The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 512

Chapter 512: 512 | The Last Thing You Say

Steele’s voice cracked on the name.

She ran toward where Dravid lay motionless on his side with one arm bent underneath him and his grey eyes half-open and unfocused. Blood pooled beneath his head from a gash across his temple that had split wide on impact, and when Steele dropped to her knees beside him and grabbed his shoulder his eyes tracked toward her face but did not seem to recognize what they were seeing.

"Cole, talk to me."

"My cane." His voice came out slurred, the words catching on teeth that did not quite line up correctly. "It broke."

"I know your cane broke, you need to stay with me."

"It was a good cane. I ordered it from Vermont."

Steele pressed her working hand against the wound on his temple and tried to slow the bleeding. Her right arm hung useless at her side. She could not apply enough pressure with one hand to make any meaningful difference. Cole’s breathing came shallow and rapid, his chest hitching on every inhale. When she looked down she saw his shirt was darker on the left side where Nexo’s knuckles had caved in his ribs. The fabric clung to the depression. She could see the outline of broken architecture underneath.

"You are going to be fine." She was lying and they both knew it. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Help is coming."

"The students." Cole’s eyes finally focused on her face. His pupils were uneven. "Check the channel."

Steele had forgotten the channel existed.

She keyed it with her working hand. Forty voices shouted over each other in a cacophony that made parsing individual words impossible. Someone was crying. Someone else was demanding a headcount.

A third voice was asking whether the structural integrity of the training hall was compromised and whether they should evacuate to the secondary rally point. Underneath the chaos Percy Mendoza’s voice cut through with the steady cadence of someone reading a grocery list.

His words arrived in the spaces between everyone else’s panic.

"All students confirmed on comms. Orion Valentine is en route to the surface to flag down emergency responders. ETA for Halloran response is fifteen minutes if Valentine reaches the access road, twenty minutes if he encounters resistance."

Four minutes.

Steele looked down at Cole bleeding on the tile and then up at Thatch walking toward them with black fire crawling between his fingers and Nexo following behind with its horrible biomechanically impossible stride.

She could not hold them both for four minutes.

She had barely held them for forty seconds when she still had two working arms and Cole Dravid standing beside her with Suppress running at full output. Now she had one arm, blurred vision from whatever the fire had done to the nerves in her burned limb, and a partner who thought his cane was the primary casualty of this engagement.

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