The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 449

Chapter 449: 449 | Piece by Piece

This was the only stimulus in the documented universe that produced this result. The Architect’s voice reached whatever part of Silas’s brain controlled the ADHD-driven motor output and applied a pressure that the medication could only approximate. Silas did not become calm. Silas became still, which was a different condition entirely, the way a loaded weapon was still until someone made a decision about the trigger.

"I heard you," the silhouette said. "Through the microphone in the ceiling. You threw nineteen darts and hit the poster fourteen times."

"Seventeen."

"Fourteen. Gerard was being generous. Three of your throws hit the wall within the poster’s border but did not contact the printed surface, which by standard target methodology constitutes a miss regardless of proximity."

Silas’s jaw worked sideways. The scars around his eyes glowed faintly.

"Your temper, Silas."

"I’m fine."

"You are not fine. You are bored, understimulated, and fixated on a target that is currently surrounded by institutional security, public surveillance infrastructure, and approximately fourteen hundred first-year students whose presence guarantees that any operation conducted within a twelve-block radius of Halloran Academy would generate civilian casualties at a scale that no operational objective could justify."

Silas’s fingers found the armrest and began drumming. The rhythm was new. Faster than the previous pattern. The black flame behind his sternum pulsed once, and a thin line of dark smoke rose from between his lips before Gerard quietly placed the glass of water back in his hand.

"I could be careful."

"You cannot be careful, Silas. That is not a criticism. It is a design specification. I built you for situations where careful is no longer available, and the investment I have made in your development is not something I intend to risk on a Tuesday afternoon because you are restless." The silhouette shifted in its chair. "Have you taken your Thursday medication?"

"Gerard made me."

"Gerard is an excellent resource. Listen to Gerard."

"Gerard won’t let me do anything."

"Gerard won’t let you do anything yet. The distinction matters. You understand the distinction."

Silas understood the distinction. He had understood it since the Architect first explained it, in a room that smelled like antiseptic and synthesized pharmaceutical compounds, when Silas was thirteen and the burns on his hands were still healing and the world had been reduced to two categories: the Architect, who provided structure, and everything else, which did not. The distinction was between patience and absence. Patience meant the thing you wanted was coming. Absence meant it was gone. The Architect had promised patience. The Architect had never promised absence. And in nine years, the Architect had not broken a promise once.

"When?" Silas said.

"Soon."

"You always say soon."

"And each time I say it, the distance between soon and now decreases. This is the nature of the word."

"I want a date."

Silas’s foot started tapping again. The rhythm was different now. Slower.

"And the fire?"

"The fire will be the last thing he sees. As it should be."

The monitor went dark. The silhouette vanished. The ambient blue returned.

Silas reached for the cup of darts on the side table. Three remained. He threw them in rapid succession without standing from his curled position in the armchair, his arm whipping forward from an angle that should not have produced accuracy. The first dart hit Radiant’s left eye. The second hit the right. The third punched through the poster’s golden emblem and embedded itself deep enough into the concrete that Gerard would need pliers to retrieve it.

"Twenty," Silas said.

Gerard removed the tray from the side table and walked toward the door. At the threshold, he paused and looked back at the boy in the armchair who was already reaching for his phone, scrolling through news feeds with the frantic speed of someone whose brain demanded constant input the way a furnace demanded fuel.

"Shall I bring dinner at the usual time, Young Master?"

"Bring it whenever. I don’t care."

"Seven thirty, then."