The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 451

Chapter 451: 451 | The Acoustics of Laughter

Percy looked up from the cup with his brown eyes sharp and warm and carrying the specific quality that surfaced when Percy Mendoza found a variable he hadn’t accounted for and decided it was worth investigating. "Show me the one with the best input-to-output satisfaction ratio."

I led Percy to the racing simulators first because they provided the most direct correlation between skill and result, a relationship Percy’s brain could map without the intervention of randomness or claw machine physics. The two full-sized motorcycle cabinets sat side by side, identical in construction and identical in the faded quality of their screens, which displayed a Tokyo track selection menu in font that had been modern in 2019.

Percy climbed onto the motorcycle with the coordination of someone who had never sat on anything resembling a motorcycle and whose body was still negotiating the appropriate posture. His feet found the pegs after a delay that his notebook would later document. His hands gripped the handlebars with the force of someone who had been told this device operated at high speeds and had taken the warning personally.

"Relax your shoulders," I said from the adjacent cabinet.

"My shoulders are relaxed."

"Your shoulders are at your ears, Percy."

Percy lowered his shoulders by approximately two inches and immediately looked more comfortable and less like someone being electrocuted in slow motion. "This is a different input interface than I anticipated. The response curve between handlebar angle and on-screen trajectory is nonlinear."

"It’s a ten-year-old arcade machine. The response curve is whatever the machine feels like that morning."

"Noted."

We raced. Percy crashed seventeen times during the first lap, his body fighting the inputs his brain was generating because the delay between processing and execution remained his fundamental weakness in every context, academic, social, combat, and now recreational. The motorcycle wanted faster decisions than Percy could deliver, and every corner that required commitment before full information was available produced a wall impact and a timer penalty.

I won the first race by eleven seconds.

We raced again. Percy crashed nine times.

I won by seven seconds.

The third race Percy crashed four times, and the crashes had a different quality, a precision to them that suggested Percy was now crashing deliberately at specific corners to test the physics engine’s collision response. His muttering had shifted from anxious to analytical, his lips moving rapidly as he processed the track’s geometry in real time and fed corrections back to his hands with increasing speed.

"The hairpin at sector six requires commitment point four seconds before the visual cue suggests," Percy said without looking away from his screen. "The game rewards early input over accurate input. This is a design philosophy prioritizing action over analysis."

"Welcome to arcade racing."

"I find it philosophically distressing and operationally instructive."

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