The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 330

Chapter 330: 330 | An Act of Professional Respect

I looked at the revised plan taking shape on Percy’s notebook and felt two things simultaneously.

First, genuine admiration for how Camille had taken my failed concept, identified the critical flaw, and redirected the group toward a solution that actually accounted for civilian behavior under stress conditions.

Second, a particular warmth in my chest that had nothing to do with tactical appreciation and everything to do with the way Camille’s entire body had changed when she engaged with the problem on her own terms. Her shoulders had dropped. Her jaw had relaxed.

The aggressive performance she’d maintained for two days of avoiding me had evaporated the moment she started doing what she was genuinely great at, which was reading a situation for its breaking point and restructuring the approach around it.

She caught me looking.

Her cheeks darkened by half a shade. She pulled her attention back to the notebook with aggressive focus.

"Your original plan wasn’t terrible," she said, and the words came out directed at the notebook rather than at me. "The environmental denial concept has applications. You just forgot that environments contain people."

"I forgot that environments contain people," I agreed.

"Don’t do that."

"Do what?"

"Agree with me when I’m criticizing you. It makes it harder to stay irritated."

Felicity looked between us with the expression of someone who was watching something unfold in real time and finding it far more interesting than the tactical exercise they were supposed to be completing.

"So," Felicity said brightly, "should we talk about the presentation format, or should I give you two a minute?"

"Presentation format," Camille and I said at the same time.

Felicity smiled in a way that communicated she was filing away everything she had observed for future deployment at the worst possible moment.

We spent the next thirty minutes refining the plan into a presentable brief. Percy handled the tactical diagram, transferring his notebook sketches onto a digital overlay of the Silverbrook floor plan with annotations tracking extraction routes, illusion deployment zones, and real-time information feeds. Felicity drafted the crowd management section with particular attention to the psychological impact of perceived safety on civilian behavior, drawing on her Aspect’s practical applications in ways that demonstrated she understood her power far better than most people gave her credit for. Camille structured the overall approach, organizing the partition-by-floor methodology into a timeline with contingency branches for the three most likely failure scenarios.

I contributed by shutting up and letting them work.

This was not false modesty. My plan had been wrong. Not wrong in the catastrophic way that gets people killed, but wrong in the fundamental way that reveals a gap in how someone thinks about problems. I’d been so focused on the clever solution, the environmental denial angle that would make Steele nod with approval and Dravid recognize his own lesson reflected back at him, that I’d forgotten the most basic principle of hero work. The people inside the building are not obstacles to navigate around. They’re the entire reason you’re there.

Camille had seen this immediately. Not because she was smarter than me in raw processing terms. Percy’s Analyze could outrun her pattern recognition on pure data speed any day of the week. She’d seen it because Camille Ortega thought about people first and strategy second, and she’d built her entire combat philosophy around the principle that every situation has a breaking point and her job is to find it before anyone gets hurt.

The fact that she’d broken my plan instead of a person was, in Camille’s particular framework, an act of professional respect. She’d treated me as someone worth correcting rather than someone to dismiss.

This realization was doing exactly zero helpful things for the complicated feelings I was actively attempting not to have about the woman sitting across from me with her hair falling across her jaw and her brown eyes alive with tactical engagement.

At the forty-minute mark, Percy completed the final version of our tactical brief. The diagram showed three simultaneous operations: ground-floor extraction through service corridors while Felicity’s illusions held the Villain’s visual attention on the upper floors, second-floor extraction through the maintenance access points once the ground floor cleared, and a final third-floor approach using the combined information advantage of Percy’s Analyze and Felicity’s sensory chaos to create a window where the Villain’s displacement Aspect was functionally useless because he couldn’t distinguish reality from projection.

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