The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 485

Chapter 485: 485 | The Buffet Is A Trap [CASTLE BONUS]

I collapsed Joyful Cloud back to a rod and slid it into my belt, because a glowing white staff is the opposite of what you want when you’re the one doing the finding. Then I picked my way down the rubble slope on the balls of my feet, listening.

The structure kept talking to itself in that low settling groan, but under it, faint and getting less faint, came voices. Men’s voices. Bored the way a shift is bored.

I crouched behind a slab that had folded over another slab and made a wedge, and I let the noise resolve.

"—wanna find one of the little ones before it’s over."

"Butler said don’t kill ’em."

"Didn’t say don’t hurt ’em." A laugh, wet and pleased with itself. "You seen the roster? Kids. Fourteen hundred applied and these forty are the cream, right, the special ones. I wanna crack a special one open and watch its face figure out it ain’t special."

"You’re a sick bastard."

"I’m a patient bastard. There’s a difference."

Four of them, spread across the debris field below me, moving in a loose sweep pattern with the discipline of people who had done this before and the enthusiasm of people who enjoyed it. Masks like the butler’s but rougher, cheaper, the kind you buy in bulk when you’re issuing them to men whose faces don’t need protecting.

Grown men. Adult men with muscle and weapons and years, spread across a collapsed building hunting for teenagers so they could break something before the schedule ran out.

Something in my chest went very quiet and very cold, and it was not fear.

I have done a lot of unpleasant math about myself since I woke up in this body. I know what the System thinks I am. I know what my Defiance counter looks like and I know exactly how many lines I’ve crossed with women who trusted me, and I have gotten reasonably comfortable with the idea that I am not a good person, just a practical one, and that the overlap is bigger than people give it credit for.

But there is a specific flavor of disgust that lives underneath all of that, and these four had found it. A grown man who wants to hurt a kid for the way the kid’s face falls apart is beneath even my standards, and my standards are, generously, a basement.

I was still sitting on that, jaw tight, when a hand touched my shoulder.

I came off the ground about a foot.

To my genuine and lasting shame I made a sound, small and startled and undignified, the kind of noise you make when your enhanced nervous system, debuffed or not, spends its entire threat budget on the men below and gets flanked by the one person who can move without disturbing air.

I spun with Joyful Cloud already half out of my belt.

Suki Tanaka looked back at me. Deadpan. Cerulean eyes, brown bob with the side-swept bangs falling right, the deep blue and white bodysuit dusted grey along one shoulder from her own landing. She had her small notebook clutched in one hand like a lifeline and an expression that suggested she found my reaction the mildly interesting kind of data.

She raised her free hand. Waved. Two fingers, slow.

My heart was trying to relocate to my throat, so I waved back. Same two fingers. Same slow.

Here is the read I’d been sitting on since the Oracle Feed said collapse zone. These men had come to a facility to hunt Hero students. They had a roster. They knew our names, some of us, because the butler had rattled Camille’s file at her like a party trick.

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