The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 591

Chapter 591: 591 | Efficient Manipulation

The Student Services wing smelled like someone had painted over the entire past month and hoped nobody would notice the fumes. Fresh latex, industrial carpet cleaner, and the particular staleness of a room that had been sealed and reopened too many times in three weeks. I sat in a plastic chair that had been designed by someone who hated the human spine and held a sealed envelope with my name printed on the front in a font that suggested bureaucratic finality.

BELMONT, LUKAS. Class 1-B. Provisional Community Service Contract.

The envelope felt heavier than paper had any right to feel, which was probably psychological, and I made a note to examine that later when I had fewer women within fifty meters reading my heart rate.

Nineteen other first-years lined the row of chairs and the two rows behind me, each holding an identical envelope, each pretending they weren’t pretending to be calm. Sloane sat two seats down with her knee going like a piston, her pink hair pulled into the ponytail she wore when she wanted her hands free for something violent. Through the bond she read as a coiled spring that had already decided which direction it planned to snap.

Percy occupied the seat to my left with the informational packet open across his knees, reading it for the third time and annotating the margins in tight blue ink. His pen moved down a paragraph about supervisory reporting protocols, paused, and made a small notation that I could not read from this angle but that I trusted was correct about something the rest of us had missed.

"You’ve read that twice already," I said.

"Three times." He did not look up. "The second reading identified an inconsistency between the described evaluation timeline and the winter assessment calendar. The third reading is to determine whether the inconsistency is intentional or a formatting error."

"And?"

"Intentional." He underlined something. "They want us to feel like the placement matters more than it technically does, so we treat it with the appropriate seriousness. It’s manipulation, but it’s the kind that works on people who are already trying, which is everyone in this room, so it’s efficient manipulation." He caught himself using a word I’d heard him use a dozen times and did not apologize for it, because Percy did not apologize for accuracy.

Felicity sat across the aisle in a cropped white sweater and dark jeans that had opinions about her legs, and she had checked her phone four times since I sat down. Her blonde hair fell loose over one shoulder, and every time the screen lit her face she read it, made a face, and put it away, which meant she was texting someone who was not answering fast enough and it was driving her quietly insane. She caught me watching, mouthed bestie, and went back to her phone.

Camille leaned against the far wall because she refused to sit in the plastic chairs, her arms folded, her two-tone hair loose around a face that had decided the entire process was beneath her patience. She wasn’t holding her envelope. She’d put it in her back pocket like she already knew and had simply come to watch the rest of us find out.

Imara Steele came through the door at ten fifteen precisely, and the room stopped pretending to breathe.

She wore her gold jacket and carried a stack of envelopes I already had a copy of, which meant the distribution was ceremonial rather than logistical, which meant Steele wanted to watch our faces when we opened them. Her right arm still moved a fraction slower than the left. She’d stopped covering the burn, and the black tree of scar tissue ran from her wrist up under the sleeve, and she’d made a decision about that scar that I recognized because I’d made the same one about the marks on my own back. You either hide the thing that almost killed you or you let people look. Steele had chosen to let them look.

"Provisional Community Service Contracts," she said, and her pink eyes swept the row. "Distributed alphabetically. When I call your name, you come get your copy. You do not open it until everyone has theirs. If I catch you opening it early I will assume you cannot follow a simple instruction and I will file that observation, and it will follow you into your winter assessment. Questions before we start?"

Nobody had questions before we started. We had nineteen envelopes’ worth of questions and none of them were the kind you asked out loud.

"Ashida, Ren."

Then they did, and I went back to my chair, and the bond spiked with Sloane’s attention narrowing on the exchange because of course she’d caught it, because she caught everything about me now, because we were structurally welded together and she’d spent eleven days counting my breaths and had not gone back to trusting the universe. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

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