The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 434

Chapter 434: 434 | The Loaded Weapon in Slot Four

I lay on my bed like a good boy.

That was the punishment. Sloane Fitzgerald, the girl who could detonate concrete with her palms and had spent nine years learning to weaponize silence before she ever learned to weaponize kinetic energy, had sentenced me to a night alone in my seven hundred and fifty square foot apartment with nothing but my ceiling and my thoughts and the low thrum of the Bond Resonance carrying her emotions from across campus like a radio station I could not turn off.

She was satisfied. Vindicated. A little smug. And underneath all of that, the warm constant hum that never changed regardless of what I did or who I did it with, the frequency that said mine without variation or apology.

I pulled up my phone and scrolled to the playlist Felicity had made me during our mall trip, a collection of lo-fi instrumentals and Japanese city pop that she’d titled "for when you’ve been a terrible person and need to decompress."

The woman had predicted this exact scenario six days before it happened. Either she possessed genuine precognitive ability or she simply understood my personality with surgical accuracy, and I was not sure which option terrified me more.

The first track opened with a saxophone that had no business being that smooth at seven forty-three on a Friday evening.

I let it play.

The apartment held the fading warmth of the afternoon sun through the east-facing window, and the sage reading chair sat in the corner where Diane had placed it three weeks ago with opinions about light angles and lamp cord placement that I had followed to the letter because disagreeing with Diane Fitzgerald about interior design carried the same survival probability as disagreeing with her about anything else.

The walnut desk held Percy’s thirty-six page insurance document, my phone charger, a half-empty water bottle, and the framed photograph of Marcus and Reina Belmont in their Hero costumes.

I looked at that photograph for eleven seconds.

The original Lukas had looked at it forty-seven times from a different bedroom in a different house during a different life. The transmigrant had looked at it four times total, counting tonight.

The memories that came with the photograph belonged to someone who no longer lived behind these amber eyes, and the grief that should have accompanied those memories arrived secondhand and useless, like receiving a bill for a meal someone else had eaten at a restaurant I had never visited.

I exhaled through my nose and pulled up the interface.

〘 Status 〙

Name: Lukas Belmont

(DP) 0 (SP) 23,430

[ Attributes ]

〘 STR: 100 | AGI: 100 | DEX: 100 〙

〘 INT: 100 | END: 100 〙

ACTIVE SKILLS (4/4):

Spectral Reach (Rare)

Blitz (Rare)

Lightning Cloak (Epic)

PASSIVE TRAITS (6/6):

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify