The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 171

Chapter 171: 171 | The Girl with the Ram Horns and the Rabbit Heart

The first thing I registered was the horns.

They curved upward from her skull in dark spiraling twists, like something carved from obsidian by someone who cared about aesthetics. Ram horns, specifically, two of them rising from the sides of her head and curling back with a natural elegance that made them look like they belonged on a fantasy game character rather than a real person standing in the entrance of a California dormitory.

They were dark enough to absorb the afternoon light rather than reflect it, and they framed her face in a way that drew attention inward rather than outward, toward the person underneath.

And the person underneath was.

Small. Five-four at the absolute outside, with a frame that packed more curve than her height had any business supporting. Her hair was white. Not silver, not platinum blonde, not any of the twelve designer shades that expensive colorists charged four hundred dollars to create.

White. Pure, unfiltered, cloud-on-a-January-morning white, cropped short enough to frame her face without reaching her shoulders, and it caught the light from the south windows in a way that made it glow faintly at the edges.

Her skin was pale in a way that wasn’t unhealthy but otherworldly, like she’d been assembled from moonlight and expensive porcelain by someone with a generous materials budget.

Her eyes found me from across the common room, and I felt the look land before my brain finished categorizing the color. Purple. Not blue-violet, not lilac, not the kind of ambiguous shade that changed depending on the lighting. Purple. Rich and saturated and carrying something underneath the softness that her posture was trying very hard to hide.

She wore an oversized cream sweater that draped past her wrists and hung to mid-thigh over dark leggings, and beneath the fabric I could see the outline of her body doing things that her modest clothing choice could not fully conceal.

Full through the chest in a way that the sweater couldn’t disguise no matter how much excess fabric it threw at the problem.

Wide hips that the leggings did absolutely nothing to downplay. A waist that went in where it was supposed to and then came back out with commitment on both ends.

She looked like someone had designed her for a gacha game and then put her in a Sunday morning outfit to keep the rating down.

And behind her, visible through the gap between her body and the doorframe, something fluffy and white twitched at her lower back. A tail. A sheep tail, round and soft and unmistakably not human, and it was trembling.

She was trembling. All of her. The horns, the white hair, the purple eyes, the oversized sweater, the impossible proportions, the fluffy tail. Everything about this girl vibrated at a frequency that communicated, with absolute clarity, that she was terrified of being in this building and had walked through the door anyway.

"H-hello?"

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