The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 512: 512 | The Last Thing You Say

Steele’s voice cracked on the name.

She ran toward where Dravid lay motionless on his side with one arm bent underneath him and his grey eyes half-open and unfocused. Blood pooled beneath his head from a gash across his temple that had split wide on impact, and when Steele dropped to her knees beside him and grabbed his shoulder his eyes tracked toward her face but did not seem to recognize what they were seeing.

"Cole, talk to me."

"My cane." His voice came out slurred, the words catching on teeth that did not quite line up correctly. "It broke."

"I know your cane broke, you need to stay with me."

"It was a good cane. I ordered it from Vermont."

Steele pressed her working hand against the wound on his temple and tried to slow the bleeding. Her right arm hung useless at her side. She could not apply enough pressure with one hand to make any meaningful difference. Cole’s breathing came shallow and rapid, his chest hitching on every inhale. When she looked down she saw his shirt was darker on the left side where Nexo’s knuckles had caved in his ribs. The fabric clung to the depression. She could see the outline of broken architecture underneath.

"You are going to be fine." She was lying and they both knew it. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Help is coming."

"The students." Cole’s eyes finally focused on her face. His pupils were uneven. "Check the channel."

Steele had forgotten the channel existed.

She keyed it with her working hand. Forty voices shouted over each other in a cacophony that made parsing individual words impossible. Someone was crying. Someone else was demanding a headcount.

A third voice was asking whether the structural integrity of the training hall was compromised and whether they should evacuate to the secondary rally point. Underneath the chaos Percy Mendoza’s voice cut through with the steady cadence of someone reading a grocery list.

His words arrived in the spaces between everyone else’s panic.

"All students confirmed on comms. Orion Valentine is en route to the surface to flag down emergency responders. ETA for Halloran response is fifteen minutes if Valentine reaches the access road, twenty minutes if he encounters resistance."

Four minutes.

Steele looked down at Cole bleeding on the tile and then up at Thatch walking toward them with black fire crawling between his fingers and Nexo following behind with its horrible biomechanically impossible stride.

She could not hold them both for four minutes.

She had barely held them for forty seconds when she still had two working arms and Cole Dravid standing beside her with Suppress running at full output. Now she had one arm, blurred vision from whatever the fire had done to the nerves in her burned limb, and a partner who thought his cane was the primary casualty of this engagement.

Thatch stopped ten feet away with the creature looming behind him.

"You fought well." He sounded like he meant it. "You lasted longer than the projections suggested you would."

"I am going to break your jaw." Steele stood up, leaving Cole on the tile because staying beside him meant dying beside him and she needed to be standing to buy time. "I am going to break your jaw and then I am going to break both of your arms and then I am going to throw you through the wall and watch you land on something sharp."

"You cannot." Thatch’s burn scars pulsed with amber light. "Your dominant arm is not responding to neural input and your Aspect requires forward momentum that you cannot generate from a standing position with your balance compromised by shock."

He was right. Steele knew he was right. She could feel the way her body was not responding correctly, the way her legs shook when they should have been steady, the way her vision doubled at the edges and refused to resolve into single images.

She charged anyway.

Bom Ba Ye built through her stride despite her compromised footing, momentum accumulating into kinetic force that could punch through reinforced steel when properly applied. She covered eight feet in a single explosive burst and drove her working fist toward Thatch’s face with everything she had left.

The white creature stepped between them.

Steele’s fist connected with Nexo’s sternum and the impact ran up her arm like hitting bedrock with a sledgehammer. Her knuckles split open. Her wrist hyperextended. The kinetic charge dissipated against the creature’s body without producing any visible effect, and Nexo stood there looking down at her with its awful head tilted in what might have been curiosity.

Then its hand came up.

The longer arm, the one that dragged near its knees when standing still, rose with the slow mechanical certainty of construction equipment being deployed. The palm was white and smooth and large enough to wrap around Steele’s entire torso, and when it began descending toward her skull she understood with crystalline clarity that the next three seconds were all she had.

Steele tried to move but her legs finally gave out. She dropped to one knee on the tile with her ruined arm hanging useless at her side and her working hand pressed against the ground to keep from falling over entirely. The creature’s shadow fell across her face as its palm blotted out the emergency lighting, and somewhere behind her Cole Dravid was trying to stand and failing and forty students were counting down the minutes until help arrived that would not arrive fast enough.

She thought about Class 1-B on their first day, nervous and eager and looking at her like she knew all the answers. She thought about Camille’s perfect aim and Felicity’s impossible illusions.

She thought about how she had promised them she would teach them to be Heroes and now they were going to watch her die on a plaza floor because she had let some burned kid with abandonment issues get inside her head and make her sloppy.

The hand was six inches from her skull.

"I’m sorry," Steele said.

Her voice came out steady despite everything. The channel was still open. Forty students could hear her. Cole could hear her. She wanted the last thing she said to sound like she meant it.

"I’m sorry."

The hand came down.

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