The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 390

Chapter 390: 390 | You Didn’t Call Your Mother [GT BONUS]

The interface didn’t say a word about the text, which was how I knew it was bad. Ecchi Logic bent reality around me to produce underwear reveals and convenient stairwell collisions, and the Oracle Feed narrated my humiliations in real time with the enthusiasm of a sports commentator, but the one time an actual adult with an actual budget reached out to me personally, the whole system went quiet and let me handle it alone.

I read Odette Reyes’s message twice. Fifteen minutes, informal, my convenience, on or off campus. That was the language of somebody who had already decided what the conversation was and was letting me pick the wallpaper.

Then I opened my class group chat, scrolled to the contact I’d never once used, and typed.

Downstairs. Now. Outside the west entrance.

The reply took ninety seconds, which meant she’d read it immediately and spent eighty-nine of those seconds deciding how to sound.

I am not a dog, Belmont.

Two minutes or I come up. Your neighbors will love that.

Nothing for a while. Then: Four minutes. I am not going outside in what I currently have on.

Which meant she was going to change, which meant she’d already lost the part of the conversation where she pretended this wasn’t happening.

I went down the west stairwell instead of the elevator because the elevator meant standing still, and standing still meant thinking, and I was doing that badly enough on the move. The common room noise faded behind the fire door. Outside the air had gone cool the way it did on campus after eight, jasmine off the hedges, sprinklers ticking somewhere in the dark toward the training fields, the whole place performing serenity for nobody.

Here’s the thing about my situation that I don’t think anybody involved fully understood, including the system that built it.

False Data made me invisible to machines. I could sit in a diagnostic chair at the IHL regional office and let them run a full-spectrum Core scan and the readout would come back as a mid-tier Channeler with a fifteen-foot ceiling and a stamina flag, and no analyst alive could catch it, because there was nothing to catch. The lie wasn’t hidden in the data. The lie was the data. Every scanner in California could line up and take a number.

What False Data could not do was stop a woman with an agency and a grudge from telling a reporter she found the Belmont boy’s timeline interesting. It couldn’t stop a thread on a hero forum from putting my three negative diagnostics next to my entrance exam score and asking a question in a font that got screenshotted. It couldn’t stop the machine that took Jade from thirty-seven to rank eightty seven in a single bad interview.

Institutions I could beat. Institutions ran on documents and I had a passive trait that wrote documents.

Public opinion had no Core to fool. It just decided, and then it was true.

Her jaw tightened. She didn’t move back, and I gave her credit for that, because the polite thing to do when someone with my Strength stat walked at you in the dark was move back.

"And you assume I’m responsible."

"I know you’re responsible."

"You know nothing," she said, and the aristocratic finish on it cracked slightly at the edges, which was the first honest sound she’d made. "You have a theory and a very high opinion of it, which appears to be your entire operating system."

Two more steps. Now the light from the west door reached us both, and I could see the pulse going in her throat, and the very faint sheen on her collarbone that meant she’d walked down the stairs faster than she wanted to admit.

"Your hallway," I said. "Four-oh-something in the afternoon, you left the conference room, you came back for a pen you knew the location of, and you saw me with Sloane against the wall. Fifteen minutes later you were on the phone. Not to your mother, because your mother would have opened with the file, and she opened with the timeline, which means she got it secondhand from somebody who thought the timeline was the interesting part." I watched the confirmation arrive in her eyes before she could stop it.

"Brother. You called your brother."