The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 264

Chapter 264: 264 | The Misdirection Play

The Oracle Feed noticed and helpfully provided data about the exposure event that I dismissed so fast the notification probably got whiplash.

Camille fired another volley. Three rivets in a spread pattern designed to cover my retreat angles. I ducked the first, sidestepped the second, and caught the third with a construct six inches from my hip. The amber arm absorbed the impact and the rivet dissolved on contact, its material composure failing outside of Camille’s active control range.

"She’s overextending. She’s six feet past optimal firing position and her regeneration timing has slipped by point three seconds. She’s angry."

Percy’s voice had lost every trace of hesitation. The boy who couldn’t decide whether to say hello or goodbye was calling tactical reads with the confidence of a ten-year veteran running a field operation.

I grinned behind the mask.

"Percy, what’s the hallway look like between me and room 2C?"

"Clear. Fourteen feet from your current position to the door. No constructs. No traps. She left the hostage room undefended because she expected to hold the corridor."

Camille had stopped advancing. She stood in the hallway with rivets glowing at both palms, her brown eyes tracking my movement with the focus of someone who had decided that the next exchange would be the last one. The overhead fluorescent light caught the defined line of her jaw and the sharp angle of her cheekbone, and even in the middle of a combat exercise with adrenaline flooding my system, some part of my brain that I really wished would shut up registered that Camille Ortega was devastatingly beautiful when she was trying to kill someone.

"You’re stalling." She said it flat, without the heat of her earlier exchanges. The anger had cooled into something more dangerous. Analysis. "You don’t need to beat me. You just need to keep me occupied while your partner does something."

Smart.

Really, really smart.

"Maybe I just like talking to you."

"And maybe I put four rivets through your shoulder and we find out if your telekinesis works with a punctured rotator cuff."

Behind her, at the far end of the east hallway, something shifted in the stairwell doorway. A slight movement, barely visible against the fluorescent backlight. Percy, repositioning from the east stairwell to the second floor while Camille’s attention remained locked on me.

I needed her looking this direction for another thirty seconds.

"Your top is ripped," I said.

Camille’s eyes dropped to her chest for exactly one point seven seconds. The lace edge of her bra was visible above the shifted fabric, the deep orange accent line pulled taut across skin that flushed darker as she processed what I’d said and what I was looking at and the fact that I had the audacity to mention it in the middle of a tactical engagement.

The orange glow at her palms doubled in intensity.

"You’re dead."

She fired eight rivets in under three seconds. The fastest sustained volley I’d seen from her, each construct trailing orange luminescence as it crossed the distance between us. I threw myself sideways through the nearest open doorway, which happened to be the bathroom she’d been using as her alcove, and the eight rivets punched through the doorframe behind me in a staccato line that sounded like a sewing machine running through steel plate.

Water sprayed from the holes she’d put in the pipe earlier. The bathroom floor was already slick, and my boots found approximately zero traction on the wet tile as I slid toward the far wall. A construct grabbed the towel rack and arrested my momentum, but the sudden stop wrenched my shoulder and the feedback lanced through my temples.

"She’s not following into the bathroom. She’s adjusted her line to cover both the bathroom door and the hallway approach to 2C. She is good."

"Percy. Window seal is halfway open. When I tell you, push through and grab the hostage. Get it to the ground floor south exit. That’s the extraction zone."

"The fall from the second floor window to the courtyard is approximately eighteen feet. I cannot survive that drop without injury."

"There’s a ledge at the first floor window. Drop to the ledge, then drop to the ground. Total fall is under ten feet."

"I am not an athlete, Lukas."

"You’re a hero, Percy. Same thing."

Silence on the earpiece for two full seconds. Then his voice came back smaller and steadier than I’d ever heard it.

"Tell me when."

I burst out of the bathroom at full speed, not toward Camille but away from her, sprinting down the west corridor toward the stairwell. The move looked like retreat and I needed it to look like retreat because every second she spent processing my apparent flight was a second she wasn’t covering room 2C.

Camille’s voice followed me down the hallway, loud and sharp. "Running won’t save your partner!"

She was wrong, but she didn’t know that yet.