The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 526

Chapter 526: 526 | The Cost of a Miracle [GT BONUS]

The stamina bar was gone.

I noticed that first. Not gone in the sense that it had emptied and was waiting to refill, but gone in the sense that the interface had stopped rendering it entirely, like the System had looked at the math and decided there was no point in showing me a negative number. The Demigod recovery rate was still processing somewhere in the background, doing its slow patient work, but something structural in my chest refused to cooperate with the rebuild and the golden light that had erupted from my back when I took Silas’s fire was completely spent. Burned to nothing.

I was aware of the following things in sequence: the pain, which arrived as a comprehensive inventory rather than a single spike. The floor, which was tile and broken and very cold under my cheek. Sloane’s hand on my face, her palm warm and her fingers shaking. The specific quality of silence that follows violence when nobody has won and everyone is too tired to pretend otherwise.

Breathing hurt.

I filed that observation under problems I could not solve in the next sixty seconds and moved it to the back of the queue. My ribs made their objection known and I told them to get in line behind my shoulder, which had separated completely at some point during the Silas exchange and was now hanging at an angle that my brain kept trying to process as wrong and my body kept confirming was extremely, painfully correct.

Sloane’s thumb moved across my cheekbone.

"Stop moving," she said.

Her voice had gone flat and hard in the way it went when she was terrified and refusing to acknowledge it. I could feel her through the bond, a constant pressure in my chest that sat adjacent to all the other pressures and somehow made them more bearable. She was scared. She was furious. She was counting my breaths the way you count seconds on a timer, and the fear underneath the fury tasted like copper.

"Not moving," I managed.

My voice came out rough and torn. Talking hurt almost as much as breathing, which was impressive considering breathing was already filing complaints with management.

Percy’s voice crackled through the channel.

"Headcount," he said.

His tone was flat and precise in the way that meant he had been holding himself together through data for the past forty minutes and intended to keep doing so because the alternative was not useful to anyone. I could hear the notebook. The pen scratching against paper in the background, steady and relentless.

"Kennedy."

"Here." Maribelle’s voice, soft and steady.

"Ashida."

"Present." Ren sounded exhausted.

"Vale."

"Yeah." Rocco, quiet for once.

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