The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 335

Chapter 335: 335 | No Aspects

I was pushing. Hard. Harder than was probably wise with someone whose Aspect could put a beam through my chest if he lost his temper.

But Hiro Sato wasn’t going to lose his temper. That was the thing about pure hero types. They valued control. They valued the appearance of control even more than the reality of it. Losing his temper would mean proving me right about the gap between his image and his substance.

So he stood there, Corona blazing, and took it.

"The kiss," I continued, because I was committed now and backing off would waste all the momentum I’d built. "You’re offended by the kiss because it violated your sense of how combat training should look. Ortega fired a rivet at my face. She missed because I moved, but if I hadn’t moved, I’d be in the medical wing with a hole where my thinking happened. In that moment, I had two options. Dodge backward and give her time to fire again, or close the distance and do something so unexpected that it disrupted her entire attack pattern."

"You could have just dodged."

"I could have. And then she could have fired again. And again. Until eventually one of them landed, because her Aspect has a faster reload time than my movement and at that range the odds were stacking against me with every exchange. The kiss was the winning play because it did something that dodging could never do. It made her stop. Not pause, not hesitate, stop. Complete system reset. Every plan she had for the engagement got thrown out because her brain couldn’t process the input."

Hiro’s expression shifted. Something in his eyes that might have been doubt, might have been reassessment, might have been the first crack in the foundation of his conviction about what I was.

I leaned into it.

"You wanted me to lose with dignity instead of winning without it. That’s your philosophy in a sentence. And if that’s what you’re bringing to the Hero rankings, then you’re going to hit a ceiling that I’m going to blow past, because at some point you’re going to face someone who doesn’t care about dignity and doesn’t fight by the rules and doesn’t give a damn about how the engagement looks, and in that moment you’re going to have to choose between your principles and your life, and I genuinely don’t know which one you’ll pick."

The silence that followed was different from the others. This one had weight.

Hiro Sato looked at me like he was seeing something new. Not better, not worse, just different. Like I’d revealed a dimension of the conflict between us that he hadn’t fully mapped until this moment.

Then his Corona dimmed. Not to baseline, not to the comfortable maintenance glow he’d been holding earlier. Dimmer than that. Almost to nothing.

"You think I haven’t faced situations like that," he said, and his voice had dropped to something quiet and intense that didn’t match the theatrical register he usually operated in. "You think my philosophy is untested. That I’m some sheltered rich kid who talks about heroism without understanding what it costs."

"Am I wrong?"

"You’re wrong."

He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t offer details or justifications or the kind of backstory exposition that would have explained what he meant. He just stood there, Corona nearly extinguished, and let the statement sit between us like a challenge.

For a moment, just a moment, I wondered if I’d miscalculated.

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