The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 517: 517 | Patient Arithmetic [GT BONUS]

Nexo moved.

The single most terrifying part was how slow it was.

Fast I could have handled. Fast meant someone trying, and trying meant they could fail. This thing walked like it was crossing a parking lot after a long shift, unhurried, certain. One foot down, then the other, that asymmetric gait where the longer arm dragged along the tile and left a gouge that screamed against the stone. Its joints bent backward on the upswing before correcting on the plant with a wet crack that had no business coming from something without cartilage.

Crunch. Crunch.

Lightning Cloak flared hot up my arms. Golden current wrapped my forearms and crawled toward my shoulders in jagged threads, and the air tasted of ozone before the dust choked it out.

Thirty-eight feet between me and the thing. Eleven minutes on the clock. The stamina bar sat at twenty-two percent because I’d spent the morning getting thrown through walls by Petra, and now I was about to burn what was left of it on something I couldn’t beat in a straight fight. The alternative was standing still and letting a twelve-foot horror flatten me in front of forty students and two teachers who hadn’t signed up to watch me die today.

Blitz.

Distance collapsed. I hit the far side of the plaza before my brain caught up to my legs and spun around, certain Nexo would already be turning to follow.

It wasn’t.

Its longer arm was already where I’d been standing half a heartbeat ago, fingers spread, palm flat against the tile I’d vacated. The arm lifted, dragging through the space with that same patient arithmetic, and the head tilted once. Not tracking where I was. Tracking where I was going to be.

My stomach dropped.

This thing does not have an Aspect. It has a nature. There is no Core to suppress and no signature the System can read. The Oracle Feed delivered that with the flat brevity of someone who had run out of better news to share. Recommendation: do not be where it is.

"Fantastic advice," I muttered, and Nexo started walking again. Same pace, same stride, twenty feet and closing with the confidence of something that had been told to kill and had never once failed.

I couldn’t fight this. Steele had hit it three times at full output and moved it six feet. Dravid’s Suppress, strong enough to strip a Branded down to baseline biology, had done nothing because there was nothing in it to nullify. This wasn’t a power. This was just what it was, and punching through it would be like punching through gravity.

Terrain, then. I had a plaza full of broken tile and a staff I could barely lift, and twelve minutes of not dying to survive while this thing migrated toward me with the certainty of continental drift.

Spectral Reach flared from my left hand. Three amber constructs snapped into shape and hauled a slab of concrete the size of a couch between us. Nexo walked through it. Not around it. Through it. The longer arm punched clean through the center and the rest of the body followed, rebar bending aside, concrete parting like water, and it came out the other side without slowing.

I filed that away and tried something else.

If it read where I was going before I moved, maybe it was reading the wrong thing. I planted my weight hard toward the east colonnade, shoulders committing to the turn, and Nexo’s head swung that direction on cue. Then I cut west instead, no Blitz, just my own legs, betting everything on the half second it would take to correct.

It didn’t correct. It arrived.

The shorter arm was already sweeping west before I’d finished the turn, and I threw myself into a roll that scraped half the skin off my elbow. It hadn’t read my weight or my stride. It had read my intent the moment I’d formed it, whatever that meant for something with no Aspect and no Core. Feinting was off the table. Good to know. Bad way to learn it.

Stamina: nineteen percent.

Behind me Percy’s voice ran low and sharp over the comms, counting something under his breath. Rina’s breathing had gone ragged. Koda said a word that sounded like a threat and a promise both, hard to tell which. Up on the landing Steele coughed wet and tried to sit up, and Petra’s hands kept pressing her back down.

New idea. If size didn’t matter to it, maybe speed did. I grabbed a fist-sized chunk of rubble with Spectral Reach and fired it at the joint where the longer arm met the shoulder, no windup, just gone.

Nexo’s hand came up and caught it without turning its head, crushed it to gravel, and let the dust fall through its fingers.

That was worse than the wall. The wall meant tank. This meant it saw the rock coming before I’d finished releasing it, which meant every plan built on catching it flatfooted was already dead on arrival.

New rule, then. Whatever this thing had instead of eyes clocked commitment, and it clocked it early. Nobody ever beat an enemy like that by hitting harder. You beat it by making it commit to the wrong shadow and never giving it a real one to read.

Terms. I needed terms.

The ceiling above the east colonnade had a support strut torn half loose, swaying with every impact so far. I reached for it with Spectral Reach, not to hit Nexo, but to drop it on the tile between us and force a choice. Nexo didn’t choose. It walked straight into the falling debris, let a ton of steel and plaster bounce off its shoulder without a stagger, and kept coming through the settling dust like the collapse had been scenery.

It doesn’t dodge. It doesn’t need to.

Stamina: sixteen percent.

Ten feet. I burned another Blitz and crossed the gap between one heartbeat and the next, and this time I didn’t stop moving when I landed. I rolled my weight straight into a second step before the first had finished, no clean commitment for it to read, just momentum stacked on momentum, the kind of pace where the only decision is the next half second and nothing further.

Nexo’s head turned to where the roll should have ended and found empty air. For the first time all fight, it hesitated. Half a second, maybe less. Long enough that the arm checked itself mid-swing before correcting.

That was the crack. Not in its guard. In the read.

It didn’t predict momentum once momentum was already stacking on itself. It predicted commitment, and commitment needed a finished decision behind it. If I never let a step finish, if everything I did stayed half open, there was nothing solid for it to grab onto.

I didn’t have the stamina to live on that principle forever. I had enough, maybe, to buy the rest of the students the time they needed to get Steele off the landing and everyone else behind the far wall.

Stamina: thirteen percent.

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