The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 263

Chapter 263: 263 | Cardamom and Cordite [PS BONUS]

The desk hit the spot where Camille had been standing approximately half a second after she wasn’t standing there anymore.

I’ll give her this. The girl was fast.

Camille threw herself sideways into the bathroom alcove as a hundred and fifty pounds of institutional walnut smashed into the wall where her ribs had been, cratering the drywall and sending a shower of plaster dust across the hallway. Two of my constructs released the desk on impact and reformed at my flanks while the other two held position near the ceiling, tracking both ends of the corridor.

From the east stairwell, Percy’s voice came through the earpiece with zero stutter. "She’s in the alcove. Four feet in. She can see both directions but her firing window is compressed to a thirty-degree arc from that position. You have approximately six seconds before she recalibrates."

Six seconds. More than enough.

I pushed off the wall and sprinted down the west hallway, boots hitting the impact matting in rapid succession. The corridor was narrow enough that my constructs couldn’t fan out to full extension, so I kept two tight against my body and sent the other two ahead, one skimming the ceiling and the other hugging the baseboard.

Four seconds.

Orange light bloomed from the alcove. Camille came out shooting.

The first rivet punched through the air where my head had been a quarter second earlier, the hardened nail construct traveling with enough velocity to make the air snap. The second one curved mid-flight, bending around the wall of the corridor in a trajectory that should have been physically impossible and absolutely was not because Camille Ortega could adjust her projectiles after firing them.

The curve caught me off guard. I dropped flat and the rivet screamed past my ear close enough that I felt the heat of it against my skin. The construct embedded itself in the far wall with a sound like a railroad spike being driven through sheet metal.

"Rivet trajectory adjusted approximately seven degrees from initial vector," Percy reported through the earpiece with the clinical tone of someone reading a weather report. "She’s compensating in real time. Straight-line approach is not viable."

Yeah, no kidding.

I rolled sideways against the wall as a third rivet punched through the space I’d been occupying, this one aimed lower, designed to catch me if I’d gone prone. Camille was reading my movement patterns after three exchanges and already adapting her firing solution.

This girl was the real deal.

I sent the ceiling construct forward in a feint, the amber arm sweeping down toward the alcove entrance like a grasping hand. Camille responded exactly the way a trained combat specialist would, pivoting her fire to intercept the incoming threat. Two rivets punched through the construct simultaneously, the orange nails shearing through my amber projection hard enough that I felt the feedback travel up my spine and settle behind my eyes as a sharp throb.

But the feint bought me two seconds. I used them to close fifteen feet of hallway in a dead sprint, keeping low, keeping my profile tight against the left wall.

Twenty feet from the alcove.

"She’s regenerating. Both palms active. Volley incoming in approximately one point eight seconds."

I didn’t have one point eight seconds to think about this.

I activated Blitz.

The world compressed. The fluorescent lights stretched into horizontal lines as my body covered the remaining twenty feet in a duration that my conscious mind couldn’t meaningfully track. The hallway blurred past, the matting compressed beneath my boots, and then I was inside the alcove and Camille Ortega’s brown eyes went very, very wide.

We occupied approximately nine square feet of recessed bathroom doorway. Her back pressed against the tile wall. My momentum carried me forward until our bodies were separated by inches. The six rivet constructs she’d been generating flared bright orange at both palms, aimed at a target that was no longer at the end of a forty-foot hallway but instead close enough to smell.

And she smelled like something warm. Cardamom and brown sugar and the metallic undertone of Aspect discharge that clung to her skin from years of generating those nail constructs.

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