The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 286

Chapter 286: 286 | I’ll Be the One Who Grounds You

"Like reaching," I said, trying to put something I’d never articulated into actual words. "Like having arms that don’t stop at the shoulder. They go further than my body does. Way further. And when they touch something—when the constructs make contact—I can feel it. The weight and the texture and the temperature, all of it flowing back through a connection that doesn’t have a physical component. It’s not like remote control. It’s like touching the world from fifteen feet away. Like my sense of touch extends beyond where my skin stops."

I paused, running through the sensation in my head, trying to capture what it actually felt like rather than what it looked like from outside.

"The feedback is immediate. Not delayed, not processed through some intermediary layer. I grab something with a construct and my brain registers it the same way it would if I grabbed it with my hand. Just... displaced. Extended. Like someone took the concept of ’arm’ and decided the elbow joint was optional and the maximum length was negotiable."

Rina’s expression shifted. The wariness receded slightly, replaced by something that looked like recognition. Like she understood exactly what I was describing because her own Aspect operated on a similar principle, just expressed through a completely different medium.

"Mine feels like breathing out," she said, her voice quieter now, more deliberate. "When I manifest the wool, it’s not like pushing something out of me. It’s like exhaling and the exhale becomes physical. It carries the feeling with it. Whatever I’m feeling when I generate it, the wool takes that emotion and makes it real enough to touch. If I feel safe, the wool makes other people feel safe. If I feel scared, it makes them scared."

She paused. The pause stretched longer than it should have, turning into something that required actual courage to break.

"I never told anyone that last part."

The implication landed with the weight of something she’d been carrying alone for a long time.

"You can generate fear?"

"I don’t know. I’ve never tried. I’ve always been told to focus on comfort and calm and safety because those are the applications that support roles need. Those are the feelings that make people trust you. Nobody ever asked what would happen if I was angry. Or frightened. Or..."

She trailed off, but the word she didn’t say hung between us anyway.

Vengeful.

Furious.

Hurt.

All the emotions Rina Soleil had been trained to suppress because her Aspect amplified them and made them contagious, and an Aspect that could make people feel comfortable could also make them feel the opposite, and nobody had wanted to explore what the opposite looked like because the comfortable version was already so useful.

"You should test it," I said, before I fully thought through what I was offering. "In a controlled environment, with someone who can ground you if it goes wrong. But you should find out what your Aspect does when you stop limiting it to nice feelings. Not because fear is better than comfort. Because knowing the full range means you get to choose what you deploy instead of just defaulting to what you were told was appropriate."

Her purple eyes tracked my face, searching for something. Permission, maybe. Or proof that I meant it.

"That feels dangerous."

"It is dangerous. That’s why you do it with someone you trust instead of finding out during an actual crisis when the fear is real and you can’t control the output."

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