The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 265

Chapter 265: 265 | The Tactical Kiss

I hit the west stairwell door at full sprint and threw myself through it without slowing down. The door slammed against the interior wall hard enough to crack the safety glass in the viewport window, and I used the momentum to carry me up the first three steps before my boots found purchase on the concrete.

Behind me, Camille’s footsteps echoed through the hallway. She was following. Good. Every step she took toward this stairwell was a step away from room 2C and the hostage that Percy was currently extracting through a peeled window seal.

"Percy. Now."

"Going."

I climbed another four steps and stopped on the landing between the second and third floors. The stairwell was narrow, maybe six feet wide, with institutional green walls and overhead fluorescent tubes that hummed at a frequency designed to give everyone headaches. Perfect terrain for what I had in mind.

Camille appeared in the stairwell doorway below me. Orange light blazed at both palms as she tracked my position, and I watched her weight shift as she committed to the pursuit. Her compression top was still pulled low across her chest from our earlier exchange, the deep V of exposed skin catching my attention for approximately half a second before my survival instincts reasserted themselves.

"End of the line," she said. "This stairwell has one exit above you and one below me. You’re not getting past me, and you’re not reaching the third floor before I put enough rivets in your back to qualify as modern art."

"That’s an interesting theory."

"It’s not a theory. It’s geometry."

She raised both hands and fired.

Three rivets came up the stairwell in a spread pattern designed to cover my entire body. The narrow walls meant I couldn’t dodge left or right, and the steep angle meant I couldn’t drop flat without sliding back down the stairs directly into her range. Standard geometry said I was trapped.

Standard geometry didn’t account for what happened when I grabbed the overhead fluorescent tube with a construct and yanked it out of its housing.

The tube shattered on impact with the stairs between us, spraying glass fragments and phosphorescent powder in a cloud that filled the stairwell like flash-bang residue. Her rivets punched through the cloud and embedded in the wall behind my head, but she’d lost visual contact for approximately two seconds.

Two seconds was enough.

I launched myself down the stairs instead of up, diving through the dissipating cloud with my arms extended and four constructs trailing behind me like the world’s most aggressive moving violation. Camille’s eyes widened as I emerged from the powder cloud three feet from her position, close enough to see the individual lashes framing her brown eyes and the way her pupils contracted in surprise.

She tried to bring her palms up. I caught her right wrist with a construct before the motion completed, wrenched it sideways, and used my momentum to carry us both through the stairwell door and back into the second-floor hallway.

We hit the hallway floor in a tangle of limbs and constructs. My back took the impact and the air left my lungs in a rush that made stars explode across my peripheral vision, but I kept the construct locked on her wrist and extended two more to pin her other arm and her left ankle.

Camille thrashed against the grip with genuine strength. Her combat training hadn’t been theoretical. She knew exactly how to twist her body to generate maximum torque against a restraint, and my constructs registered the pressure as burning feedback that lanced through my temples.

"Let go!"

"No."

I rolled us over, putting her back against the floor and my weight across her hips. The position was deeply inappropriate for a combat training exercise and I was going to hear about it from approximately everyone who was watching through the observation deck monitors, but it was also the only way to pin her center of gravity while keeping my constructs locked on her limbs.

Her chest heaved against mine with every breath. The shifted fabric of her top had given up any pretense of coverage, and I could feel the heat of her skin through the thin compression material. Her brown eyes blazed with fury from six inches away, and her lips were parted in an expression that communicated murder in the most attractive way possible.

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