The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 497

Chapter 497: 497 | Arithmetic [CASTLE BONUS]

Eleven seconds. Twelve. On thirteen his shoulder dropped a half inch further than it had the previous three swings, and Sloane put a fully charged fist into his armpit where the density Aspect ran thinnest.

The detonation lifted him off the grating, spun him, and dropped him on the rail hard enough that the rail lost.

He fell. She let him.

Sloane stood in the ruin of the mezzanine, breathing harder than she wanted to be, and did the arithmetic. Five confirmed. Two unaccounted for. She’d used maybe eight full-force detonations already and the buildup lag hadn’t kicked in at all, which was another thing she was going to yell at Lukas about, because six had been her hard ceiling since she was fifteen and she had worked for every single one of those six.

"You are so annoying," she muttered.

Then she felt him.

The bond went hot in her sternum, a fast spike of something ugly, and Sloane’s whole body locked up around it because she knew that flavor. That was pain. That was Lukas taking a hit he hadn’t been able to slip.

"No," she said.

She turned south and her legs were already moving before she finished the word, and she got exactly four steps before the wall in front of her opened up and let three more men through, and she was so unbelievably furious about the delay that she cleared all three in under six seconds and didn’t remember doing it.

The bond flickered again. Weaker. Then steadier.

He was up. He was always up. That was the whole insufferable thing about him.

Sloane made herself stop.

Three hundred meters. Through a collapse zone and a flooded district. She could get there in maybe ninety seconds if she overclocked the whole way and arrived with nothing left in the tank, or she could stop being a child about it and do the thing that actually mattered, which was that the entire dome was sealed and nobody could call for help and every single person in this building was going to keep bleeding until somebody fixed that.

"Fine," she said to the empty corridor. "Fine. I hate this."

She was halfway to the security substation when the laughing started.

It came from the east ramp, and it was a man’s voice, and he was laughing the way people laugh when they think they’ve cornered something small. Sloane went flat against the wall and looked.

Four of them, wading up the ramp after a girl in white and pink who was walking backward and giggling and absolutely, one hundred percent, not there.

"Aw, you guys are so fast," the fake Felicity said, and her voice did the thing Felicity’s voice always did, that upward lilt that made everything sound like a compliment and a dare at once. "It’s giving predator energy. Love that. Keep going, you’re doing amazing."

"Get back here."

"Bestie, I am literally right here."

She stepped left. The whole illusion slid three feet and turned transparent for half a second at the shoulder before catching itself, and Sloane clocked the seam immediately because she’d sparred against sensory Aspects since she was twelve.

The four men did not clock it.

They followed her up the ramp, around the corner, and into the loading bay, and Sloane understood the geometry about one second before the orange light started.

Camille Ortega was standing on top of a stack of shipping crates with both palms already glowing, and she had the high angle, the sightline, and forty feet of open floor to work with.

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