The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 484

Chapter 484: 484 | A Hard Landing [CASTLE BONUS]

Then the static ate me.

There was no impact and no cold and no falling sensation, which was somehow far worse than any of those, because my inner ear insisted I was standing on solid ground while my eyes reported an absence of everything. No color. No depth. Not darkness, since darkness has a texture and this had less than that. My skin went numb in patches. My teeth buzzed.

Somewhere in the grey I could feel the Devotion’s Echo dragging like a fishing line under tension, Sloane’s fury and terror threaded together and pulling away from me at speed, which meant she was still alive and getting further away, which meant this was transit and not deletion.

The System put up exactly one line.

Passive: Integrity Shield engaged. Bond intact.

Then the floor came back.

Not under my feet. Above my head, apparently, or at least at some angle my body had strong objections to, because I came out of the grey sideways with forward momentum I had not asked for and absolutely no reference point for where down had gone.

Oh shi—

The ground took the thought before I finished it.

I hit shoulder first on something with edges. Concrete, broken into fist-sized geometry, and I bounced, and the bounce spun me, and the second impact caught my hip and turned the spin into a genuinely ugly cartwheel across a slope of rubble that had opinions about my ribs. Boundless Stamina would have shrugged this off. Boundless Stamina had been dead for weeks, traded out for a Legendary trait that made my jaw sharper and did nothing whatsoever about landing on rebar.

I got a hand down. Got the roll going, sacrificed the shoulder, ate the rest with my back, and slid the last twelve feet on the tactical jacket Diane designed while dust and grit found every gap in the collar.

Then I stopped, and lay there, and coughed out a lungful of powdered building.

"Fuck," I rasped at the ceiling. "That was a hard landing."

Nobody answered, which was the first genuinely bad news.

I ran the checklist while the coughing worked itself out, because moving before you know what is broken is how people with superpowers end up as case studies. Shoulder: screaming, functional. Hip: purple by tomorrow, functional. Ribs: two of them had a complaint they were filing in triplicate. Head: intact, which I attributed less to skill than to the fact that Demigod had spent the last month quietly reinforcing everything I was made of while I complained about my reaction time.

At eighty-eight percent, that landing would have hospitalized any normal first-year. At a hundred I wouldn’t have felt it.

I sat up.

The collapse zone.

Of course it was the collapse zone. Somewhere in the sealed dome, four hundred million dollars of reconfigurable disaster architecture had four flavors on offer, and the static had looked at my file, at the twelve percent debuff and the eighteen percent reaction penalty, and dropped me into the one environment where the entire hazard model was things falling faster than you can respond.

Concrete slabs sat at angles that made my Intelligence stat itch, whole floors folded down onto each other with their reinforcement bars jutting out like ribs from something that had been butchered rather than demolished. Dust hung in the emergency light in long red bands. Above me, sixty or seventy feet up, a slab the size of a tennis court balanced on a support column with two visible fractures, and my brain helpfully generated a load calculation I did not want.

〘 Oracle Feed 〙

Location: Crucible — Sector Two, Structural Collapse Environment. Sublevel access confirmed. Exact position unmapped.

Squad proximity: No registered heroines within 50m.

Bond Resonance (Fitzgerald, S.): Signal present. Distance approx. 340m. Emotional state: enraged, escalating.

Note: The other thirty-nine were distributed. They were not removed. Host is advised to stop calculating and start walking.

Do try to survive.

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