The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 571

Chapter 571: 571 | Cocky Is What She’s Looking For

Sloane went the specific kind of red that meant her Aspect might start popping around the kitchen, so I decided to end the war before she took out the pizza boxes. I dropped the cheese slice back onto the empty tray and held up both hands.

"Truce," I said.

"You started it."

"I threw cheese back. You started it."

"You called me second-highest in my field."

"You are second-highest in your field."

Diane made a small sound that she disguised as clearing her throat, and Sloane turned the glare on her instead of me, which felt like a strategic victory. I ate the last slice of my meat pizza and let the two of them argue about whether the vegetable pizza counted as a real pizza or a salad with delusions of grandeur, and for a while nothing existed except a warm kitchen and two women who wanted me around for reasons I still hadn’t fully earned.

I circled back to it when I let myself, which was a controlled activity I rationed more carefully than gacha pulls. The System had built the scaffolding. Sloane’s gauge climbing without intervention. Diane’s gauge ticking upward at a rate she probably wasn’t tracking herself. The missions that put me in rooms I’d have walked past if the interface hadn’t made avoidance too expensive. All true. All documented. All architecture that existed before a single genuine moment did.

But the System hadn’t built the cheese throw. That was Sloane, too happy to commit to being angry. That was real. The interface hadn’t scripted Diane sitting across from me at breakfast asking if I’d slept, meaning it, saying it with the kind of ambient care that didn’t register as performance because it wasn’t one. That was just how she operated when the person in the chair was someone she’d decided counted. The warmth in this kitchen, the specific quality of existing in proximity to two women who wanted me around for reasons I still wasn’t certain I’d earned, none of that read like something the System had generated.

I didn’t know what to do with that. The math didn’t resolve cleanly. Something real had grown out of a machine that treated affection like currency, and I was still working out whether that made the real thing less real or just made me more of a bastard for accepting it.

The blue void thing hadn’t helped. Three seconds dead. Something older than the System reaching for me like it recognized what I was. Like it had found what it was looking for. I’d filed that next to all the other things I wasn’t prepared to examine yet, which was becoming a very large and increasingly concerning drawer in the back of my head that I was pretending didn’t have structural weight. That pretense was not holding as well as I wanted it to.

"You’ve gone somewhere," Diane said.

I blinked back. Both of them were watching me now, Sloane with the sharp attention she brought to everything, Diane with the flat reading stare that stripped whatever mask I’d put up. The bond hummed with Sloane’s spike of worry, quick and hot.

"Just tired," I said. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

"You’re not tired. Juno cleared your stamina at a hundred percent this morning." Diane tilted her head. "You do the thing. The eyes go left and your lips move like you’re reading something the rest of us can’t see. You’ve done it since the morning you came downstairs and looked at Sloane like you’d never met her."

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