The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 373

Chapter 373: 373 | Roadkill Chic

Morning training left me sore in the specific way that meant Steele had actually put effort into designing our suffering. Hill sprints, partner drags, and a thirty-minute core circuit that made my abdominal muscles file a formal complaint with management. The Demigod trait would erase all of it by lunch, which was the only reason I hadn’t started plotting Steele’s dramatic demise somewhere around burpee number forty.

Breakfast had been ramen and eggs and Percy delivering unsolicited data about the campus water pressure fluctuations. Normal. Comfortable. The kind of routine that lulled a person into thinking their life wasn’t held together by fraud and gacha mechanics.

Then Felicity found me in the hallway.

She looped her arm through mine the way she always did, chin tilted up, blonde hair caught in a loose braid that had clearly taken deliberate work to look accidental. Her uniform blazer sat unbuttoned, her white shirt straining exactly one degree past regulation, and she smelled like vanilla and something floral I couldn’t name and didn’t want to think about too hard.

"Okay bestie, you are giving Steele-truck-hit-you energy right now," she said cheerfully, her voice carrying that specific bright quality that meant she was enjoying herself. "Like, full-on roadkill chic."

"Steele is worse than a truck," I said. "A truck has mechanical limitations. Steele has enthusiasm and a whistle."

She laughed, the sound bright and easy and completely unaffected, which was what actually got me. Because yesterday had happened.

The theater.

Her in my lap, breath warm against my neck, her fingers digging into my shoulders while I held completely still and tried to pretend the whole thing wasn’t rapidly approaching territory neither of us had explicitly agreed to enter.

The illusion-covered near-disaster with the campus employee who’d walked past too close to where we shouldn’t have been.

All of that had happened, and she was walking beside me now acting like nothing fundamental had shifted at all.

That was the part that landed wrong.

Not wrong in a bad way. Wrong in the specific way that meant I’d calibrated for the wrong outcome.

She wasn’t different.

There was no awkwardness threading through her usual warmth, no clingy recalibration where she’d suddenly need constant validation, no shift into some possessive new frequency the way I’d quietly braced for when I woke up this morning and remembered what her Temptation Gauge had been doing.

She was the same Felicity who’d dragged me shopping two weeks ago and monologued about the correct shade of chartreuse for seventeen uninterrupted minutes. Physically affectionate in ways that registered as completely natural to her and mildly overwhelming to everyone else. Impossibly, relentlessly herself.

I’d spent the walk from the dormitories to homeroom quietly grateful for that continuity, which was probably the first genuinely dangerous thought I’d had all morning.

Because gratitude was one comfortable step from trust, and trust was one unguarded moment from telling her everything, and telling anyone everything was exactly how a guy with a fake Aspect registration and a system-mandated harem protocol ended up in a government research facility with electrodes attached to his skull and a file stamped ANOMALOUS ENTITY - CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS AUTHORIZED.

"You’re doing the thing," Felicity said.

"What thing."

"The thing where your eyes go flat and you stop blinking." She poked my ribs. "Percy does it too, except Percy mutters. You just look like a very handsome computer buffering."

"I’m not buffering."

"You’re absolutely buffering." Her fingers drifted lower on my arm, tracing along the fabric with a casualness that would’ve fooled anyone who hadn’t spent yesterday afternoon learning exactly what her hands were capable of. "So."

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify