The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 463

Chapter 463: 463 | The Floor Under the Scumbag’s Path [CASTLE BONUS]

Page seven. Environmental compatibility grids for the flooded sublevels. Petra said it like it was the most natural request in the world, like there weren’t three other people arranged around me in various states of undress and interruption, like the sake bottle sweating a ring into my nightstand was a decorative choice.

I love how the universe operates.

You spend three weeks holding a lie together with insurance loopholes and federal favors, you finally get one clean evening of card games and warm skin and a girl’s laugh vibrating against your ribs, and the moment your body relaxes enough to enjoy it, four women fill your seven-hundred-fifty-square-foot apartment and the System drops a mandatory quest that would require me to be in two contradictory relationships with the same eight hours.

I took the planner. Read page seven. Didn’t absorb a single word of it.

"The grids look fine," I said.

Petra’s pen stopped moving. "You didn’t read them."

"I read the shape of them. They’re good grids."

Felicity made a sound into her sparkling beverage that was almost a laugh, and Camille shifted her weight on my bed, the mattress dipping under her hip, and I felt the warmth of her leg return against mine as she settled back into the position she’d claimed before Petra’s knock rearranged the entire atmosphere.

Vivienne watched me from the desk chair with those clear green eyes, and I understood with cold specificity that she’d already read the room in a way that had nothing to do with sight.

Her Resonance Read pulled emotional signatures out of everyone within ten feet, and there were three people within ten feet radiating things I very much did not want catalogued.

Sloane hummed at the edge of my awareness across campus, warm and settled and blissfully unaware that her boyfriend was currently the center point of a geometry problem with too many contact surfaces.

"There’s a discrepancy," Vivienne said. Her voice landed measured, each word chosen instead of assembled. "Sublevel two. You flagged Rina Soleil as high compatibility for the flooded environment because her wool displaces water. But you didn’t account for the fact that her wool loses tensile integrity past a certain saturation threshold. It works until it doesn’t, and when it fails, it fails all at once."

Petra turned toward her. "That’s in the appendix."

"It’s in the appendix as a footnote. It should be in the grid." Vivienne tilted her tablet toward Petra without breaking eye contact with me. "The difference matters when someone’s making a call under a two-hundred-forty-second clock and reads a green cell instead of a footnote."

I liked Vivienne Cross. That was the problem with almost everyone in this building. They were too smart to dismiss and too interesting to ignore, and every one of them came attached to complications I wasn’t equipped to price.

"She’s right," Petra said, and the concession cost her something visible, a tightening at the corner of her mouth. She made a note in emerald ink.

Camille leaned toward me, and her voice dropped into the low register she’d been using since she came out of the bathroom a changed woman with a plan I hadn’t decoded yet. "So this is what class reps do," she said. "Argue about wool at midnight."

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