The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 464

Chapter 464: 464 | Resonance Read is a Terrifying Thing [GACHAPON BONUS]

Petra handed it over. Emerald ink. Of course it was emerald ink.

I signed page seven. Then eight, nine, and the two items on twelve that she’d flagged with sticky tabs the exact color of her eyes, which was either coincidence or a level of aesthetic commitment I found genuinely unsettling. My signature looked like it belonged to a person with a functioning life instead of a transmigrant holding a fake registration together with prayer and a butler-adjacent guardian’s federal connections.

"There," I said. "Signed. The Crucible will proceed with correct wool metrics."

Camille snorted. Felicity beamed. Vivienne wrote something on her tablet.

Petra took the planner back and inspected the signatures with the intensity of a jeweler checking for flaws, and when she found none, her expression did something complicated, a flicker of satisfaction chased immediately by the recognition that she now had no procedural reason to stay.

She stayed anyway.

She sat in my reading chair, the one Diane had positioned for optimal spinal alignment and afternoon light, and she crossed her legs, and the cream silk pajama pants pulled taut across her thigh in a way that I noticed and hated noticing and noticed anyway, because Ecchi Logic doesn’t take nights off and reality had decided to angle the light exactly right.

"So," Felicity said, bright and warm and absolutely aware of every current running through the room, "we were playing truth or dare."

The temperature dropped again. Vivienne’s pen paused.

"Were you," Petra said. Flat.

Camille leaned back on her elbows on my bed, brown eyes on Petra, a slow grin spreading across her face that carried the specific energy of someone who’d spent three hours losing a game she didn’t know she was playing and had just been handed reinforcements she didn’t ask for. "Belmont’s shirt was already off. We’d just gotten to the good part."

I closed my eyes for one second. When I opened them nothing had improved.

Petra’s flush started at her collarbone and climbed. She controlled everything about her presentation except that, the one tell she couldn’t manage, the color rising up her throat while her voice stayed perfectly level. "I’m not here to play games."

"You’re here at midnight in silk pajamas," Camille said, "carrying homework you could’ve emailed."

"The brief required a physical signature."

"It required a scanned signature. You wanted an excuse."

The room went very quiet. Felicity’s hand found the sparkling beverage bottle and refilled a glass with the careful movements of someone defusing something. Vivienne set down her tablet, and for the first time since she’d entered, she spoke without being addressed.

"You’re both right," Vivienne said, "and neither of you is going to admit it, and I find that genuinely interesting."

She’d just saved me from the quest without knowing the quest existed.

Or she knew. I genuinely couldn’t tell with her. That was the whole problem with Vivienne Cross.

The System notification pulsed once more, gold and patient, and I did the math again because I’m not smart enough to stop doing math even when the answer is bad. Both willing. Both present when it begins.

Same room.

Except now there were four people in the same room, two of them with no gauge and no interest in participating and one of them with a leather planner and a family that could end my career with a phone call, and the scenario the System had constructed had collapsed under the weight of its own success.

Failure. Forty Defiance Points. I could feel the shape of the cost already, the debuffs waiting eleven days out, and there was a version of me from three weeks ago that would have panicked about it.

That version was gone. That version had died somewhere between a burning building and a conference room and a boardwalk full of people who wanted nothing from me except my company. The version sitting on the bed now looked at forty Defiance Points and thought: fine. Charge it to my account. I’ll pay it in the Crucible, or I’ll pay it in sleep I don’t need, or I’ll take the Penalty Quest when it comes and make it the System’s problem too.

Because the alternative was completing a quest that required me to hurt Sloane in the exact way I’d promised I wouldn’t, in front of witnesses, on a night when the thing I actually wanted was already sitting in the room and it wasn’t sex.