The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 258

Chapter 258: 258 | Cracks are What I Work With [PS BONUS]

Percy and I stood outside the south entrance of Building C in Ground Beta while the ten-minute preparation clock ticked above the door in red digital numbers. Nine minutes and forty-three seconds. Somewhere on the second floor, Camille Ortega and Petra Lang were positioning a simulation dummy in a room of their choosing, setting traps, establishing lines of fire, and generally making our lives significantly harder with every passing second.

Percy had his notebook open against the wall, sketching the building’s floor plan from memory with quick strokes of his pen. The lines were clean. The proportions were accurate to within inches. The boy had walked this building’s layout in his head so many times that his hand moved on autopilot while his mouth tried to keep pace with his brain.

"Seven rooms on the first floor. Five on the second. Three on the third. Two stairwells, one on the east side and one on the west, plus a non-functional elevator shaft in the center that connects all three floors. The maintenance corridor on the ground floor runs north to south and exits near the east stairwell." Percy’s pen tapped the paper three times in rapid succession. "If they place the hostage in room 2C, which has the most defensible sightlines and only one entrance, Camille can cover the hallway approach with Rivet while Petra generates structural barricades using Conjuration. That gives them overlapping fields of coverage with the hostage behind two layers of protection."

"And if they put it somewhere else?"

Percy’s pen stopped. "There are eleven possible hostage locations. I’ve ranked them by tactical viability. Room 2C is the most likely at thirty-one percent probability. Room 2A is second at twenty-two percent because it has windows on two walls, which creates escape routes for the hostage extraction but also gives us approach vectors they’d need to defend. Room 3B on the third floor is third at—"

"Percy."

He looked up from the notebook. His navy blue hair fell across his forehead and his brown eyes carried the specific intensity of someone whose brain was producing sixteen options per second while his mouth could only vocalize one.

"I need you to breathe."

Percy breathed. The exhale came out shaky and too fast, but it was something.

"Watching from the observation deck is different from being inside," I said. "Up there, you can see everything. Down here, you see a hallway and a door and whatever’s behind it when it opens."

"I know that. I’ve accounted for the informational asymmetry in my tactical modeling." Percy’s voice wavered on the last word. His left hand twitched toward his pocket where the notebook usually lived, found it was already in his right hand, and settled against his thigh. "The problem is that accounting for it doesn’t reduce it. I can model every room in this building and calculate approach probabilities for seventeen different configurations, but the moment we enter that door, I’m operating on partial data and partial data is where I—" He stopped himself. Swallowed. "Where I freeze."

The timer read eight minutes and twelve seconds.

I leaned against the wall beside him and crossed my arms. The charcoal compression suit felt good against my skin, fitted in a way that didn’t restrict movement, and the amber accent lines caught the afternoon sunlight in the narrow space between the building’s shadow and the walkway. My half-mask sat around my neck, ready to pull up when we entered.

"You won’t freeze."

"You can’t guarantee that."

"No. But I can guarantee that Camille Ortega fires hardened nail constructs at roughly the speed of a high-caliber round with trajectory control that most people don’t develop until their third year. And I can guarantee that Petra Lang generates material constructs from nothing with a Legendary classification that the admissions board rated as the highest raw capability in either cohort." I watched the timer tick past seven minutes and thirty seconds. "So if you freeze, I need you to freeze somewhere that isn’t directly in front of either of those things."

Percy stared at me. Then something happened that I had seen exactly three times since meeting him. The corners of his mouth moved upward.

"That’s not reassuring."

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