The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 375

Chapter 375: 375 | Do Not Embarrass Me in Front of Class 1-A

Percy started writing again, faster now.

"The Crucible isn’t a combat arena. There’s no scoreboard. No villain points. No robots to farm for cheap victories." Her eyes moved across us, and there was weight in it. "It’s a rescue exercise. Civilian dummies with trauma sensors, wired to a central system. Multiple crisis environments running simultaneously. Fire. Structural collapse. Flooding. Hazmat. You and Class 1-A will be deployed as combined teams into an active disaster scenario, and your grade, your ranking, and every scout’s opinion of you will come down to one number."

She let it hang.

"How many people you save."

Nobody spoke. The room had that specific frozen quality of people realizing the game had changed and they hadn’t been told the new rules.

Caden broke it, because of course he did. "So no punching? At all?"

"There will be obstacles that require combat capability to overcome, Holt. Debris to move. Threats embedded in the scenario. But if you spend the exercise looking for something to hit, you will fail, and I will personally ensure your failure is memorable." Steele’s smile returned, sharper than before. "The Crucible doesn’t care how hard you punch. It cares whether the person under the collapsed floor is breathing when you leave."

Hiro’s Corona had dimmed completely. He was staring at the schematic with an expression I couldn’t fully read. Something told me the answer he’d given about punishing evil was rearranging itself behind his eyes, piece by piece.

"Class 1-A will be there because Dravid and Hale believe the two cohorts sharpen each other," Steele said, her tone shifting into something closer to lecture mode. "Class 1-A executes protocol beautifully. You people improvise like your lives depend on it, which they eventually will. In a real disaster, both matter. Neither one is enough alone. This exercise is designed to find out whether you can work together or whether you’ll get people killed fighting over who’s in charge."

I thought about Sloane’s Detonation Aspect in a building full of civilian dummies with trauma sensors. Each one wired to register concussive force, heat signature, impact velocity. Her hits didn’t just land. They cratered. That was the problem.

I thought about Rina’s wool, which could strip the panic out of a crowd faster than any sedative could manage without the side effects.

I thought about Petra, who’d just correctly identified that the entire point of this profession was keeping people alive, and who conjured barriers fast enough to hold a ceiling up while you evacuated everyone underneath it.

I thought about the Combat Symbiosis in the Heroine Bond Resonance. The fifteen percent boost Sloane and I got fighting side by side, the unconscious coordination that made us read like we’d trained together for years instead of sparring in the same house for most of our lives. A joint exercise put us on the same field for the first time since I’d unlocked that passive. The implications were loud.

The System was quiet. No quest. No gauge update. No sarcastic commentary about what I was thinking or what it meant. Just silence, which was somehow more ominous than a notification would have been.

"As class representatives," Steele added, and her pink eyes found me first, then flicked to the top row where Petra sat, "Belmont and Lang will attend the coordination meeting with faculty and 1-A’s representatives on Friday. You’ll be involved in the operational planning. Which means the two of you are going to have to be in the same room, working toward the same objective, without one of you conjuring a spike through the other."

Petra’s expression didn’t change. "I make no promises."

"Likewise."

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