The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 261

Chapter 261: 261 | Two Queens, Two Floors

Camille Ortega had exactly ten minutes to turn a three-story building into a kill box, and she was spending four of them arguing with a girl who’d never taken an entrance exam.

"The hostage goes in 2C." Camille stood in the center of the second-floor hallway with her arms crossed, Rivet constructs already warming beneath the skin of her palms. The orange glow pulsed faintly against the fluorescent light overhead. She’d walked the floor twice in the first ninety seconds after Radiant released them into the building, identified every sightline, every doorframe that offered cover, every angle where a projectile could reach from the hallway into the rooms beyond.

The answer was obvious. 2C had one entrance, limited approach vectors, and a straight shot from the hallway that gave Camille forty feet of uninterrupted suppression fire. "I hold the corridor. You hold the room. They walk into a crossfire they can’t survive."

Petra Lang stood six feet away with her leather planner tucked under one arm and her emerald eyes focused somewhere past Camille’s left ear, as though the wall behind her contained more interesting content than anything Camille was saying.

"The hostage goes in 3B."

"Third floor."

"Third floor." Petra didn’t repeat herself with emphasis. She repeated herself the way someone would read a menu item back to a waiter who misheard. "The third floor provides additional vertical separation from the entry points, forces the Hero team to commit to a longer approach through the stairwell, and gives my Conjuration sufficient room to establish layered barricades across the landing. By the time they reach the third floor, they will be exhausted, disoriented, and walking into a prepared defensive architecture that they cannot dismantle faster than I can regenerate it."

"Your defensive architecture won’t mean anything if Belmont sends his constructs up the stairwell ahead of him. Phantom Touch has fifteen feet of range. He doesn’t need to be on the third floor to reach a hostage on the third floor."

Petra’s mouth curved into something that could charitably be called a smile. "Belmont’s Aspect is a mid-tier telekinetic projection with documented limitations. His constructs cannot exert force beyond fifteen pounds at maximum extension. My crystalline barriers weigh in excess of two hundred pounds per segment. The physics of this engagement are not complicated."

"Physics." Camille’s fingers curled at her sides. The orange glow at her palms brightened by a visible degree. "You want to talk physics. Let me tell you about the physics of a hardened nail construct traveling at the velocity of a high-caliber round, which is what happens when I fire down a straight hallway at someone who doesn’t know where I am. That’s the physics we should be using. My Rivet, my range, my control of the engagement space from the second floor where the approach corridors are long enough that I can pin anyone before they get within twenty feet of the hostage room."

"And what happens when they don’t approach from the corridor?"

"They have to approach from the corridor. That’s how buildings work."

Petra opened her planner and began writing something in handwriting so neat it looked typeset. "I have reviewed three years of Halloran practical exercise footage from the student archive. In sixty-seven percent of successful Hero extractions, the attacking team bypassed the primary corridor through environmental destruction, alternate entry via windows, or Aspect-based movement that negated standard architectural routing."

She closed the planner without looking up. "Your corridor defense assumes your opponents will walk politely into your kill zone. History suggests they will not."

Camille’s jaw tightened. "You reviewed three years of footage."

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