The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 516: 516 | The Gap Goes to Hell

Three weeks of holding back. Three weeks of running the middle of the pack, of solving problems clever so I’d never have to solve them hard, of respecting the fifteen-foot leash and the twenty-pound ceiling on a registration Diane wrote and Percy fortified and Petra signed her whole family name under. Three weeks of being a mid-tier Channeler who quotes literature on television. Odette wanted me to stop building evidence against myself. Dravid told me the gap wasn’t sustainable.

The gap could go to hell. This was life and death and there was a teacher on the ground not moving and another one about to be, and I had spent every day of this cover story terrified of the moment someone found out what I actually was, and it turns out when the moment comes you don’t feel terrified at all. You feel free.

Lightning Cloak ate the distance. I hit the plaza floor with the whole coat of golden light crawling across my skin, and I got under Steele’s arms, and the monster’s swing came around to finish her and I was eight feet left of where it thought I’d be. The arm shattered a railing. I hauled Steele against my chest and moved, and black fire chased me and did not catch me, and I got her up the stairs and onto the landing.

She was breathing. Shallow, wrong, uneven pupils. But breathing.

Then I went back for Dravid.

And a notification bloomed at the edge of my vision, gold-bordered, pulsing with the specific weight the System saves for things it considers non-negotiable.

MAIN QUEST: SURVIVE.

That was it. No parameters. No bonus objectives. No cute little bracketed commentary about my life choices. Just the one word and a timer underneath it counting down from twelve minutes, which meant the Network response window Percy had promised was real and the only thing standing between right now and licensed professionals was seven hundred and twenty seconds of me not dying.

I could work with twelve minutes. I’d done stupider things with less.

The masked kid down on the plaza tilted his head up at me. Silver-grey eyes ringed with clean burn scars. Black hair he’d stopped fighting years ago. His leg bounced in a four-beat rhythm against nothing, and the black fire crawled between his fingers, and when he spoke his voice had this hollow polished quality, like someone had scooped everything human out of it and buffed what was left.

"That’s some aspect you’ve got." He almost sounded delighted. "Really. I’ve been standing here for four minutes and I have not seen anything move like that. The speed, the coat, the strength. That is not on your paper. I read your paper." His head tilted the other way. "I truly hate to be the one who cuts a promising hero career short, but you understand the position I’m in. Schedule slipped. Someone found the interlock. Everyone in this dome has now seen the asset, which means everyone in this dome is a witness, and my employer feels strongly about witnesses."

"Shut the fuck up."

He blinked. It’s the most human thing he’d done since I laid eyes on him.

"I’m serious." I planted my feet on the tile and let the gold build hotter across my forearms even though every second of Lightning Cloak was carving into a stamina bar already sitting at twenty percent. "You’ve been down here running your mouth this whole time and I’m gonna be real with you, I’ve had a genuinely terrible morning. I got dropped in a flood. My jacket is ruined. I broke a woman’s four arms and I did not enjoy it as much as I usually would. And now you’re up here monologuing at me like I’m gonna stand still and let you deliver it."

Down the landing, Steele made a sound. Pain, or a warning, I couldn’t tell.

I glanced back at her, at the black ruin of her forearm under Petra’s green mesh, at the way her fingers wouldn’t close. Steele. Who’d looked at my file and seen the gap and decided to push me harder than anyone else because she recognized something in it. Who was, and I’m going to be honest because she’s about the strongest and most objectively striking woman I’ve had the pleasure of getting knocked down by, one of the finest instructors this or any academy has to offer.

That arm was never coming all the way back. I could see it in the crack pattern. Nerve damage, deep tissue burn, the kind that scars.

I looked back at the kid with the black fire.

"If one of the best-looking, most terrifying teachers I have ever met has a permanent scar because of you," I said, and I meant every syllable of it, and I let him hear that I meant it, "I am going to make the rest of your life a genuine living hell. I’m not going to kill you. Killing you is a gift. I’m going to make you very, very aware, for a very long time, that you brought fire to a school full of people who fight for a living. And you didn’t even do it well. You did it on a Wednesday. During conditioning week. That’s just rude."

The plan, in case it isn’t obvious, was to stall.

That was the whole plan. Stall. Keep him talking, keep him laughing, keep him standing in his lake of black fire feeling like the smartest person in the dome, because every second he spent enjoying the sound of his own hollow voice was a second closer to the timer hitting zero and a licensed Hero coming through whatever door Orion Valentine had flagged down. Twelve minutes. I didn’t have to win. I just had to not lose for twelve minutes, which is a very different math problem and one I’m significantly better at.

Behind me I could feel it working like a held breath. Percy’s voice, low and fast, running the retrieval line. Petra’s hands still moving over Steele. Somebody, Koda probably, shifting her weight toward the stairs like she was thinking about coming down here to help, and somebody else, Ren probably, putting a low wall of stone up to make sure she couldn’t. The Devotion’s Echo pulled hot and steady from three hundred meters northwest, Sloane tearing toward this exact spot with a fury that had gone from rage to something colder and more focused, which meant she’d found the substation and she was coming and if I could keep this kid distracted for even four of my twelve minutes she’d arrive with the rest of the cavalry.

Stall. That was it. Talk pretty, buy time, don’t die.

The kid with the fire looked at me for a long moment. His leg stopped bouncing.

And then he laughed.

Not the hollow thing I’d expected. Not the buffed-empty polish of his talking voice. A real laugh, from somewhere down in his chest, big and rolling and genuinely delighted, the laugh of someone who has just been handed the funniest gift of his entire miserable life. His whole body shook with it. The black fire pulsed brighter with each heave, throwing that terrible non-light across the plaza, and his burn scars glowed amber like coals fanned by breath, and he laughed and laughed and laughed while a twelve-foot horror stood motionless beside him and a teacher bled on the landing above.

"Oh," he said, when he could talk again, wiping at one silver eye with the back of a fire-wreathed hand. "Oh, that’s good. You’re good. You really do think you’re going to walk out of here."

His leg started bouncing again. Four beats. He looked past me, up at the shape of everyone I’d dragged up those stairs, and something in his hollow face rearranged itself into a decision.

"Nexo," he said, gentle as anything. "Kill him."

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