The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 460

Chapter 460: 460 | The Question of Genuineness

I was so cooked.

Not metaphorically cooked, not "oh this is a little inconvenient" cooked, but the kind of cooked where the universe looks at your situation and decides that what you really need right now is a mandatory quest requiring you to sleep with two women who are currently sitting on your bed playing Cards Against Humanity while your girlfriend can feel your emotions in real time through a supernatural bond that neither of you can turn off.

I was staring at a mandatory quest requirement that offered zero room for reinterpretation, zero grace period, zero creative workarounds that turned "physically involved with two women simultaneously" into "had a respectful conversation about personal space while maintaining eye contact."

Forty Defiance Points. The System had listed the number with the kind of finality that suggested the algorithm had run this calculation six times and arrived at the same answer every time.

I processed the implications in the three seconds it took Felicity to select her next white card from the fan in her hand. Forty points on top of my current zero meant I’d hit the first stat debuff threshold at twenty-five. By thirty I’d be operating at reduced capacity in every physical metric the System tracked.

At forty I’d be functionally compromised in any situation requiring coordination, stamina, or the ability to dodge something moving faster than a shopping cart. And at fifty—assuming I somehow managed to refuse my way past forty—I’d trigger a Penalty Quest.

The System’s Penalty Quests were designed by something that thought exclusively in bracketed mission parameters and had never once filed a complaint about participant comfort, social consequences, or the increasingly narrow gap between what I could physically survive and what would destroy every relationship I’d built in the last three months. The interface did not care if I died. It cared if I completed objectives. The difference was academic.

The alternative was obvious, and the alternative was sitting on my bed in matching states of flushed skin and loosened posture while a party game scattered white cards across my sheets like confetti at the worst wedding reception in recorded history.

"Belmont." Camille held up a card. "You’re not paying attention. Felicity just played ’A windmill full of corpses’ on ’What’s that smell?’ and it’s genuinely the funnest thing that’s happened in this room all night and you’re staring at the wall like it insulted your mother."

Felicity tilted her head and the overhead light caught those freckles in a way that made my orbital cortex shut down for a quarter second.

I looked at both of them, one on each side of the scattered cards, Felicity’s bare legs folded beneath her with her white cropped top doing absolutely nothing to conceal the architecture underneath, Camille’s compression leggings painted onto thighs that could crack walnuts and whose tank top had been slowly migrating southward all evening through a combination of movement and what I was now ninety percent certain was the Ecchi Logic trait deciding that gravity should operate differently on fabric within a six-foot radius of my body.

"New game," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"I’m bored of cards."

Felicity’s eyebrows rose. "You were losing."

"I was strategically disengaging from a contest whose scoring metrics no longer served my objectives."

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