The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 488

Chapter 488: 488 | The Apology Is Breaking

"You dropped forty feet and yelled Geronimo," Ren said, flat, and honest to god I think that was the first joke Ren Ashida had made in the entire semester.

I Blitzed.

Even debuffed the world blurred, thirty feet compressed into a fraction, and I came out of it inside the guard of the two on the left flank before the ram had finished folding the others, and I did not have a weapon so I used what I had, which was a hundred Strength dressed down to eighty-eight and a lifetime in another world’s worth of not fighting fair.

I caught the first one’s wrist and broke the grip and put my elbow through his mask, and the second one got a hand on my shoulder, dug in, and something cold ran up my arm from the contact, some kind of drain Aspect trying to sap the strength out of me.

Which would have worked, on a person.

It fizzled off the Demigod trait like a match against a bonfire, and his eyes went wide behind the mask when the drain gave him nothing back, and I put him down with a strike to the temple I calibrated very carefully to not kill him, because I am, whatever else I am, practical.

The last one ran.

I let him. Ren’s fist-wall came down across the ridge and sealed the gap he’d fled through, and the sound of the man’s boots faded, and the sublevel went quiet again except for the drip of the burst pipe and Ren breathing hard and Suki, up on a ledge, calmly writing something in her notebook like she was taking exam notes.

"Okay," I said, and blew out a breath, and touched my ribs and regretted it. "So that’s two teams. There are more. There are always more."

Ren looked at the wreckage he’d made, the bodies I’d put down, the way I’d moved through the space like the debuff wasn’t wearing me down to nothing. Looked at his own hands, then at me, and I watched him choose to ask the question directly instead of dancing around it, which I respected.

"What are you," he said.

Not who. What.

Everyone got there eventually. Dravid, Steele, Odette, Petra, Percy, and now the coldest kid in the cohort, standing in a room he’d rebuilt with his mind, looking at me like I was the anomaly. Which, fair.

"I’m the guy who’s going to get everyone out of here," I said, and it wasn’t an answer and we both knew it, and I saw Ren decide to let me have it for now and add the non-answer to whatever file he kept behind those grey eyes. "Including Rina, who I need to get to before the water does or before she has to use her Aspect on actual people instead of training dummies. So. Time pressure."

Rina is close.

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