The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 224

Chapter 224: 224 | The Ready Part Comes Later

"I’m fine. Just tired."

"Tired how? Physical tired or emotional tired? Because those require different advice and I need to know which drawer to pull from."

I considered the question. The honest answer was both, but that felt too complicated to explain over the phone.

"Emotional tired. The kind where everything works out fine but you still feel like you’ve been running a marathon."

"Ah. That kind." The sound of liquid pouring into a glass came through the speaker. Diane settling in for a real conversation. "Tell me about your day, sugar. Start from when you woke up and don’t leave anything out."

So I told her.

Not everything. Not the System notifications or the Gacha pulls or the supernatural mechanics that governed my existence. But the human parts. The assessment with Steele. The physical evaluations. The way my classmates had demonstrated their Aspects while I’d held back and calculated how much to reveal. The shopping trip with Felicity. The conversation where Sloane and Felicity had negotiated some kind of détente that I still didn’t fully understand.

Diane listened without interrupting. Occasionally I heard the soft clink of her glass against something solid, but otherwise she stayed quiet until I ran out of words.

"So let me make sure I understand this correctly," she said when I finished. "You deliberately underperformed during your evaluation because you didn’t want to draw attention. Your instructor noticed and called you out privately. A pretty blonde girl convinced you to go shopping and buy clothes that make you look like you actually care about your appearance. And then that same pretty blonde girl had a civil conversation with Sloane that somehow ended with everyone agreeing to be friends."

"That’s the summary, yeah."

"And you’re calling me because you’re tired."

"I’m calling you because I don’t know what I’m doing."

The words came out before I could stop them, slipping past the usual filters I kept between my thoughts and the world outside my head. The kind of admission that felt like pulling a splinter from somewhere deep, the relief immediate and uncomfortable all at once.

Diane went quiet. I could hear her breathing on the other end of the line. Measured and unhurried, like she was giving the words the space they needed before responding to them.

"Sugar, nobody knows what they’re doing," she said finally. Her voice had shifted slightly, losing the casual warmth and settling into something more deliberate. "That’s the secret they don’t tell you in orientation. Every single person you’re going to meet at that academy is faking it to some degree. The confident ones? They’re faking it harder than the ones who look scared because they’ve learned to make the performance look effortless. The trick isn’t knowing what you’re doing. The trick is moving forward anyway and letting yourself figure it out as you go. The people who wait until they feel ready never start at all."

"That sounds exhausting."

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