The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 479

Chapter 479: 479 | The Lukas Tingle

The coaches emptied into a staging area under the dome’s shadow. For the first time all semester I watched 1-A and 1-B stand in the same space without a table or a monitor between us. Forty teenagers in costume. Half of them Class 1-A, moving with the settled confidence of people who executed protocol as reflex. Half of them mine. The improvisers.

The ones the faculty kept comparing us to unfavorably, usually while we were in earshot. Koda was already loud somewhere to my left, her voice cutting through the general ambient noise in ways that suggested she’d found something worth competing about.

I caught the flash of pink that meant Sloane had positioned herself where she could see the whole crowd, which was tactically sound and also meant she’d probably spotted me before I’d finished stepping off the coach.

Percy found me before I’d taken four steps.

"You look worse than you did at breakfast." He had his notebook out, pen moving, blue hair dark at the temples with the specific dampness of someone who’d been awake since four calculating something nobody asked him to calculate. His eyes flicked up to mine for half a second before dropping back to the page.

"Your gait’s off by a measurable margin. Reaction latency, based on how long it took you to notice me, is up roughly a fifth from your Monday baseline. I’m documenting this because the environmental compatibility grids I ran last night assume baseline performance from every participant in the exercise."

"Good morning to you too."

"I’m not making conversation." He didn’t look up. The pen kept moving in small, precise strokes that suggested he was annotating something in real time. "I ran the environmental compatibility grids against every plausible squad configuration last night. Sample of one hundred and nineteen permutations. Your squad, whichever one you got, has a survivability curve that assumes you perform at your documented ceiling. The documented ceiling is what I used for the calculations because that’s the only data I have access to."

His pen stopped. He looked at me directly, and the blue of his eyes carried the flat quality of someone who’d already decided this conversation mattered and was going to have it whether I cooperated or not. "You are not going to perform at your documented ceiling today. I can see it in how you’re standing. I can see it in the micro-adjustments you’re making to compensate for fatigue you think you’re hiding. You’re not hiding it. You’re managing it poorly."

That was the problem with Percy. He never accused. He observed, out loud, in a format that made denial pointless.

"Rough night," I said.

"That is the fourth time this week you’ve offered a version of that answer." He finally looked at me, and there wasn’t judgment in it, just the flat concern of someone who’d decided I mattered and hadn’t figured out what to do with the decision. "I don’t need the real one. I need you to know that if this exercise gets difficult and you’re at reduced capacity, the person who dies is not a dummy. It’s whatever fiction you’ve built holding you back."

He walked off toward Rina before I could respond, which was its own kind of mercy.

I turned toward the faculty cluster, and that was when I noticed it.

They looked annoyed. Not exam-day tense, not the controlled irritation Steele wore when a student underperformed. This was different. Steele stood with her tablet lowered, her pink eyes cutting toward the road every few seconds, and Cole Dravid leaned on his cane beside her with his blue-black head bent close to hers, and they were whispering. Whatever Dravid said made Steele’s jaw tighten. Whatever she said back made him look at the sky like the sky owed him an explanation.

I have a hundred Intelligence and a passive that reads faces for a living, and I still couldn’t parse it. Dravid’s mouth moved and I caught the shape of it, of all the irresponsible things, delivered in that flat register he used for observations he’d already decided were true.

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