The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 481

Chapter 481: 481 | Static On The Line

The dome’s artificial daylight cut. One complete beat where the whole structure dropped into a blackness so total that the burning building to the north became the only reference point, orange and flickering, throwing shadows that moved wrong across concrete and steel. Forty students made forty different noises in the dark. Someone’s Aspect flared reflexively off to my left, a burst of green that lasted exactly long enough to prove they hadn’t meant to do it.

Then the backup generators slammed back online with a mechanical thunk heavy enough to rattle fillings, and the emergency lighting came up cold and clinical, washing out everything it touched. Everyone stood there trying to control their breathing and maintain the collective fiction that nobody had just jumped.

"Power fluctuation during facility reconfiguration," Steele said, and her voice carried the exact level of authority she’d been using for instructions all morning, but her hand had dropped to her hip in the specific way that said she was checking for something that should be there in an emergency. "The dome runs on independent generation. This is within expected parameters."

The Lukas tingle had escalated. Not just the low-level hum I’d been carrying since Radiant’s departure. A full system alert, the survival instinct from the transmigrant’s previous arrangement, the calibration that had never fully integrated into a world where the most dangerous thing on the schedule was supposed to be a training exercise. It was informing me, with the kind of clarity that didn’t allow for second-guessing, that whatever had just happened to the power grid hadn’t been a fluctuation.

Nobody moved. The generators continued their steady mechanical drone. Steele’s posture started to settle fractionally. Dravid tapped his cane once against the observation platform’s railing, drawing breath to resume whatever administrative statement had been interrupted by the darkness.

The air tore open.

I felt it before I saw it. That specific shift in pressure, like the second before the bass drops and you realize the floor was never rated for this, the air doing something it wasn’t supposed to. The static portals weren’t portals the way you’d expect them, glowing dramatic circles with particle effects. They were dead television channels, flat grey pockets where reality had gone offline and whatever came through them was wrong at the most basic level you could process. No light. No sound. Just absence, colorless rifts hanging in midair with edges that flickered like corrupted video, and through every single one of them people dropped.

Across the fire zone. The flooded district. The collapsed section near the eastern wall. The open plaza between structures. Everywhere, simultaneously, at least forty of them, landing with the kind of coordinated precision that told you rehearsal had been involved. Masked, every single one, though the masks varied. Some half-face, some full, some cheap Halloween store tier, some custom fabricated. The consistency was the intent. They wanted anonymity. They had it.

Caden’s voice cut through from somewhere behind me, still in social mode, still reading this as part of the program.

"Woah! They even got actors? Okay, that’s actually sick, this level design is—"

"Holt." Steele’s register changed so completely that the shift had physical weight. Every ounce of the warmth she’d been carrying since we arrived dropped out of her voice like someone had flipped a switch. "That’s not part of the exercise."

The platform went cold.

Forty teenagers recalibrated simultaneously. The nervous energy about trauma sensors evaporated. The ones with combat instinct didn’t wait for confirmation. Cain’s shadow-wing stirred at his left shoulder, the corvid-black void-feather construct bleeding into visibility before he’d fully committed to manifesting it. Camille’s hands went orange, rivet constructs halfway to projection before she’d consciously decided to arm up. Sloane’s knuckles popped with tiny amber detonations, the sound sharp and immediate, her whole stance dropping into something lower and wider without her thinking about it.

The people who’d thought this was a scary fun house ten seconds ago weren’t thinking that anymore.

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