The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 519

Chapter 519: 519 | Make It Weird [GT BONUS]

The northwest wall came apart in a spray of masonry and superheated dust, and through the gap came the single most terrifying thing I had ever been genuinely happy to see.

Sloane hit the plaza at a dead sprint with amber cracking off her knuckles in strobing pulses, her pink hair torn loose from its tie and plastered flat to one side of her face, her hero suit scorched through at the left hip where something had gotten close enough to try. Behind her, Felicity slid down a section of collapsed ramp on the side of one platform boot with the poise of a person who had practiced falling as a fashion statement. Camille came off the ramp differently, both palms already burning that hot construction-cone orange, dropping the last eight feet and landing in a crouch that put four hairline fractures in the tile.

And under Sloane’s right arm, tucked against her ribs like a duffel bag she had decided was hers, was a middle-aged man in a soaked facilities polo who had absolutely no business being anywhere near this fight.

She had carried him. Out of a room filling with smoke, up two levels, through a hole she made herself, she had carried the man who sold all forty of our names to the people currently trying to kill us, because leaving him would have meant letting him die and she had apparently decided that wasn’t happening today.

I love her. That’s the whole thought. There’s nothing clever underneath it.

Sloane set Wes Prentiss down against a support column with a shove that was gentler than her face suggested, and then she looked up and found me on the floor with twelve feet of white wrongness standing over my skull.

The Bond Resonance detonated inside my chest.

It came through in one continuous wave that had no words in it, only pressure, and the pressure said mine and hurt and no in a register that made my ribs ache worse than the actual broken ribs. She felt every part of my condition in real time. Four percent stamina, separated shoulder, blood in my mouth, the specific mathematical certainty that I had nine minutes left and no way to fill them. She got all of it at once, the entire inventory, and she did not stop moving for even a fraction of a second.

She didn’t scream my name either. That’s the part people always get wrong about Sloane Fitzgerald. When she’s loud she’s fine. When she goes silent, somebody’s about to have a very bad afternoon.

She closed the distance in five strides and put a fully charged Detonation into Nexo’s flank.

BWOOM.

The sound was physical. It slapped across the plaza and came back off the dome ceiling and the pressure wave rolled over me where I lay, and Nexo staggered. Two steps. Sideways.

Not hurt. Moved. Which was two steps more than Steele had managed with three full charges, and I lay there on the broken tile doing math with a concussion and arrived at a number I liked.

Sloane didn’t admire her own work. She was already chaining into the second strike, same spot, same angle, driving her palm into the identical seam of black banding on the creature’s flank with her shoulder behind it. BWOOM. Third. BWOOM. Fourth, and this one came in low with her whole body rotating through the hips the way Diane’s coaches had spent nine years and a small fortune teaching her, and the tile under her boots cratered from the reaction force.

Her ceiling was six detonations. Six, hard stop, since she was fifteen, verified, tested, documented in three separate prep-program assessments.

She was on nine and her hands were getting brighter.

I felt her notice it through the bond, the surprise landing under the fury without slowing it, and I made a mental note that when we got out of here there was going to be a conversation about the Claimed buff and permanent output ceilings and my ongoing failure to mention certain mechanics, and that she was going to be correct in that conversation, and that I was going to lose it badly.

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