The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 155

Chapter 155: 155 | The Things I Do For Character Development

Marcus Belmont had been a licensed Hero. Reina Belmont had been a licensed Hero. They had both pulled salaries, both earned case bonuses, both accumulated nine years of dual income before they died in the Eastside during that S-class incident. The education trust wasn’t some scraped-together emergency fund. It was a proper estate-planned trust with diversified holdings that Diane Fitzgerald’s financial advisor had managed for nine years while the original Lukas sat in his room feeling sorry for himself.

I had money. Real money. Enough money that Dale’s six-thousand-dollar estimate wouldn’t have made a dent. Enough money that I could have called him back, said yes to the Saturday premium, and been sitting on the couch right now with a protein shake instead of standing on sawhorses with my arms above my head applying compound to a ceiling at eight-thirty in the morning.

And here I was. Hard hat. Safety glasses. Respirator. YouTube tutorials from a man named Carl whose mustache deserved its own licensing agreement.

I set down the taping knife.

I pulled off the gloves.

I removed the respirator and let it hang around my neck.

"I don’t have to do this shit."

The words sat in the air for a long moment. My constructs hovered beside me, amber and patient, waiting for instructions.

I climbed down from the sawhorses and stood in the middle of the gym, surrounded by plastic sheeting and tools and materials and the quiet evidence of forty-five minutes of honest manual labor that had produced genuinely professional results. The wall patch was clean. The ceiling patch was half done. The compound on the wall had already begun to set, and it looked good. Really good. Better than I had any right to produce on a first attempt, even with eighty Dexterity and Carl’s guidance.

I pulled out my phone.

I stared at it.

Dale’s number sat in my recent calls. One tap. One conversation. "Hey Dale, ignore the appointment, just come fix everything, charge whatever you want." He’d have a crew here by Monday. Professional finish. Guaranteed work. No hard hat required.

My thumb hovered over the call button.

I thought about Gerald. A man built like a small building who had spent forty-two years fixing what people broke because his father handed him a putty knife at seven years old and told him that being big enough to break something meant being big enough to learn how it went back together.

I thought about the grey walls of that state facility where the original Lukas spent six weeks. The fluorescent lights. The wobbling cafeteria table. The three empty parking spaces outside a window that looked onto nothing. A building where nothing got fixed because nobody who lived there was expected to fix anything, because the people in that building had been filed under the category of things that couldn’t be fixed.

I put the phone away.

I put the gloves back on.

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