The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 207: 207 | The Class 1-B Freak Show [PS BONUS]

Maribelle stood behind him in line and gave him a look that mixed exasperation with a specific warmth that had clearly been accumulating over years of exactly this behavior. Her tail swayed once before she caught it and forced it still.

Finn Walsh’s demonstration was the opposite of everything Eden had just done. He stepped into the center of the field without fanfare and simply stood there. For about three seconds nothing happened. Then I noticed the light catching on something near his fingers. Thin lines, almost invisible, spreading outward from his hands in geometric patterns that wove t hrough the air around him.

"Filament," he said in the same half-asleep drawl someone might use to describe a houseplant. His hands continued producing geometry that should have required actual thought to construct. "High-tensile threads. You can’t see them unless the light decides to cooperate, which is kind of the operational advantage."

The web expanded outward. Lines connected to the ground. To the equipment rack at the field’s edge. To a training pole about twenty feet behind him that nobody had been watching. He moved one finger, a casual adjustment that looked like stretching, and the pole jerked violently sideways. It tipped off its base and hit the grass with enough force to suggest the thread pulling it had not been gentle about the process.

"The whole thing is basically that," Finn said. He sounded like he was describing lunch options. "People walk into them. Then they don’t understand what just grabbed them. It’s funny."

Steele regarded the fallen training pole with the expression of someone running a calculation about how many pieces of field equipment she was prepared to lose today. She looked at Finn. Back at the pole. I caught the exact moment her mouth twitched at one corner in something that absolutely was not a smile but was definitely acknowledging the tactical value of invisible hazards.

"Reset," she said. "Step back to the line."

Marco Vidal stepped into the center carrying a dinner plate.

He had walked out of the building holding it. Nobody asked where he got it because asking Marco why he had decided something was necessary usually generated answers that were funnier than whatever confusion his choice had created, and people had learned to accept this as a feature.

He held the plate in his left hand, generated a glowing yellow disk in his right that was roughly the size and shape of a CD, and stood there for about two seconds while the disk hummed with kinetic energy that looked like it wanted to go somewhere. Then he pressed the disk into the plate’s surface.

The plate began to glow.

"Energy Disk Emitter," Marco said, weighing the now-luminous dinner plate in his hand. "I make these little disk things. On their own they go about fifteen feet before they peter out. But you stick one inside something?" He wound up like a pitcher and hurled the plate at a training dummy sixty feet away.

The plate hit the dummy center mass. It didn’t bounce off. It punched through the dummy’s chest and embedded itself in the equipment storage wall behind it, leaving a perfectly round hole through six inches of compressed foam and a significant dent in the aluminum siding.

"The range goes way up," Marco finished.

The silence lasted about two seconds before Caden started clapping. Marco bowed.

Steele looked at the hole in the equipment wall. Her expression communicated a very specific opinion about property damage during first-day assessments.

"That was my favorite plate," Finn observed from the sideline.

"I’ll get you another one man."

"It had a rooster on it."

"I will find you a plate with a rooster on it."

Theo Park went next and asked the nearest person, who happened to be Rook, to punch him. Rook looked at Steele for permission. Steele gave a slight nod. Rook hit Theo in the shoulder with about half his strength, which was still enough to make most people stagger.

Theo absorbed the impact like it was nothing. His body didn’t even shift. And then he punched the training dummy with the same fist and the dummy flew backwards eight feet, skidding across the grass and leaving a furrow in the turf.

"Kinetic Bank," Theo said, grinning warmly. "Hit me and my next hit gets harder. The more you beat me up the worse your situation gets."

"Sounds like dating my ex," Marco said from the sideline.

"Dude."

"What? The parallel is right there."

Steele closed her eyes for a very brief moment. When she opened them, whatever impulse she’d been suppressing had been safely filed away in whatever internal vault she maintained for situations like these.

Suki Tanaka’s demonstration was the quietest of them all. She stepped to the center of the field and opened her mouth. A single whispered word came out.

"Stop."

Every person on the field went rigid. My legs locked. My arms froze at my sides. My lungs continued breathing but everything voluntary simply ceased responding to my brain’s commands. The paralysis lasted maybe two seconds before releasing, but those two seconds felt like an eternity spent trapped inside my own body with full awareness that someone else had just pressed pause on my nervous system.

Suki closed her mouth. She looked at Steele. She did not speak again.

The field was very, very quiet.

"Resonate," Steele said, and for the first time since the assessment began, I heard something in her voice that might have been genuine respect. "Voice-based command frequency. Legendary classification."

Suki nodded once. She walked back to the sideline without another word, her blue eyes sweeping the group once before settling into the composed neutral expression she maintained at all times. She pulled a small notebook from her waistband and wrote something down with a pen she’d apparently been carrying the entire time.

Nobody made a joke. Even Marco’s mouth stayed closed, which was itself a statistical anomaly worth documenting.

Rina went after a few more demonstrations that I tracked with varying degrees of attention. When Steele called her name, Rina flinched so hard her horns caught the light. She walked to the center of the field like someone approaching a firing squad, her white hair gleaming against the afternoon sun and her tail pressed tight against her back.

"I’m sorry," she said before Steele could give instructions.

"You haven’t done anything to apologize for, Soleil."

"I know. I’m just." She swallowed. "Nervous. Sorry."

"Demonstrate your Aspect."