The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 489

Chapter 489: 489 | Rina Soleil Is A Problem

The Blitz took me off the bridge Ren was still building and into open air.

For a quarter-second I hung suspended over black water that reflected emergency lighting in long red smears, and the debuff screamed through every nerve because eighteen percent slower reaction time turns a controlled descent into a prayer, and then gravity remembered I existed and I dropped two stories into the flood zone feet-first.

The water hit me like a wall of ice.

Not figurative. The flood simulation ran cold, colder than any California municipal reservoir had a right to produce, and the shock of it punched the breath from my lungs before I could lock my diaphragm.

My boots found submerged concrete at about four feet of depth, and I planted, shoved upward, broke the surface gasping, and immediately could not see a goddamn thing.

Rain.

Not the gentle misting kind that turns Creston Hills joggers into Instagram content. The dome’s environmental system had apparently decided that flooding a residential block to the second floor wasn’t dramatic enough and had added driving sheets of simulated rainfall that came down at forty-five degree angles and reduced visibility to about twelve feet in every direction.

Red emergency lighting scattered through the rain and the rippling water surface in patterns that turned the entire zone into a fever dream painted by someone who hated depth perception.

Every building around me stood half-submerged and dark, their ground-floor windows swallowed by black water, their upper stories visible only as silhouettes through the curtain of rain.

Somewhere to my left, glass shattered.

I heard the crack first, then the splash, then a sound I recognized from two months of daily conditioning with a girl whose idea of an alarm clock was kinetic detonation.

BOOM.

Sloane. Three hundred meters had become fifty, and through the Bond Resonance her fury hit me like a physical force against the inside of my sternum, hot and absolute and carrying the specific frequency of someone protecting people she had known for less than a month with the same commitment she’d protect family.

The explosion’s shockwave displaced water in a radial pattern that slapped against my chest, and through the rain I caught a strobing flash of amber light, Sloane’s Detonation Aspect painting the underside of the rainfall gold for half a heartbeat before the dark closed back in.

Then voices. Lots of voices.

I waded forward with Joyful Cloud collapsed at my belt and my constructs tucked tight against my body because amber light in a visibility-starved environment turns you into a beacon for everyone with a weapon, and I rounded the corner of a half-submerged pharmacy with the rain hammering the top of my skull hard enough to make my teeth vibrate, and I saw the fight.

Rina wasn’t alone.

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