The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 510

Chapter 510: 510 | A Collision of Concepts

The word arrived with heat. Actual, physical heat that rolled across the plaza and made Steele’s exposed skin prickle. The fire did not behave like fire. It curled inward, seeking Thatch’s own face before dissipating against his cheekbones, and the scarring around his eyes blazed bright enough to throw shadows across his mask.

"Who." The word came out flat, killed of everything except the question.

"Unknown. Three candidates in the sublevel, one of whom demonstrated a sensory Aspect consistent with a Class One Channeler specializing in hard-light constructs. The jammer’s power stage remains active but the broadcast array has been physically severed. Coax line, clean cut, single projectile. The work was professional."

Steele’s brain ran the arithmetic before Thatch finished processing it. Three candidates in the sublevel. A sensory Aspect. A clean projectile cut on a coax line. She knew exactly who had fired that shot and she felt a swell of pride so ferocious it burned worse than her collarbone.

Thatch’s hands opened and closed at his sides, and each time they opened, black flame licked between the fingers and vanished. The four-beat rhythm was gone. Whatever replaced it came faster and uglier and carried no pattern at all.

"If you were not our ticket out of this dome," he said to the speaker, and the temperature rose four degrees in the space of the sentence, "I would burn you to a fucking crisp."

The butler’s voice came back untroubled. "Your frustration is noted, young master."

"Noted." Thatch laughed, and the laugh had edges. "Noted. She cut the line. One of them found it and cut it and now every Hero in California is going to know exactly where we are and what is in this room with them."

"The extraction protocol accommodates accelerated timelines."

"It accommodates nothing! It accommodates a schedule that assumed we would have Radiant on the floor and the building sealed for another twelve minutes!" The tapping came back, both hands now, fingertips striking the seams of his coat with the speed of a pianist whose recital had gone horribly wrong. "No matter."

He turned toward Steele and Dravid with the burn scars still glowing and the fire licking at the corners of his mouth.

"No matter," he said again, quieter. "We might as well take out some pro Heroes and students before we leave."

Steele felt the temperature spike before she saw the fire.

Black flame erupted from both of Thatch’s palms, not projected but exhaled, pouring from his hands and wrists and forearms in ropes of lightless heat that carved the air apart. The fire did not illuminate. It consumed illumination. Where it passed, the red emergency lighting simply stopped, swallowed into something that burned at temperatures the plaza’s tile could not survive. The concrete beneath Thatch’s feet began to glow cherry red and then white and then nothing at all, because the fire ate the glow too.

Steele moved left. Dravid moved right. They had never discussed this particular division and they did not need to discuss it now.

A rope of black fire whipped across the space where Steele had been standing and punched through the fountain’s remaining pedestal. The stone did not shatter. It melted. Liquid concrete ran down the crater walls in sluggish orange rivers that hissed where they met the standing water.

"The students," Dravid said through the earpiece. One sentence. No inflection. The entire operational briefing.

Steele understood. They could not win this fight. They had not been winning it when the creature was the only threat and they were certainly not winning it now with a fire-based Aspect user whose output exceeded anything in the documented S-class threat database and a biological nightmare that shrugged off Legendary-tier kinetic events and did not possess a suppressible power.

The job was not to win. The job was to keep the fire and the monster pointed at them instead of at forty teenagers scattered across a sealed dome.

She ran.

Not at Thatch. At the space between Thatch and the corridor where Steele’s channel had just confirmed twenty-two students were still breathing. She put herself in the gap and let Bom Ba Ye build, and the charge sang through her legs and hips and spine with the familiar promise that forward was the only viable direction and everything she had committed would arrive at the point she aimed at.

Thatch sent two more ropes of black fire toward the corridor.

Steele hit both of them.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify