The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 538

Chapter 538: 538 | Off the Record

I looked at Juno Mak eating a granola bar at the foot of my hospital bed at two in the morning and ran the math on what honesty cost versus what lying bought me at this particular moment.

The lying math was simple. I maintain the Category Seven fiction, Juno treats me according to a Rare-tier Channeler’s recovery protocol, and the interventions either do nothing useful or actively interfere with whatever my body has decided to do on its own. Nobody learns anything dangerous. I heal slower than I should. The gap between my chart and my flesh sits in the file gathering dust until the next time someone with Juno’s attention to detail opens it and asks the same question in a less charitable environment.

The honesty math was worse. I tell Juno what I am, she builds a protocol that actually works, and one more person in the world carries a piece of information that could unravel everything Diane built, everything Percy fortified, everything Petra signed her family name beneath.

Except Juno hadn’t asked what I was. She’d asked which medical explanation applied to her observations. That distinction mattered in the same way it mattered when Dravid asked me to explain the gap and I’d answered in tactical theory rather than confession. There existed a space between truth and disclosure where a careful person could stand indefinitely, and I had been standing in that space for three months with increasing foot traffic.

"Off the record," I said.

Juno’s pen stopped moving. Her dark eyes settled on mine with the perpetual half-lidded attention that could pass for boredom or surgical focus depending on which outcome you were hoping for. "I don’t have a record. I have a treatment chart. Treatment charts are medical documentation protected under patient confidentiality statutes that I could explain to you in detail if you want me to waste both our time."

"She means yes," Diane translated from her chair, her drawl softened to the register she used at home when the blazers came off and the opinions came out.

Juno unwrapped the second half of her granola bar.

I looked at the ceiling. The ceiling had no opinions about my Aspect classification and offered nothing but fluorescent panels and a water stain in the corner that resembled a rabbit if you squinted. The ceiling was useless, which made it the most trustworthy surface in the room.

"I don’t know how it works."

Juno chewed.

"My body heals faster than it should. Significantly faster. I can’t turn it off, I can’t modulate it, and I didn’t ask for it." I let the words land flat because flat was honest and anything else would sound rehearsed. "The burns are going to close on their own regardless of what you do. The ribs will knit in days rather than weeks. The shoulder is the worst of it and even that’s going to resolve faster than your chart can account for."

"How much faster."

"I’ve never broken ribs before so I don’t have a baseline, but cuts that should take a week close in a day. Bruises that should last five days gone by morning. The morning conditioning sessions with Steele leave marks that my body processes overnight so I show up looking fresh and everyone assumes I’m just running on caffeine and spite."

Sloane’s grip on my gown loosened by one degree. Through the bond I felt her shift from protective fury into something quieter, a listening quality that meant she was absorbing information she would process later at volume.

Juno wrote three lines in her chart without pausing. "Poison resistance?"

"Tested incidentally. Full immunity to at least one documented neurotoxin that should have dropped me for forty minutes. Felt like a warm bath."

"Disease?"

"Never been sick since manifestation. Not once. Not even a cold."

Juno’s pen tapped twice against the chart. "And you genuinely don’t know the mechanism."

This was the part where lying and truth occupied the same sentence. I genuinely did not know the mechanism by which the Demigod trait operated at a biological level.

The System had installed it during a platinum pull and provided a description involving multiplicative bonuses and recovery rates and existential reclassification, but nowhere in that description had it explained how my cells actually accomplished the things the trait demanded of them.

The System said what. The System never said how.

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