The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 513: 513 | Not Registered For That

The hand never landed.

Something hit Steele from the side with the force of a car. The world turned to light.

Gold. Everywhere. Arcs of it crawling across her vision in threads that snapped and forked and reformed, and the sound came with it, a shriek of displaced air that swallowed everything, the creature and the plaza and her own scream. She was airborne. Her ruined arm slammed against something solid. The pain went white behind her eyes. She almost blacked out, held together only by momentum. Whatever had her was moving too fast for her body to process the damage.

The plaza fell away underneath her.

She saw it in fragments. The crater where the fountain had been. The black fire spilling across tile in rivers that consumed their own light. Nexo’s arm still descending toward a spot on the ground she was no longer occupying. Thatch’s masked head turning to follow her trajectory with something that might have been surprise.

Then stairs. Then a landing.

Concrete met her back. The golden light died around her. Fading strands popped against the air like static.

Steele lay there with her cheek pressed to the floor and tried to make her eyes work.

Someone was crouched over her. Broad through the shoulders, wearing charcoal and amber, and Steele’s brain kept insisting she recognized the shape but refused to attach a name to it. Half the boy’s face was covered by a matte black mask. The other half was streaked with blood from a split eyebrow and coated in whatever the flood zone had been made of. Golden lightning still crawled along his forearms in dying threads, and where it touched the concrete it left small black scorch marks in patterns like frost.

His hair was gold.

The color had bled up from the roots and taken the whole thing, lit from inside, and it faded even as she watched, dimming back toward the dirty blond she had seen every morning at six o’clock for the last three weeks.

Amber eyes. A scar cutting through the left eyebrow.

"Belmont," she said.

The word came out wrong. Her mouth was not cooperating. Blood and concrete dust had turned her tongue into something that belonged to somebody else.

"Hey, Ms. Steele." He was breathing hard. His shoulder sat at an angle that Steele’s twenty years of field medicine flagged as separated, and his ribs had to be broken from the way he held himself, and none of that stopped him from smiling at her under the mask. "You look terrible."

"You are." She had to stop and find air. "You are not registered for that."

"Yeah." He glanced at the last golden thread crawling down his wrist and let it die. "Gonna be a whole conversation later."

Voices behind him. Multiple. Steele tried to turn her head and the world tilted so violently she almost vomited.

"Do not move her." That voice she knew immediately, and it hit her with the sheer wrongness of hearing Petra Lang sound frightened. "Belmont, put your hand back on her shoulder and hold her still. Mendoza, I need the length."

"Fifty-one inches at the shoulder, thirty-eight to the hip crease if we are immobilizing at the pelvis instead of the ankle, which we should be, because the femoral pulse in her right leg is thready and I do not want to guess why. Steele, ma’am, can you feel your toes."

"I can feel." Steele tried to think about her toes. "Some of them."

"That is not a yes."

"That is not a yes," she agreed.

Emerald light bloomed at the edge of her vision.

Petra Lang knelt on the concrete beside her in a hero costume that had been white and green at the start of the day and was now something closer to grey. Her black hair had come apart from whatever architecture had been holding it. She held both hands over Steele’s ruined forearm and something began to grow between her palms, layer on layer, a translucent green mesh that unfolded in geometric sheets and settled onto the burn without weight.

Steele expected pain. She got cold instead. Blessed, absolute cold that sank into the cracked flesh and stopped the screaming in her nerve endings so abruptly that she made a sound she would be embarrassed about later.

"Conjured gauze," Petra said. "Sterile by definition, since I am making it rather than storing it. It will hold moisture and prevent contamination but it is not analgesic, so what you are feeling is the thermal differential and not actual treatment. Do not mistake it for improvement."

"Lang." Steele had to close her eyes for a second. "How long have you been able to do that."

"Since I was eleven." Petra’s hands did not stop moving. Another sheet unfolded, longer, and Steele felt it wrap around her elbow. "I was taught field dressing before combat application. It was considered more practical. I’ve never used it on a person."

"You are doing it correctly."

Petra’s hands faltered for exactly one motion. She recovered so fast that Steele would have missed it with two working eyes.

"I know," Petra said.

Behind them, further up the landing, other voices. Steele made her head turn this time and got a slice of the picture. Eden Wilkinson on his knees at the top of the stairs with his hands cupped around something invisible, pulling heat out of the air in a way that made the space above his palms shimmer and warp. Nyx Calloway with her forearms hollowed into something Steele did not have a name for, dragging a support beam across the corridor mouth. Maribelle Kennedy pressing her palm to the sternum of a boy Steele could not identify, red skin and black horns bright against the emergency lighting, murmuring something that had the cadence of a promise.

Twenty-two on the channel. She had heard Mendoza say it. All of them alive and none of them running and every single one of them exactly where they should not have been.

"You are all supposed to be evacuating," Steele said.

"We considered it." Percy appeared on her other side with a bundle of poles and green fabric in his arms and started assembling something with movements that suggested he had built it in his head before he ever touched the materials. "The evacuation order assumed both faculty members remained operational. That assumption failed at approximately eleven forty-nine when Professor Dravid stopped moving. I recalculated."

"You recalculated."

"Yes." He snapped the last pole into place. "The updated model indicated that a coordinated retrieval had a sixty-one percent chance of extracting both instructors alive, versus a nine percent chance if we complied with the order and waited for Network response. Nine percent was unacceptable. Belmont agreed."

"Belmont." Steele searched for him.

He was gone.

She got her working hand under her and pushed and got approximately four inches of elevation before Petra’s palm landed flat on her collarbone and pressed her back down with a strength that had no business existing in a girl who spent her mornings finishing conditioning in the bottom third.

"Do not."

"Lang, where is Belmont."

"Getting Dravid."

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