The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 498

Chapter 498: 498 | When The Powerhouse Shakes [CASTLE BONUS]

Camille’s grin came up slow and infuriating. "Wow, so you can be nice."

"Don’t."

"Fitzgerald just complimented us," Felicity said, and she said it to nobody in particular, and she said it loud, and she was clearly logging it somewhere for future use. "That’s going in the group chat. Not today. But eventually."

"There is no group chat."

"There’s a group chat, bestie."

Sloane dragged a hand down her face and reminded herself that killing your allies during a live incursion looked bad on the record.

"Okay." She jabbed a finger toward the far door. "Substation’s through there. The shutters are on a hard mechanical lockdown, which means somebody’s overriding the release from inside the building. Comms are jammed the same way. Probably the same person doing both. We find them, we unjam the system, the entire California Hero Network shows up in under five minutes, and this stops being our problem."

"And if it’s not the same person?" Camille dropped off the crate and landed easy, orange still flickering at her fingertips like embers refusing to die.

"Then we hit two people instead of one."

"I like her plan," Felicity said, sounding genuinely pleased about it. "It’s very simple. Very direct. It’s giving Sloane."

"I will detonate you."

"You will not, bestie, you literally would never. You’re all bark and we both know it. Lukas told me."

Sloane stopped walking.

The heat that went up the back of her neck was so immediate and so total that her Aspect activated twice at her hip without permission. Tiny amber cracks scorched the floor tile. She felt the residual charge buzz in her thighs and did absolutely nothing productive with the information.

"He did not say that."

"He absolutely said that. Word for word. He was like, she gets loud but she’s—" Felicity’s face did something soft and unbearable and completely genuine. "Anyway. He’s very sweet about you. The way he talks about you is actually kind of unfair. Like he thinks you’re—"

"Shut up."

"Making a note," Camille said, and she said it with the precision of someone logging ammunition for later. "Fitzgerald goes pink at the ears when you say Belmont’s name. Filing that for tactical use."

"Both of you shut up. We are in combat."

She got moving before either of them could see her face properly, which meant she was walking point now, which meant she was walking point in a building full of people who had come here specifically to hurt her friends. She found she was completely fine with that. The part of her that wanted to blow something up had plenty of targets and no confusion about which direction to face.

Not her thoughts. Her body. Her spine, her gut, the base of her skull where fear lived before language had a name for it. The six-year-old who had manifested Detonation in her mother’s kitchen because she got scared and couldn’t hold it in. That part of her went off all at once, louder than it had in years, and told her to turn around, get out of this building, and never think about that shape again.

Her hands were shaking. Sloane Fitzgerald’s hands did not shake.

"Oh," Felicity breathed. All of the brightness had drained out of her voice and what was left was very small and very young. "Oh, no. No, that’s not, that’s not a person, right? Tell me that’s not."

Camille said nothing.

That was worse than anything Camille could have said.

Sloane looked down at that plaza, at the thing with the horns and the black writing on its bones, and every calculation she had ever run about her own ceiling collapsed into a single flat number.

If that turned on, she died.

She hated that thought. She had never had that thought about anything in her life.

The bond gave a small pull in her chest, southeast, three hundred meters, warm and stubborn and still there.

"Comms," she said. Her voice came out steadier than it had any right to. "We fix the comms. Right now. Before that thing wakes up."