The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 478

Chapter 478: 478 | The Color of Money [CASTLE BONUS]

I liked them, was the annoying thing. I’d been dropped into a squad with three people I barely knew and every one of them was sharper than their surface, and if my brain had been running at full speed I’d have already mapped out how their Aspects layered against the four environments and which of them could carry the flooded sublevels and who was going to fold under pressure.

Instead the map kept assembling and dissolving, the debuff eating the connections before they solidified. Dash’s Quickdraw, rapid energy bolts, good for suppressing threats but useless against fire and worse than useless in water. Elara’s Glacial, momentum-dependent, which meant the collapsed structure with its debris fields and tight corridors would either be a playground or a coffin depending on whether she could build speed. Zara’s Trace, common-tier proprioception layered under years of obsessive combat conditioning, which made her the most physically capable person in my squad and the one whose Aspect helped least with rescue.

And me. Phantom Touch, allegedly. Four amber constructs and a fifteen-foot leash on paper. Considerably more than that in a burning building where nobody could see the numbers and Odette Reyes was going to be standing on the floor reading trauma sensors and deciding whether my file was wrong by a factor of two or ten.

She’d told me to assume ten. She’d told me she assumed ten.

Twelve days ago that had been an abstract problem. Now it was three hours out.

The coach pulled onto the road and the campus slid past the tinted windows, all that white stone and manicured green, the training fields with their permanent scorch patterns, the covered walkways I’d learned to navigate by Percy’s obsessive maps. Behind us the 1-A coach followed at a distance, and somewhere in it Sloane was probably explaining to Koda exactly how she planned to win an exercise that technically couldn’t be won in the traditional sense.

"You’re doing the thing." Elara had turned from the window and was looking at me across the aisle, her pale eyes steady. "The staring at nothing thing. Your lips moved."

"I do that."

"I know. I’ve watched you do it in Aspect Theory." She said it without accusation, the way she said everything, like she was reading a temperature off a gauge. "You go somewhere. Most people who do that are anxious. You don’t read as anxious." A pause, unhurried. "You read as someone running numbers he doesn’t like the answers to."

Two seats back, Zara made a sound of interest. "Camo sees everything and says nothing. Until she says the exact thing you did not want said."

"It’s a gift," Elara said mildly, and went back to the window.

I let out a breath and leaned my head against the cool glass. The debuff sat at the base of my skull like wet cement, and I was surrounded by three people who between them didn’t miss much, heading into an evaluation where I’d need to either reveal what I actually was in a controlled enough context that it read as development, or stay hidden and let people die on the trauma sensors, and neither of those was the kind of decision I wanted to make at eight-forty in the morning at eighty-eight percent of my capacity.

The road wound down out of the hills and the city opened up below us, Verano stretching gold and glass toward the water, and off in the distance somewhere near the Strand a thin column of black smoke rose against the morning sky. Some agency’s problem. Some ranked hero’s win. I watched it curl upward for a second and then lost interest, because the coach was slowing.

"Oh," Dash breathed. "Oh, holy shit."

I followed his stare out the front windshield.

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