The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 452

Chapter 452: 452 | Tonkotsu and Telepathic Requests

The arcade fell quiet for a full second. Caden’s grin shifted from performative to real in a way that rearranged his entire face. Marco stopped choking. Finn, who had at some point entered the arcade and was now sitting on top of a broken Pac-Man cabinet with his threads drifting in the climate-controlled air, opened one eye and said "Good man" in a voice that carried more weight than two words should have been able to support.

Percy blinked. His ears turned pink. His pen stopped moving for the first time in eleven minutes.

Eden collected his tickets and announced his intention to redeem them for the largest available plush toy, which he would deliver to Maribelle because Maribelle liked soft things and because giving her a present would produce the exact reaction he was imagining and because imagining that reaction was making him flick his lighter at a rate of approximately four clicks per second, which was two clicks above his documented baseline.

We spent three hours at VOLTAGE. Caden dominated the air hockey table and lost catastrophically at a fighting game where the stick operated on a three-second delay that his Refract-trained reaction time could not compensate for. Marco found a disc-shaped bumper hockey puck at the bottom of a prize bin and channeled an energy disk into it, sending it across the air hockey table at a velocity that cracked the surface and prompted a staff member to approach with an expression that communicated both concern and resignation. Eden accumulated enough tickets to redeem a plush bear the size of a small child and carried it under one arm with zero self-consciousness for the remainder of the day.

Finn won a single game of Skee-Ball without appearing to try, using threads nobody could see to adjust the trajectory of his final ball by approximately two degrees, converting a forty-point landing into a fifty-point landing that nobody could prove was anything other than remarkable skill. Percy watched this happen and wrote three pages in his notebook without blinking.

At twelve-thirty we found the ramen shop Caden had originally planned around, a narrow establishment two blocks from the boardwalk with a hand-painted sign and a line of four people that suggested the food was good enough to wait for but not yet famous enough to require a reservation. The interior held eight seats at a counter facing an open kitchen where a man in his sixties worked with the specific efficiency of someone who had been making the same four broths for longer than any of us had been alive.

I ordered tonkotsu. The first sip confirmed that the broth had been simmering for approximately twelve hours and that the man behind the counter understood something about pork bones that most people would never access. The noodles had the right resistance, the chashu melted against the tongue, and the egg had been marinated in soy and mirin until the yolk turned the colour of sunset.

Percy sat beside me and ate miso ramen with the concentration he applied to everything, breaking the experience into component flavours and textures and documenting each in his notebook between bites. His blue hair fell across his forehead while he wrote, and at one point he paused mid-sentence with his pen hovering over the page and said "The dashi base uses two types of kombu" without looking up, then continued writing.

Caden and Marco occupied the far end of the counter and argued about whether the spicy option was actually spicy or merely warm, a debate that involved Marco eating Caden’s portion and declaring it insufficient while Caden stole Marco’s gyoza in retaliation, a transaction they executed with the practiced fluidity of people who had been sharing food and stealing from each other since the habit had predated the ability to articulate it.

Eden ate three bowls and asked the chef if he could absorb the residual heat from the broth. The chef looked at Eden for four seconds and then placed a fourth bowl in front of him without charging for it, a gesture that communicated respect for appetite in a language that required no translation.

Finn ate half a bowl and spent the rest of the meal with his eyes closed and his fingers threading invisible patterns between the counter and the wall, comfortable in the way that Finn was always comfortable, which was to say present without demanding that the world acknowledge his presence.

My phone buzzed at one-fifteen.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify