The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 138

Chapter 138: 138 | I Know All The Exits Too

Recognition flickered across his face. The kind that said he’d watched the news or read a forum or maybe both.

"Belmont. You’re, um, Badge 138. Field Three." Percy’s frown deepened, not with hostility but with the specific quality of someone whose brain had flagged a piece of data and was now cross-referencing it against everything else in his head. "You ran the assist strategy. Set up the plant guy for three kills and covered the slime girl in sector seven."

"They released footage?"

"No. I, uh, I was in Field Three." He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"Class 1-B?" I asked.

His eyebrows went up. "Yeah. How did you..."

"Lucky Guess. I’m in Room 204"

"Room 205."

Percy’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "So we’re, um, we’re going to be in the same class. And we’re neighbors. In the same building." His hand went to his notebook again, this time pulling it out and flipping to a page where I could see a hand-drawn floor plan of what was clearly the 1-B residence hall.

He’d mapped the entire layout from the housing packet and annotated it with notes in handwriting so small it was barely legible. Room numbers, common areas, distance to the nearest exit.

He caught me looking at the notebook and his face went red. "It’s not weird. I map things. It helps me process spatial information when I can see it laid out and I already knew my room number so I started plotting the common areas and the distances between major points of interest because understanding the space helps me, like, exist in it."

"It’s not weird," I said. "It’s smart."

"Really?"

"How many exits did you count?"

"Seven. But two of them are maintenance access that I’m not sure students are allowed to use, so functionally five if you’re trying to leave the building in under ninety seconds from any interior point."

I liked this kid. His brain worked at a frequency most people couldn’t hear, and instead of turning that down to make other people comfortable, he’d just accepted that he was going to mutter and map and overanalyze his way through the world. There was something genuine about that.

Something that reminded me of the forum posts I’d read from AspectlessWonder, the Unmarked hero who’d passed the exam on their fourth try by learning to cheat better than everyone else.

Percy Mendoza didn’t cheat. He just saw more than most people did and hadn’t figured out yet that seeing more was its own kind of weapon.

"What’s your Aspect?" I asked.

"Analyze. It’s, uh, Channeler-type. Information processing. I look at something and my brain takes it apart into components and tells me how it works and what’s wrong with it and what would happen if you changed one variable." He said it the way someone describes a chronic condition.

"The problem is the information comes in faster than I can talk about it, so by the time I finish explaining what I see, the moment’s already passed and whatever I was going to recommend doesn’t matter anymore."

"That’s something that would cause anyone to freeze up."

"I had sixteen tactical options ranked by probability of success and I couldn’t pick one fast enough to actually execute before you showed up and just said do the thing."

Do the thing? "So what you needed was someone to give you a deadline."

Percy blinked. His frown changed from processing to something that looked alarmingly close to realization. "I... yeah. That’s actually, um, that’s a really good way to put it. Nobody’s ever described it like that."

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