The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 206: 206 | The First Day of School Is A Superpower Talent Show [PS BONUS]

I dismissed my constructs and walked back toward the group, feeling Steele’s attention on me like a physical weight between my shoulder blades. She hadn’t bought the adrenaline excuse. I hadn’t expected her to. The goal wasn’t convincing her I was telling the truth. The goal was establishing that I’d give reasonable-sounding answers when pressed, which meant pushing harder would cost her time without producing better results.

She’d come back to it later. I could feel that certainty the way you feel weather changing.

"Holt, Caden."

Caden peeled himself off the grass where he’d been lying flat since arriving, somehow managing to look like he’d been interrupted during something more important than a combat assessment. He ambled toward the center of the field with his hands in his pockets and his blonde hair falling across his face in a way that looked accidental and absolutely was not.

"Refract," he said, and the word came out sounding like he was ordering takeout. "Light manipulation. I bend it, redirect it, mess with how things look."

He snapped his fingers.

The air around him shimmered. Not dramatically, not with the explosive visual impact of Ren’s terrain restructuring or my spectral constructs. The change was subtler than that. Caden simply stopped being where he appeared to be. His body remained in the center of the field, but the light around him warped just enough that your eyes kept sliding past him, refusing to lock on. You could see the grass behind him through a faintly distorted outline, like looking through old glass.

"Partial invisibility at the low end," Caden continued, his voice coming from slightly to the left of where his outline suggested he stood. "Full invisibility if I commit to it, but that eats stamina. Flash bursts for disorientation. I can make zones of visual garbage that throw off targeting."

A burst of white light exploded from approximately where Caden’s hands should have been, bright enough that I flinched and heard Percy let out a noise behind me. The flash lasted maybe half a second before dying completely, leaving purple afterimages swimming across my field of vision.

"That’s the fun stuff," Caden said, his outline resolving back into solid form as he dropped the refraction. He was grinning. The scar on his left eyebrow lifted with the expression. "People don’t usually see the followup."

Steele’s face remained utterly still. "You’re performing at approximately sixty percent of your demonstrated entrance exam capability."

Caden’s grin didn’t waver. "Sixty sounds about right."

"That’s not a compliment, Holt."

"Didn’t take it as one."

I caught Marco covering a laugh with his hand from three spots down the line. Steele’s jaw did something very controlled and very deliberate.

"Reset. Step back." She said it flat, the same words she’d used for everyone, but the temperature behind them had changed. Caden walked back toward us with his hands still in his pockets, and Marco fist-bumped him without either of them looking at each other, a motion so rehearsed it had become pure instinct.

The demonstrations continued in alphabetical order. Vivienne Cross went next, and the temperature on the field dropped several degrees when she activated her Aspect. Not literally. Nothing about her ability involved temperature manipulation. But her presence shifted the moment Cipher went active, something about the way she held herself communicating that she was now receiving information about every person within ten feet of her.

She didn’t explain much. Placed a mark on a training dummy through brief contact, then detonated it from twenty feet away. The dummy’s torso sparked and smoked. The other students went very quiet.

"Electromagnetic tagging and detonation," she said, her voice carrying that particular quality of someone who has chosen each word in advance and sees no reason to add more.

Steele said nothing for a moment. Then: "Efficient."

Vivienne smiled. Just barely. "Thank you."

After Vivienne came the demonstrations that turned the field into something closer to a carnival than a military evaluation.

Felicity walked to the center like she was arriving at a party where she already knew everyone. She threw her arms wide and the entire field transformed. Where there had been grass and training equipment, suddenly there stood a perfect replica of the Halloran administration building, complete with windows that caught imaginary sunlight at angles that didn’t match the actual sun. Students who’d been standing on open ground found themselves apparently inside a lobby with marble floors and a reception desk. The quality was insane. You could smell the cleaning chemicals. You could hear the faint hum of air conditioning.

"Mirage," Felicity announced to the air, her voice bouncing off walls that didn’t exist. "Full sensory illusion. Visual, audio, olfactory. What you’re looking at right now has zero physical substance but your brain doesn’t care because I’m giving it enough data to commit."

She held the illusion for maybe fifteen seconds before letting it dissolve, the administration building peeling away in layers until only the field remained. Several students blinked rapidly, their brains struggling to reconcile the transition.

"That’s lowkey insane," Caden said from somewhere behind me.

Steele’s expression remained neutral. "Combat application."

Felicity’s smile widened. "Sweetie, I just made twenty people believe they were standing inside a building. If that’s not combat application, I don’t know what is."

Something flickered across Steele’s face. Not amusement exactly. Something adjacent to it that she killed before it could fully form.

"Reset. Step back."

Eden Wilkinson nearly set the equipment shed on fire.

He stepped up grinning the way people grin when they’re about to do something reckless and feel genuinely good about it. His red hair stuck up in every direction like an argument with gravity that gravity was losing. He pulled a Zippo lighter from his pocket with the casual ease of someone who’d been carrying it since birth, flicked it open, and absorbed the tiny flame through his fingertips.

The fire disappeared into his skin. His eyes got brighter. Then he opened his palm and produced a ball of flame roughly the size of a softball, stable and contained, hovering an inch above his skin.

"Flame Forge," Eden said, his voice louder than strictly necessary. "I absorb fire from external sources and reshape it. Watch this."

The fireball stretched and flattened into a blade that extended maybe two feet from his fist, edges sharp enough that the air around them wavered with heat distortion. He swung it once, producing a sound like tearing fabric, then collapsed the blade back into the sphere and blew on it.

The sphere expanded. Rapidly.

What had been a softball became a shield of flame roughly four feet in diameter, heat pouring off it in waves that I could feel from fifteen feet away. Rina made a small distressed sound and took two steps backward. Her tail tucked close against her leg.

"Oh man, this is so much better than training at home!" Eden shouted through the wall of fire. "You guys have no idea how good it feels to actually let loose! My mom’s neighbors filed three noise complaints last month because I was practicing in the backyard and the heat kept setting off their sprinkler systems!"

Steele’s jaw tightened visibly. "Wilkinson."

"I can also condense it into like a golf ball that explodes on impact, you want to see that? Because I really want to show everyone that."

"Wilkinson."

"Rock on!"

"If you damage my field I will personally ensure your remedial combat sessions extend through winter break."

Eden’s fire shield collapsed back into a controlled sphere faster than I would have thought possible. The grin didn’t go anywhere though. He absorbed the remaining flame back into his body and his eyes dimmed to their normal brown. His fingers still trailed wisps of heat as he walked back to the group.

"That was awesome," he told nobody in particular.