The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 517

Chapter 517: 517 | Patient Arithmetic [GT BONUS]

Nexo moved.

The single most terrifying part was how slow it was.

Fast I could have handled. Fast meant someone trying, and trying meant they could fail. This thing walked like it was crossing a parking lot after a long shift, unhurried, certain. One foot down, then the other, that asymmetric gait where the longer arm dragged along the tile and left a gouge that screamed against the stone. Its joints bent backward on the upswing before correcting on the plant with a wet crack that had no business coming from something without cartilage.

Crunch. Crunch.

Lightning Cloak flared hot up my arms. Golden current wrapped my forearms and crawled toward my shoulders in jagged threads, and the air tasted of ozone before the dust choked it out.

Thirty-eight feet between me and the thing. Eleven minutes on the clock. The stamina bar sat at twenty-two percent because I’d spent the morning getting thrown through walls by Petra, and now I was about to burn what was left of it on something I couldn’t beat in a straight fight. The alternative was standing still and letting a twelve-foot horror flatten me in front of forty students and two teachers who hadn’t signed up to watch me die today.

Blitz.

Distance collapsed. I hit the far side of the plaza before my brain caught up to my legs and spun around, certain Nexo would already be turning to follow.

It wasn’t.

Its longer arm was already where I’d been standing half a heartbeat ago, fingers spread, palm flat against the tile I’d vacated. The arm lifted, dragging through the space with that same patient arithmetic, and the head tilted once. Not tracking where I was. Tracking where I was going to be.

My stomach dropped.

This thing does not have an Aspect. It has a nature. There is no Core to suppress and no signature the System can read. The Oracle Feed delivered that with the flat brevity of someone who had run out of better news to share. Recommendation: do not be where it is.

"Fantastic advice," I muttered, and Nexo started walking again. Same pace, same stride, twenty feet and closing with the confidence of something that had been told to kill and had never once failed.

I couldn’t fight this. Steele had hit it three times at full output and moved it six feet. Dravid’s Suppress, strong enough to strip a Branded down to baseline biology, had done nothing because there was nothing in it to nullify. This wasn’t a power. This was just what it was, and punching through it would be like punching through gravity.

Terrain, then. I had a plaza full of broken tile and a staff I could barely lift, and twelve minutes of not dying to survive while this thing migrated toward me with the certainty of continental drift.

Spectral Reach flared from my left hand. Three amber constructs snapped into shape and hauled a slab of concrete the size of a couch between us. Nexo walked through it. Not around it. Through it. The longer arm punched clean through the center and the rest of the body followed, rebar bending aside, concrete parting like water, and it came out the other side without slowing.

I filed that away and tried something else.

If it read where I was going before I moved, maybe it was reading the wrong thing. I planted my weight hard toward the east colonnade, shoulders committing to the turn, and Nexo’s head swung that direction on cue. Then I cut west instead, no Blitz, just my own legs, betting everything on the half second it would take to correct.

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