The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 534

Chapter 534: 534 | The Name Underneath [CASTLE BONUS]

There was no ceiling.

That was the first thing I noticed, and I noticed it the way you notice you’ve slept through your alarm, which is to say with a low background dread that hadn’t figured out its own reason yet. No ceiling. No walls. Just a sea of light blue in every direction, the color of shallow water over white sand, the color of a sky that had never once considered raining.

I was floating.

Not metaphorically. Not the way you float when the drugs are good and the pain is somewhere in another building. Actually floating, weightless, arms drifting out from my sides like I’d been dropped into the calmest ocean in existence and someone had forgotten to tell gravity where I’d gone.

Great. Cool. Excellent. My body was probably a smoking crater in a hospital bed and my brain had decided to file me somewhere with better lighting.

I tried to sit up. There was no up. That should have bothered me more than it did.

The blue went on forever, and the longer I looked at it the less it felt like empty space and the more it felt like something looking back. Not a face. Not a voice. A weight of attention, patient in a way that raised the hair on the back of a neck I couldn’t currently feel.

"If this is where the System actually lives," I said, and my voice came out clean and unhurt in a way that told me none of this was real, "I want to file a complaint about the commute."

Nothing answered. But the blue shifted. Like light bending underwater when something big and ancient passes overhead, casting its shadow before you ever see its shape. For half a second, maybe less, I felt it.

Recognition.

Not the System recognizing me. Something older. Something that had known what I was before the System ever slapped its ugly bracket notation across my vision and started charging me rent for the privilege of existing in a world where I shouldn’t have fit.

I’d had this feeling exactly once before. I’d buried it so fast I’d almost convinced myself it hadn’t happened.

The night I woke up in Lukas Belmont’s bed. Before the notifications arrived. Before the Temptation Gauge. Before any of it. That first raw second of consciousness in a body that wasn’t mine, where I’d reached for a name and found two waiting.

The one everybody in Verano knew. Lukas. The orphaned kid. The Unmarked one. The dead hero couple’s son who didn’t inherit anything.

And underneath it, buried so deep I’d stopped digging the moment I realized there was something to dig for, another one. Older. Salt and bronze and a sun that hung different in the sky. A name that felt like it had weight, like it had history, like it had been shouted across distances that mattered and answered every single time.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify