The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 245

Chapter 245: 245 | My Fake Aspect Sounds Lonely [GT BONUS]

His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. A smile appeared on his face like sunrise over a landscape that did not get much sun. Small and genuine and entirely unprepared for itself.

"Thank you." He cleared his throat. "Your turn. What does Phantom Touch want?"

Right.

My fake Aspect. The cover story I’d constructed from stolen abilities and a registration system that couldn’t detect the System running beneath everything I did. Phantom Touch was supposed to be a mid-tier Channeler variant, a telekinetic projection system with moderate output and limited range. That was the file. That was what every instructor at this academy believed about me.

But Dravid had asked what the Aspect wanted.

And for one stupid, reckless moment, I considered telling the truth.

Not about the System. Not about the transmigration or the gacha or the fact that every ability I possessed had been purchased with currency generated by making women fall for me. But about the feeling. The interior experience of carrying power that nobody knew about, of holding back in every room I entered, of wearing a skin that fit the body but not the thing living inside it.

The silence between what I could do and what I was allowed to show.

That was real. That part wasn’t a lie.

"It wants more room," I said.

Percy’s pen hovered.

"Phantom Touch feels like having arms that extend past where my body ends," I continued. "The constructs reach further than my hands can, grab things my fingers can’t touch, interact with the world at distances my physical body was never designed to cover. And every time I use it, I feel the limit. Fifteen feet. That’s the range. And the Aspect wants more. It pushes against that boundary like something trapped in a space too small for it, and I can feel it asking me to let it go further."

I paused. Looked at my hands resting on the desk surface.

"It wants to fill the space between me and everything I can’t reach."

Percy wrote for thirty seconds without stopping. When he finished, he read back what he’d written, nodded once to confirm it matched what I’d said, and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t fully decode.

"That sounds lonely," he said.

The Oracle Feed remained silent. No gauge notification. No strategic recommendation. No snarky commentary about optimization or progression vectors.

Just Percy Mendoza, sitting in an Aspect Theory classroom with his notebook and his anxiety and his terrifyingly accurate read on the human being sitting next to him, telling me that the lie I’d just told about my fake Aspect sounded lonely.

He wasn’t wrong.

He just didn’t know that the loneliness was real even if the Aspect wasn’t.

Across the room, other pairs conducted their own conversations with varying degrees of success. Caden and Marco appeared to have deviated from the assignment entirely and were now arguing about whether light could technically be lonely or whether that constituted anthropomorphization of photons. Felicity spoke to her partner with the focused warmth she brought to everything, her hands gesturing as she described what illusions felt like from the inside. Rina had been paired with Nyx, and from the look on Rina’s face, Nyx had said something that landed harder than expected, because Rina’s purple eyes were wide and her tail had wrapped around her own leg in the protective curl I’d come to recognize as her processing something emotionally significant.

Petra sat in the top row with her arms crossed and her partner looking increasingly uncomfortable.

Dravid watched all of it from the demonstration floor, leaning on his cane, his gold eyes moving between pairs with the slow, deliberate attention of someone reading a room the way Percy read maps. Finding the paths. Identifying the bottlenecks. Seeing where the conversations flowed and where they got stuck.

You never answered my question about the hot teacher.

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