The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 515

Chapter 515: 515 | Fuck It

A FEW MINUTES EARLIER

"I don’t like rain," I said, hauling Rina’s arm over my shoulder because her legs had stopped agreeing to hold her up somewhere around the fourth wave of masked guys. "It’s wet, it’s cold, and it gets into everything. Your boots. Your cloak. Your hair." I looked down at the ruined amber accent lines on my jacket, the ones Diane had picked out specifically so I’d photograph well, now hanging in shredded threads and soaked through. "My jacket’s ruined now. This was a gift. Do you understand the emotional weight of that."

Rina, who had watched me take a force wall through a pharmacy and get up, who had watched me break four arms on a screaming woman, who had every reason to think I was insane, patted my chest with a wet pink glove.

"It’s okay," she whispered. Her horns dripped. Her tail hung limp and heavy behind her, waterlogged into a sad rope. "You did really good."

That was the thing about Rina. She meant it. She’d spent the whole fight convinced her Aspect made her a monster and she still had the reserves to console me about outerwear.

Suki, standing on Ren’s floating stone platform with her notebook held over her head to keep it dry, nodded once. Solemn. Like the jacket mattered. Which, honestly, in that specific moment, I appreciated more than I can say.

"See, Suki gets it." I adjusted Rina’s weight. "You two are the only ones who respect the aesthetic tragedy here."

Koda, wringing water out of her undercut ten feet away with the enthusiasm of someone who’d punched a man’s sternum concave and enjoyed it, snorted. "Your fashion sense is not the biggest problem right now, Belmont."

"Everything is a problem right now. I’m choosing to focus on the one I can fix by buying a new jacket."

The comm at my collar crackled. It had been dead the whole fight, jammed to static, and then it wasn’t, and Percy’s voice came through it clean and steady and running numbers like the world wasn’t ending.

"Belmont, if you can hear me, I have you at sublevel two, flood sector, and I am now counting you as accounted for. That is twenty-three. I need a status on Soleil, Tanaka, Ashida, Reyes, and Brynn."

I grinned into the rain. "Percy Mendoza. You beautiful bastard."

A tiny sound came from under my arm. I glanced down. Rina had gone pink across the cheekbones at the sound of Percy’s voice through the speaker, a soft flush that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the blue-haired kid who timed the acoustics of her laugh. She caught me looking and buried her face against my shoulder, which did not un-pink her ears.

Noted. Filed. Absolutely delighted about it and saving it for later.

"All present," I said into the comm. "All ambulatory except Soleil, who’s running on empty. Nobody bleeding out. Nobody dead."

"Copy. Twenty-seven now." A pause I recognized, the one where his brain got ahead of his mouth. "Lukas. The evacuation model changed. I need you at the main entrance, upper landing, as fast as you can move without dropping anyone."

"Changed how."

"Faster than I can explain over comms."

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