.

Dravid broke eye contact with Thatch.

The suppression field dropped.

Thatch’s fire came back all at once, a detonation of black flame that consumed the air around him and sent a pressure wave rolling across the plaza hard enough to stagger Steele at forty feet. The boy screamed, and the scream was not anger. The scream was relief, which was worse, the sound of someone getting back the only thing they had.

Dravid was moving. The cane came up and caught the edge of Nexo’s swing, redirecting rather than blocking, and the old wood shattered on impact but the redirect held just long enough for Cole to drop beneath the arc and roll clear. He came up on one knee with splinters of his cane still falling around him and both hands empty.

"Cole!" Steele was already running.

"I am fine." He was bleeding from the temple. He was not fine. "The creature broke my cane."

"I can see that!"

"I am upset about it. It was a good cane."

Black fire poured across the plaza in widening rivers, and Nexo stood in the center of it, untouched, six horns catching the light of flames that burned without illumination, and Thatch stood behind the creature with his hands open and his scars glowing and his breathing coming in ragged pulls that sounded like laughter and crying in the same register.

The channel crackled. Percy Mendoza’s voice, strained and rapid.

"All students accounted for on comms. Student Orion Valentine is en route to Halloran to get backup"

Steele wiped blood from her mouth and planted her feet.

All she had to do was buy time.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!