The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 146: 146 | Collateral Damage is a Scumbag Expense

I dressed in sweatpants and a tank top, slipped into the hallway, and moved past Sloane’s door on feet that made zero noise against the hardwood. Eighty Agility and eighty Dexterity turned my normal footsteps into something that sounded like nothing at all. Past Diane’s office where a thin bar of light still showed under the door. Down the stairs. Through the living room. Into the gym.

The gym at night felt different from the gym during training hours. No morning light through the high windows. No Sloane circling me with that predator’s grin. Just the heavy bag hanging from its chain, the training mats covering the floor, the rack of free weights against the far wall, and enough room to swing a weapon without hitting a ceiling.

I closed the door behind me. Flipped on the overhead lights and turned the dimmer down to forty percent. Enough to see by. Not enough to draw attention from anyone who happened to glance at the house from the street.

I extended Joyful Cloud.

One flick of my wrist and the compact rod separated into three sections with a sound like a zipper being pulled through silk. The chains caught and held. What had been a baton became a six-foot sansetsukon that moved like it was breathing in my hands. The sections orbited each other in a figure-eight pattern that I recognized from the installed knowledge as a basic warm-up form. My wrists guided the motion without conscious input. The chains whispered against each other. The ivory segments carved clean arcs through the gym air with edges that seemed to blur when they moved too fast.

The weapon sang. That was the only word for it.

I ran through three forms without stopping. Basic strikes. Lateral sweeps. Overhead arcs that transitioned into low passes that transitioned into thrusting jabs with the lead section extending like a spear before retracting back into the orbit. Every motion connected to the next one. The chains allowed for angles that a solid staff would never permit. I could strike from behind my own back without telegraphing the direction. I could redirect mid-swing if the target moved. I could collapse one section and use the remaining two as a shorter weapon before extending again without losing momentum.

Strength Resonance. That was the core property. The staff amplified whatever raw force I fed it. At fifty Strength I could put a dent in metal. At eighty I could probably do worse.

But I hadn’t actually tested it yet. I’d been too busy making sure I didn’t break something expensive while learning the forms.

Time to fix that.

I faced the heavy bag. Adjusted my stance. Drew the lead section back and let it hang behind my right shoulder with the chain pulling taut against my forearm. The weight settled. My grip tightened. I pulled ninety-six Strength from my baseline through my shoulder and down into the staff like pushing water through a hose.

The ivory segment started to glow. Faint amber light along the edges that pulsed in time with my pulse.

That was new. That hadn’t happened during the warm-up.

I committed anyway.

Brought it forward.

The bag didn’t swing. The bag launched. Two hundred pounds of sand and leather ripped off the floor-mounted chain anchor like it had been shot from a cannon, crossed the entire width of the gym in under a second, and slammed into the far wall with a concussive boom that shook dust from the ceiling and left a crater in the drywall shaped roughly like a basketball. The chain mount whipped back toward me on the recoil, the metal hook whistling past my left ear as I dropped flat on instinct, my chin hitting the mat while the broken mounting hardware embedded itself in the opposite wall behind where my head had been half a second ago.

I lay there for a full ten seconds. Not thinking. Not moving. Just staring at the gym ceiling.

The heavy bag had come to rest against the far wall at an angle that suggested it had died on impact. Behind it, the crater in the drywall was shaped like impact trauma. Deep enough that I could see the wooden studs behind the plaster. The chain mount had torn clean out of the reinforced ceiling beam with enough raw force to leave jagged metal still hanging from the hole. And the hook that nearly scalped me was buried two inches into the wall on my left, metal shaft still quivering like a tuning fork.

"Holy shit," I said. To nobody. To the empty gym. To the wreckage.

I sat up. Slow. The way you move when you’re checking to make sure all your parts still work.

The Joyful Cloud was still in my hands. Three ivory sections connected by golden chain. Warm now. Like it had a pulse. Like it was satisfied with what we’d just done together.

I looked at the bag-shaped crater. The dead heavy bag. The hole in the ceiling where a bolt used to be. The hook in the wall that had been aiming for my skull.

I ran the math.

At ninety-six Strength, the Joyful Cloud didn’t just hit things harder. It redefined what hitting meant. That bag hadn’t swung. It had been launched. The kind of kinetic transfer you’d need explosives to replicate. The kind of thing that didn’t belong in a home gym with drywall and wooden beams and a ceiling Diane probably had custom installed. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓

I needed to test this again. Somewhere with no walls. No ceiling. No witnesses who would ask reasonable questions I couldn’t answer with a straight face.

But first I needed to figure out how to explain to Diane why her gym had a new skylight and a bag-shaped hole in the wall before Sloane came downstairs at five-thirty for morning training and asked questions I did not have good answers for.

I collapsed Joyful Cloud back into its compact form and stowed it in the inventory. Pulled up a stool. Sat in the middle of a destroyed gym. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com

And I started laughing.