The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 260: 260 | The Analyst and the Telekinetic

"But if I—"

"Percy." I pulled the half-mask up over my nose and mouth. The matte black fabric settled against my skin with the weight of something that meant business. My amber eyes were the only part of my face still visible. "You won’t freeze. Because I’m going to be in front of you, and if you freeze, I get hit. And I know you well enough to know that the idea of someone getting hurt because your brain lagged is worse than any Rivet Camille can throw."

Percy stared at me through the gap between my half-mask and the collar of my tactical jacket. Something in his expression shifted. Not a smile. Not confidence. Something more useful than either of those things.

Recognition.

The timer hit two minutes.

Percy’s voice came steady. Not loud, not fast, but completely free of the stutter that had marked every word he’d said before I put the mask on. "We enter through the east stairwell. It’s narrower, which limits our movement but also limits Camille’s Rivet angles. She needs line-of-sight for trajectory control. Tight spaces degrade her precision advantage."

I watched him shift from muttering to deciding in real time. The change was something you could measure.

"We move up to the second floor and pause at the stairwell exit to assess. I’ll call Analyze the moment we have visual on the hallway. Whatever I see, I’ll tell you. You go where I say when I say."

"What about Petra?"

"Petra’s Conjuration requires line of sight and approximately one point two seconds of concentration to generate a complex construct." Percy’s hands moved while he talked, mapping invisible architecture in the air between us. "If we can force her to react rather than prepare, her advantage disappears. She had ten minutes to build defenses, which means her prepared constructs will be impressive. But anything she generates in response to our approach will be faster and less sophisticated."

"So we make her react."

"We make both of them react." He pushed his glasses up with one finger. The nervous tic was still there, but the voice underneath it wasn’t nervous anymore. "Camille is dangerous at range but vulnerable if someone closes the distance past her suppression threshold. Petra is dangerous with preparation but vulnerable if someone disrupts her concentration. If we can split their attention for even two seconds—"

"I’ll give you two seconds." I meant it. Spectral Reach could generate four independent amber constructs. Two to create noise and movement in one direction while my actual body moved in another. Three seconds of misdirection that would look like a real approach from two separate angles. More than enough to fracture whatever defensive setup they’d established.

The timer hit one minute.

"One more thing."

Percy waited.

"Camille and Petra both watched the first two matches from the observation deck. They saw how Caden and Marco won by making the Hero team split up and attack without coordination. They saw how Lyra won by adapting her form to the architecture instead of fighting through it." I glanced at the timer. Fifty-eight seconds. "They know what losing looks like. They’ll expect us to come in coordinated and careful."

"So?"

I rolled my left shoulder the way I always did when a situation shifted from manageable to complicated. "So we come in fast and reckless. Not because that’s the optimal approach, but because they won’t expect it from the team with the analyst and the telekinetic. They’re preparing for a careful, methodical assault. Let’s give them something that looks like a controlled disaster instead."

Percy’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"A controlled disaster is a contradiction in terms."

"Welcome to my entire life, Percy."

The timer hit zero. A buzzer sounded through the speakers mounted above the door, a flat tone that carried across the empty training grounds and announced to everyone in the observation deck above that Match Three was live.

The south entrance unlocked with a pneumatic hiss. The door swung inward to reveal a hallway lit by overhead fluorescents that cast the kind of light designed to make everything look slightly worse than it actually was. The corridor stretched ahead for about forty feet before branching left and right, and the air inside smelled like fresh paint and the particular ozone scent that clung to environments built to absorb Aspect discharge.

I pulled Spectral Reach into existence. Four amber constructs materialized from my back, translucent and shimmering with a warmth that made the fluorescent light look cold by comparison.

Each one extended about eight feet from my body, hovering at shoulder height and responding to my thoughts with the kind of responsiveness that one hundred Dexterity and one hundred Intelligence provided.

They moved the way I thought about moving, no lag between intention and execution, each construct tracking a different angle without conscious effort. At the power level I was willing to show here, they looked like a mid-tier Channeler’s toolkit with some room to grow. Functional. Respectable.

The kind of thing that made sense for someone who’d been training hard but wasn’t going to break the institutional framework by existing.

Nothing that would make Steele pull the footage later and start asking questions I couldn’t answer without lying or telling her about a gacha system that diagnostics couldn’t detect.

Percy fell into position behind my right shoulder, close enough that I could hear his breathing but far enough back that a hallway ambush wouldn’t catch us both in the same blast radius.

Smart positioning without me telling him to do it, which meant he was thinking tactically instead of just following instructions.

His eyes went slightly unfocused after about three steps into the corridor, pupils dilating in that specific way that meant he wasn’t looking at the walls anymore.

I’d learned to recognize the tell over the past two months. Analyze had activated. His brain was now processing the building’s architecture, ambient sound levels, temperature variations, air current patterns, structural weak points in the ceiling tiles, probable locations of defensive positions based on sight lines and cover availability, and approximately forty-seven other variables that would let him read the tactical situation before it finished developing.

He was running the numbers on a fight that hadn’t started yet, cataloging threats we hadn’t encountered, building contingency plans for scenarios that were still theoretical. The muttering would start in about five seconds if the pattern held.

"East stairwell. Thirty feet ahead. Turn right at the junction."