The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 522

Chapter 522: 522 | Six Inches from Forever [GT BONUS]

Maribelle already had her palm flat on the chest of a masked man who had made the mistake of standing near her, and whatever she was murmuring, his knees were going out from under him. Her tail was flicking hard enough to count as a threat display. Her gold eyes came up and found me across sixty feet of ruined plaza and she made a face at my shoulder that I did not care for.

"Belmont, your arm is at the wrong angle."

"I’m aware."

"No, I mean it’s giving me a personal problem."

"Kennedy, hold the corridor."

Percy’s voice threaded under all of it on the channel, steady, running numbers, doing the one thing nobody else in this building can do while people are on fire. Six minutes fourteen. Network response confirmed inbound. Rocco Vale relocated to sublevel two. Valentine has flagged down two licensed responders at the perimeter and they are cutting the northwest breach wider.

Six minutes.

That was the entire assignment. Not win. Not kill. Not be spectacular in front of a woman with static in her hair who had told me to save people and let her handle the conversations afterward.

Six minutes of nobody dying.

We were going to make it, and I let myself think that, which was stupid.

Because Thatch stopped being amused.

I saw it happen. Forty feet, Hiro’s light on everything, and I watched the fascination drain out of that boy’s face like water out of a cracked basin, and what filled the space behind it was worse than rage. It was the look of a man who has just remembered why he was sent, and who is not looking forward to what remembering will cost him.

The tapping stopped entirely.

His fire changed register. It had been sprawling before, ropes and gouts and lakes of it, theater for the cameras that the Twilight Society had gone to enormous expense to install. Now it pulled in tight against his forearms and got hotter, the black going somehow blacker, the edges of it going clean and thin and shaped like a decision.

"You’re all doing very well," he said, and his voice had lost the tremor. "I’d like that on the record. Genuinely."

Then he turned toward Sloane.

I understood it instantly, and I hated how good it was.

Nine years. Nine years of somebody building a tactical read into a boy who was never taught to care about the people he was reading. He had watched the five of us for six minutes and he had correctly identified that Hiro’s light could be replaced, that Felicity’s paint could be waited out, that Camille could be outlasted, and that I was already a dead battery propped up by spite.

Sloane was the structure. Sloane was the one who had not moved off my flank once in six minutes, who was managing the creature’s entire pathing with tight bursts into tile, who had blown past her documented six-charge ceiling somewhere around ten and had kept going without slowing down.

Take out the structure and the rest of it collapses in four seconds.

"Sloane," I said.

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