The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 207

Chapter 207: 207 | The Class 1-B Freak Show [PS BONUS]

Maribelle stood behind him in line and gave him a look that mixed exasperation with a specific warmth that had clearly been accumulating over years of exactly this behavior. Her tail swayed once before she caught it and forced it still.

Finn Walsh’s demonstration was the opposite of everything Eden had just done. He stepped into the center of the field without fanfare and simply stood there. For about three seconds nothing happened. Then I noticed the light catching on something near his fingers. Thin lines, almost invisible, spreading outward from his hands in geometric patterns that wove t hrough the air around him.

"Filament," he said in the same half-asleep drawl someone might use to describe a houseplant. His hands continued producing geometry that should have required actual thought to construct. "High-tensile threads. You can’t see them unless the light decides to cooperate, which is kind of the operational advantage."

The web expanded outward. Lines connected to the ground. To the equipment rack at the field’s edge. To a training pole about twenty feet behind him that nobody had been watching. He moved one finger, a casual adjustment that looked like stretching, and the pole jerked violently sideways. It tipped off its base and hit the grass with enough force to suggest the thread pulling it had not been gentle about the process.

"The whole thing is basically that," Finn said. He sounded like he was describing lunch options. "People walk into them. Then they don’t understand what just grabbed them. It’s funny."

Steele regarded the fallen training pole with the expression of someone running a calculation about how many pieces of field equipment she was prepared to lose today. She looked at Finn. Back at the pole. I caught the exact moment her mouth twitched at one corner in something that absolutely was not a smile but was definitely acknowledging the tactical value of invisible hazards.

"Reset," she said. "Step back to the line."

Marco Vidal stepped into the center carrying a dinner plate.

He had walked out of the building holding it. Nobody asked where he got it because asking Marco why he had decided something was necessary usually generated answers that were funnier than whatever confusion his choice had created, and people had learned to accept this as a feature.

He held the plate in his left hand, generated a glowing yellow disk in his right that was roughly the size and shape of a CD, and stood there for about two seconds while the disk hummed with kinetic energy that looked like it wanted to go somewhere. Then he pressed the disk into the plate’s surface.

The plate began to glow.

"Energy Disk Emitter," Marco said, weighing the now-luminous dinner plate in his hand. "I make these little disk things. On their own they go about fifteen feet before they peter out. But you stick one inside something?" He wound up like a pitcher and hurled the plate at a training dummy sixty feet away.

The plate hit the dummy center mass. It didn’t bounce off. It punched through the dummy’s chest and embedded itself in the equipment storage wall behind it, leaving a perfectly round hole through six inches of compressed foam and a significant dent in the aluminum siding.

"The range goes way up," Marco finished.

The silence lasted about two seconds before Caden started clapping. Marco bowed.

Steele looked at the hole in the equipment wall. Her expression communicated a very specific opinion about property damage during first-day assessments.

"That was my favorite plate," Finn observed from the sideline.

"I’ll get you another one man."

"It had a rooster on it."

"I will find you a plate with a rooster on it."

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