The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 284

Chapter 284: 284 | A stray lamb in the moonlight

I stood alone in my room at one-fourteen in the morning with the phantom scent of two different women still clinging to the air. Camille’s warmth lingered like a sunburn that wouldn’t fade, and Petra’s botanical cleanser mixed with the ozone of her crystalline constructs created something that smelled expensive and dangerous, which was basically Petra Lang’s entire personality distilled into a fragrance.

My bed sat five feet away. Unmade, because I’d been lying in it staring at the ceiling when Camille knocked. The sheets still held the impression of my body, and the pillow still had the dent from my head, and right now that bed represented the single most appealing destination in the known universe.

I didn’t make it to the bed.

Instead I dropped onto the edge of my desk chair, pressed my palms against my eyes, and breathed.

The Oracle Feed pulsed once in my peripheral vision. I opened one eye.

TEMPTATION GAUGE UPDATE

Camille Ortega: 24%

Petra Lang: 9% [NEW HEROINE REGISTERED]

NOTES: Host has generated meaningful gauge progression with two heroines through a single evening of poorly managed interpersonal conflict. The System recommends Host continue his current approach of doing absolutely nothing strategic and somehow generating romantic tension through raw incompetence. Results speak for themselves.

I closed my eye again.

Twenty four percent for Camille. Up from four percent this morning. Twenty points of gauge progression in a single day, most of it concentrated in the last three hours. The kiss during training accounted for some of that jump, and the almost-moment before Petra’s knock accounted for more, and the way I’d been brutally honest with both of them just now probably pushed it over the edge. Camille’s gauge responded to directness. To challenge. To someone who met her energy without flinching and gave it back harder.

Nine percent for Petra. Brand new registration. The girl who mistook me for a delivery boy three days ago now had a gauge, which meant the System had identified her as a viable heroine target based on whatever criteria it used to make those determinations. Knowing the System, those criteria probably included proximity, power level, physical attractiveness, and some proprietary algorithm that measured how likely a given woman was to end up in a compromising situation with me through the combined efforts of Ecchi Logic and my own catastrophic decision-making.

I should have been alarmed by these numbers. I should have been running damage control scenarios, calculating how to manage two new romantic complications on top of the existing ones involving Sloane, Diane, Felicity, and Rina.

Instead I sat in my desk chair at one-fifteen in the morning thinking about how Camille’s lip balm tasted like cardamom and how Petra’s eyes looked in the moonlight and how both of those things were going to destroy my life in ways I couldn’t begin to predict.

The Devotion’s Echo pulsed warm in the back of my skull. Sloane. Asleep, probably, given the hour. The impression I got through the bond was soft and heavy, the emotional texture of deep sleep layered over something that felt like contentment.

The common room on the ground floor sat dark and abandoned. The kitchen island still bore evidence of Caden’s kettle corn disaster from that morning, a faint sugar residue that nobody had bothered to fully clean. The modular couch arrangement held the impressions of twenty bodies that had occupied it throughout the day, cushions slightly compressed in the spots where people sat most often. Percy’s corner showed the marks of notebook placement. Rina’s spot near the wall still had a faint ring from her sheep mug.

I crossed the common room to the south-facing windows that overlooked the lower campus. The training fields lay silver in the moonlight, empty and still, the grass marked with faint lines from today’s conditioning session. Further out, the treeline rose dark against a sky full of stars that you could actually see out here, away from Verano’s light pollution.

Something moved in the courtyard below.

I pressed closer to the glass.

A figure sat on the bench near the courtyard fountain, legs drawn up to their chest, white hair catching the moonlight in a way that made identification instantaneous. Rina. Alone outside at one in the morning, sitting in the dark with her knees hugged against her body and her sheep tail wrapped around her waist like a child’s security blanket.

My phone came out before I finished thinking about it.

Still awake?