The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 513

Chapter 513: 513 | Not Registered For That

The hand never landed.

Something hit Steele from the side with the force of a car. The world turned to light.

Gold. Everywhere. Arcs of it crawling across her vision in threads that snapped and forked and reformed, and the sound came with it, a shriek of displaced air that swallowed everything, the creature and the plaza and her own scream. She was airborne. Her ruined arm slammed against something solid. The pain went white behind her eyes. She almost blacked out, held together only by momentum. Whatever had her was moving too fast for her body to process the damage.

The plaza fell away underneath her.

She saw it in fragments. The crater where the fountain had been. The black fire spilling across tile in rivers that consumed their own light. Nexo’s arm still descending toward a spot on the ground she was no longer occupying. Thatch’s masked head turning to follow her trajectory with something that might have been surprise.

Then stairs. Then a landing.

Concrete met her back. The golden light died around her. Fading strands popped against the air like static.

Steele lay there with her cheek pressed to the floor and tried to make her eyes work.

Someone was crouched over her. Broad through the shoulders, wearing charcoal and amber, and Steele’s brain kept insisting she recognized the shape but refused to attach a name to it. Half the boy’s face was covered by a matte black mask. The other half was streaked with blood from a split eyebrow and coated in whatever the flood zone had been made of. Golden lightning still crawled along his forearms in dying threads, and where it touched the concrete it left small black scorch marks in patterns like frost.

His hair was gold.

The color had bled up from the roots and taken the whole thing, lit from inside, and it faded even as she watched, dimming back toward the dirty blond she had seen every morning at six o’clock for the last three weeks.

Amber eyes. A scar cutting through the left eyebrow.

"Belmont," she said.

The word came out wrong. Her mouth was not cooperating. Blood and concrete dust had turned her tongue into something that belonged to somebody else.

"Hey, Ms. Steele." He was breathing hard. His shoulder sat at an angle that Steele’s twenty years of field medicine flagged as separated, and his ribs had to be broken from the way he held himself, and none of that stopped him from smiling at her under the mask. "You look terrible."

"You are." She had to stop and find air. "You are not registered for that."

"Yeah." He glanced at the last golden thread crawling down his wrist and let it die. "Gonna be a whole conversation later."

Voices behind him. Multiple. Steele tried to turn her head and the world tilted so violently she almost vomited.

"Do not move her." That voice she knew immediately, and it hit her with the sheer wrongness of hearing Petra Lang sound frightened. "Belmont, put your hand back on her shoulder and hold her still. Mendoza, I need the length."

"Fifty-one inches at the shoulder, thirty-eight to the hip crease if we are immobilizing at the pelvis instead of the ankle, which we should be, because the femoral pulse in her right leg is thready and I do not want to guess why. Steele, ma’am, can you feel your toes."

"I can feel." Steele tried to think about her toes. "Some of them."

"That is not a yes."

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