The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 516

Chapter 516: 516 | The Gap Goes to Hell

Three weeks of holding back. Three weeks of running the middle of the pack, of solving problems clever so I’d never have to solve them hard, of respecting the fifteen-foot leash and the twenty-pound ceiling on a registration Diane wrote and Percy fortified and Petra signed her whole family name under. Three weeks of being a mid-tier Channeler who quotes literature on television. Odette wanted me to stop building evidence against myself. Dravid told me the gap wasn’t sustainable.

The gap could go to hell. This was life and death and there was a teacher on the ground not moving and another one about to be, and I had spent every day of this cover story terrified of the moment someone found out what I actually was, and it turns out when the moment comes you don’t feel terrified at all. You feel free.

Lightning Cloak ate the distance. I hit the plaza floor with the whole coat of golden light crawling across my skin, and I got under Steele’s arms, and the monster’s swing came around to finish her and I was eight feet left of where it thought I’d be. The arm shattered a railing. I hauled Steele against my chest and moved, and black fire chased me and did not catch me, and I got her up the stairs and onto the landing.

She was breathing. Shallow, wrong, uneven pupils. But breathing.

Then I went back for Dravid.

And a notification bloomed at the edge of my vision, gold-bordered, pulsing with the specific weight the System saves for things it considers non-negotiable.

MAIN QUEST: SURVIVE.

That was it. No parameters. No bonus objectives. No cute little bracketed commentary about my life choices. Just the one word and a timer underneath it counting down from twelve minutes, which meant the Network response window Percy had promised was real and the only thing standing between right now and licensed professionals was seven hundred and twenty seconds of me not dying.

I could work with twelve minutes. I’d done stupider things with less.

The masked kid down on the plaza tilted his head up at me. Silver-grey eyes ringed with clean burn scars. Black hair he’d stopped fighting years ago. His leg bounced in a four-beat rhythm against nothing, and the black fire crawled between his fingers, and when he spoke his voice had this hollow polished quality, like someone had scooped everything human out of it and buffed what was left.

"That’s some aspect you’ve got." He almost sounded delighted. "Really. I’ve been standing here for four minutes and I have not seen anything move like that. The speed, the coat, the strength. That is not on your paper. I read your paper." His head tilted the other way. "I truly hate to be the one who cuts a promising hero career short, but you understand the position I’m in. Schedule slipped. Someone found the interlock. Everyone in this dome has now seen the asset, which means everyone in this dome is a witness, and my employer feels strongly about witnesses."

"Shut the fuck up."

He blinked. It’s the most human thing he’d done since I laid eyes on him.

"I’m serious." I planted my feet on the tile and let the gold build hotter across my forearms even though every second of Lightning Cloak was carving into a stamina bar already sitting at twenty percent. "You’ve been down here running your mouth this whole time and I’m gonna be real with you, I’ve had a genuinely terrible morning. I got dropped in a flood. My jacket is ruined. I broke a woman’s four arms and I did not enjoy it as much as I usually would. And now you’re up here monologuing at me like I’m gonna stand still and let you deliver it."

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