The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 421

Chapter 421: 421 | Better at Hiding Than They Are at Looking

"Legendary plus. That’s not a tier, that’s an apology. That’s the IHL admitting the scale broke and refusing to build a new one. Fifteen years at ninety-eight percent approval, combat ceiling classified, output undocumented, and the man teaches Hero Basics on Wednesday afternoons and checks his phone three times during a capture the flag exercise." I spread my hands. "Nobody has ever run provenance on him. Nobody would dare. He’s the most trusted human being in this country and his file is a rumor with a costume on it, and the reason nobody asks is that he ran into a burning building twenty-seven times in four minutes with a camera on him, and after the twenty-seventh time the question stopped being a question."

"You think he bought that with results."

"I think he bought it with the only currency that’s ever worked." The garden gate was coming up on the left, wrought iron, the code Percy got off a groundskeeper through a window. "Look. The source is a story about the past. What you do with it is a story about right now. And every single institution on earth prefers the past, because the past holds still and lets you photograph it, and right now keeps moving and makes everybody look stupid. So you get compliance frameworks built entirely around where a thing came from, and then a hospital falls down and the only question anybody in that hospital cares about is whether the person coming through the wall is fast enough."

"And when the person coming through the wall turns out to have gotten fast in a way the framework can’t audit."

"Then the framework is wrong about what it should have been measuring."

"No," Odette said. "Then the framework was measuring the correct thing and got beaten by a boy who was better at hiding than it was at looking, and the people it exists to protect find out about the difference in a very expensive way."

That one went in clean, under the ribs, no wind-up.

"Say the rest," I said.

"You want the rest."

"You’ve been building to it since you put your glasses back on."

She stopped at the gate. Put a hand flat on the iron without pushing, and turned around so the light came off the concrete and hit her from below, and I got a good look at her for the first time since she walked into that conference room like she had built it personally.

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