The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 486

Chapter 486: 486 | A Standing Ovation From Suki Tanaka [CASTLE BONUS]

I stepped off the slab.

Forty feet of drop, and I did not brace for it and I did not slow it, I just let the fall happen and the fall was fast, and the four men below jerked their masked heads up at the shout, and one of them got as far as raising an arm before I landed in front of Ren hard enough to crack the concrete in a starburst and throw a wall of red dust in every direction.

The impact rang up through my heels and my ribs filed a fresh complaint and I did not care. I came out of the crouch with Joyful Cloud already extending, three ivory sections snapping out to full length, chains whispering, the whole six feet of it settling into my grip like it had been waiting three weeks for exactly this.

"Hi," I said to the four of them. "Sorry, is this a private hunting party, or."

The nearest one recovered fast, I’ll give him that. Big man, forearm the size of my thigh, some kind of hardened-skin Branded thing going grey and dense across his knuckles as he swung.

I channeled Strength Resonance into the lead section and met his fist with the staff.

The sound was not a good sound. Not for him.

CRACK.

Amber light flared down the ivory as the Resonance amplified everything I had, and I have a hundred Strength before the debuff and even at eighty-eight the number is obscene, and the staff took his hardened-skin fist and folded it back the wrong way and kept going through his forearm and lifted all two-hundred-and-some pounds of him off his feet and put him into a slab twelve feet away. He hit it and slid down it and stayed down it.

"Okay," I said. "So that’s how these are going to go."

The other three came at once, which was smart, and it did not help.

I moved. Even debuffed I moved, eating the distance to the second one before his brain finished processing the first one dying against a wall, and I put the butt end of Joyful Cloud into his solar plexus with a sound like a dropped watermelon and watched him fold in half around it. The third had a weapon, some kind of energy blade, and I let one chain-linked section come off my forearm in a whipping arc that caught the blade, wrapped it, and yanked it out of his hands into mine, and then I hit him with the flat of it across the temple hard enough to rattle his mask.

"You gotta be kidding me," the fourth one said, backing up, and there was a shake in it now, the specific shake of a man revising his afternoon. "You’re a Hero. Aren’t you supposed to be one of the goddamn heroes."

I collapsed the loose section back with a flick of my wrist and rolled my shoulders and considered the question honestly.

"Eh." I tilted my head. "I’m still in training, technically."

Then I hit him too.

He went into the rubble slope and did not get back up, and the dust settled, and for a second the only sound was my own breathing and the building groaning somewhere overhead and the faint drip of water from a burst simulation pipe. Four grown men, down, none of them dead because I am practical and dead men attract attention and living ones can be interrogated later by people whose job it is.

Behind me, Ren made a noise.

I turned. He’d pushed himself upright against the column, leg still pinned, and he was staring at me with those sharp grey eyes gone wide, the deadpan cracked wide open, dust in his dark hair and blood at his temple. Ren Ashida, who had looked at me exactly once on move-in day and decided I was uninteresting, was now looking at me like the file had changed.

You yelled Geronimo.

It was cool.

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