The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 521: 521 | A Low Tolerance for Spectating [GT BONUS]

I got my hand under me and pushed, and the floor took its time deciding whether it wanted to stay where I put it.

Petra’s voice arrived in my ear before my knee did anything useful, flat and clinical, the register she uses when she has already run the numbers and dislikes them.

"Belmont. You have three broken ribs, minimum, based on how your exhale is truncating on the comm. You are not managing that pain, you are ignoring it, which is a different thing and worse. Your left shoulder is not simply separated. Something in the joint capsule has torn and you will find that out in approximately four hours when the adrenaline stops paying your bills."

"Thanks."

"I am not comforting you. I am creating a record."

The interface offered me a stamina reading in single digits and then, with the tact of a landlord slipping a notice under the door, reminded me that Systemic Suppression had another twenty hours to run. Twelve percent off my physicals, eighteen percent onto my reaction time, a quarter shaved off recovery. So I was operating at roughly seventy percent of eighty-eight percent of a hundred, and I have never enjoyed arithmetic less than I enjoyed that.

I stood up anyway, because the other option involved lying on tile while five people I had somehow acquired got dismantled in front of me, and I have a low tolerance for spectating.

"Okay," I said, and my voice came out wet and ruined and carried fine. "Everybody listen to me and nobody argue."

Nobody argued.

Sloane hit the ground and stayed low, dropping her charge output to something she could chain indefinitely, popping tight bursts into the tile at Nexo’s foot placement instead of its body. She had stopped trying to hurt it. Two minutes of full-commitment detonations into the same seam had taught her what Steele learned the hard way, and instead of escalating like every coach she ever had predicted she would, she recalibrated. Every burst went into the floor ahead of the creature’s next step, buckling tile, opening seams, turning the plaza into a surface that had opinions about being walked on.

"North," she called, not to me. "Ortega, I’m walking it north, its long arm swings clockwise, do not stand on its left."

"Obviously," Camille said.

Above us, Hiro widened his aperture back out and let the gold spill.

He had fired one beam. One. It had melted a horn and scorched a shoulder and accomplished the sum total of nothing, and instead of firing again out of wounded pride, which is what I would have bet forty dollars on eleven days ago, he had opened Corona to its broadest setting and turned himself into a light rig.

Cheap on his reserves. Costly to nothing. Two hundred feet of dome lit up so bright that twenty-two students could suddenly see the floor they were standing on.

"You’re welcome," he shouted down, "and before anyone says it, yes, I know I look incredible right now."

"Sato, shut up and hold the wash," I said.

"Holding the wash."

Felicity was on the mezzanine steps with her hands out and her hero suit soaked through at the collar and her jaw set in a shape I had never seen on her face, and the plaza held a hundred versions of us.

She had gone wide instead of deep. No single perfect construct, no beautifully rendered decoy that would fold the second Thatch tested it. Instead she painted volume, forty students becoming eighty becoming a hundred and twenty as Hiro’s light bounced off wet tile and glass and multiplied her work for her, and every one of them was moving at a slightly wrong tempo, footfalls landing a half beat off from where the light said they should.

"Bestie," she said into the channel, breathless and bright, "I need Ortega to fire at the fake Sloane on his nine and then immediately at his actual position, back to back, no cap, he tracks the shot and then he corrects, and I want him correcting into a rivet."

"That’s four seconds of me standing still," Camille said.

"That’s four seconds of you being the most important person in this building."

There was a pause of maybe half a breath.

"Fine," Camille said. "Paint it."

I want to be honest about what that was, because I have spent two months lying about nearly everything else. Felicity Hardy has been operating at approximately forty percent of her actual social capacity since the first day of classes, letting people file her under blonde and loud and harmless, because being underestimated has never once cost her anything. And Camille Ortega has been carrying a chip about her election loss and a chip about a hallway and a chip about a midnight visit where I told her no.

They had six words of conversation and became a weapon.

Camille fired at the false Sloane and Thatch’s fire ate it out of the air, black flame swallowing gold light, and his silver eyes tracked the vector back to Camille’s palms, and his hand came up to answer.

Then the next two rivets arrived, hard on the first, into the space he was correcting toward.

He did not get hit. He did that thing again where he simply failed to be in the location that all available physics insisted he occupied, and the rivets punched into tile and stayed there.

But his tapping went irregular.

I clocked it from forty feet, the four-beat count against his thigh stuttering into something with no shape to it, and I filed that as the single most valuable piece of information anyone had generated in nine minutes.

"Hardy, again, tighter interval," I said. "He’s solving her paint, he’s just not solving it fast. Ortega, stop aiming at him, aim at where his weight lands after he doesn’t get hit. He resolves the same direction every time."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"Because he’s done it eleven times and he’s bored and bored people repeat themselves."

I could not fight. I need to be very clear about that, because I have spent three weeks pretending my ceiling is lower than it is and this was the first hour of my life where the pretending stopped being necessary and started being irrelevant.

I had four percent when Sloane came through the wall. Whatever I had now was a rounding error attached to a separated shoulder and a set of ribs that had filed for independence. Lightning Cloak was gone. Blitz would put me on the floor. Joyful Cloud was somewhere in the debris field, twenty feet of legendary staff that I could no longer lift with my left arm, which is a genuinely hilarious detail I intend to be bitter about for years.

So I did the only thing left that mattered.

I talked, and they listened.

Spectral Reach can hold roughly a hundred pounds at range when I am not lying to a diagnostic tech about it, and it costs me almost nothing to hold a construct steady compared to what it costs me to hit something. I put two arms out and used them exactly twice per exchange, and neither use was offensive.

Ren’s stone ramp cracked under Nexo’s second step and Nyx was on the wrong side of the fault line, and I got a construct around her ankle and yanked her four feet left before the slab went.

"Warn me," she said.

"I did warn you, you weren’t listening, your Aspect makes you deaf on the left when you hollow the forearm."

"That’s not documented."

"It is now."

Eden pushed too far forward chasing heat he could not absorb, black fire being the one flavor his Aspect will not eat, and I got him by the harness and dragged him back through Hiro’s light before Thatch’s next gout crossed the space where his head had been.

"Wilkinson, that fire is not fire, stop reaching for it."

"It’s got a temperature," he said, with genuine offense, like the fire had insulted his family. "Everything with a temperature is mine."

"Not this one. Get behind Maribelle."

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