The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 491

Chapter 491: 491 | Cocky Theatre

The first man reached me before the others could organize themselves into anything resembling tactics. His forearms had transformed into serrated bone blades that gleamed pale white even through the murky water, which looked genuinely impressive in that specific way that body-horror transformations always do until you realize the guy wielding them has never actually fought someone who knows what they’re doing.

He came in high and telegraphed, the kind of overhead swing that might work against someone who panics when they see bone knives coming at their face.

I wasn’t that person anymore, not after four evenings of getting systematically dismantled by Hiro Sato in training sessions that had taught me more about reading incoming attacks than any formal instruction ever could have.

The blade met Joyful Cloud’s lead section with a metallic shriek that cut through the rain, and I felt the impact travel down the staff’s length, dispersing through the chain links in a way that made the whole weapon flex like a living thing.

I rotated my grip, let the momentum carry through, and brought the trailing section around in an arc that caught him square across the jaw with the kind of satisfying impact that told me something in his face had just broken in a way that wasn’t going to heal quickly.

He went sideways into the water with a splash, arms windmilling, and didn’t come back up under his own power. The current from Rina’s wool constructs caught him almost gently, like a mother’s hand guiding a child, and nudged his unconscious body toward the pharmacy wall where he could float in relative peace until someone with a medical certification showed up to collect him.

"One," I said, which was a mistake.

Terrible idea, actually. Counting your victories out loud in the middle of a fight was the kind of cocky theater that got heroes killed in every combat manual ever written and definitely every movie I’d ever watched. It was the universe’s way of announcing that you were about to get jumped from behind by someone you’d forgotten to account for, usually right before the dramatic irony of your own arrogance came due.

Two of them jumped me from behind.

I felt them coming through the specific wrongness of displaced water and changing pressure at my back, the way the rain’s pattern shifted when bodies moved through it with violent intent.

The debuff was taxing my reaction time by its full eighteen percent, making everything feel like I was moving through syrup, but my body compensated anyway with muscle memory it had no business possessing.

I dropped low, let my knees bend, and both attackers swung through the empty air where my head had been half a second earlier with the kind of confused momentum that told me they’d expected an easier target.

One of them had hands that sparked and crackled with electrical current, bright blue arcs jumping between his fingers like miniature lightning strikes, and when his fist hit the floodwater instead of my skull, the current dispersed outward in a crackling wave that lit up the entire intersection in a flash of blue-white brilliance.

Everyone flinched, including his partner, the kind of full-body recoil that happens when your nervous system registers a threat it can’t intellectually override.

Everyone except me.

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