End of the World? I'm the Boss novel Chapter 418

Chapter 418 Challenger

He thought it, and then he simply did it.

Robin felt her own body temperature beginning to climb and turned to look at Henry with a mildly incredulous expression. “Using me as a test subject? Are you trying to get into an early grave?”

Henry gave a couple of awkward coughs, though the awkwardness didn’t slow him down in the slightest.

Among everyone present, she genuinely was the only reasonable choice for this particular experiment.

If he’d accidentally pushed things too far, she was the only one who could actually handle it without anything going seriously wrong.

Robin said what she said, and then she didn’t move.

The temperature kept rising, slow and steady.

Robin ran a hand along her own arm and felt the warmth radiating off her skin when her palm made contact, a faint, building heat that was becoming distinctly uncomfortable.

Her body temperature had to be sitting around 109 or 110 degrees Fahrenheit by now.

Henry, who had started this exercise with calm ease, was beginning to strain visibly.

By the time her temperature pushed toward 122 degrees, cold sweat was breaking out across his forehead.

Just past that threshold, Henry’s legs wobbled. He raised a hand to press against his temple, and the effort keeping her temperature elevated finally broke.

Robin activated her ice ability immediately and brought her own temperature back down.

She wasn’t in any real danger, but having her body pushed to 122 degrees Fahrenheit was not an experience she’d choose to repeat.

For reference, a normal human body runs between 97 and 99 degrees. Anything above 99.5 counts as a fever, and anything that climbs past 104 starts risking brain damage.

After the apocalypse, human resilience had increased across the board, but even so, what Henry just did to her body temperature hadn’t felt pleasant.

And if she, with everything she was capable of, found it genuinely unpleasant, an ordinary person would be cooked.

Henry had clearly arrived at the same conclusion.

11.23 Mon, 6 Jul wou.

Cupter 418 Chiles

The frustration that had been pressing against him for so long finally lifted completely

The reason he’d always felt like his ability was more limitation than gift was that every time he used it, he depended entirely on Klay. Alone, it was almost useless, too dependent on as external source to be viable in a real fight.

That wasn’t true anymore. Henry’s mood lifted in a visible, spreading way.

Robin watched the quiet satisfaction playing across his face and said, without preamble, “Now that you’ve broken through, use the momentum. There are still people buried under this rubble. Find them.”

Henry stared at her.

“After a breakthrough, you need to put the ability to work immediately, Robin continued. “The faster you get used to how it feels now, the better your control will be long-term. The collapse zone is extensive, which makes it excellent training for your mental strength. Start now.”

“You’re an absolute taskmaster,” Henry said.

He stood up and got to work anyway, because Robin was right, and because lives were waiting.

His sensitivity to temperature was dramatically sharper than it had been an hour ago.

He could read the thermal signatures of living bodies through layers of rubble now, something that felt almost like a built-in heat scanner.

The noise of their earlier blast had apparently given hope to other survivors still buried below, and Pal was picking up more voices with every passing minute.

Henry and Pal worked as a team, locating each signal, then Henry and Klay took care of opening the rubble above, the blasts now controlled with precision Henry hadn’t been able to manage before his breakthrough.

The group worked from daylight straight through to dark.

Some of the people they pulled out in the earlier hours, those whose injuries were light enough, joined the effort alongside them.

The rescue continued past midnight.

The collapse zone was enormous, and clearing it down to the last survivor was a long, exhausting undertaking.

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