The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 147: 147 | Good News Is We Found the Upper Limit

The laughter wouldn’t stop. Not the kind of laughter that comes from something being funny. The kind that happens when your brain encounters a situation so far outside its expected parameters that comedy becomes the only processing language left.

I sat on the stool in the middle of Diane Fitzgerald’s ruined gym, surrounded by drywall dust and a dead heavy bag, holding my stomach while tears ran down my face and my abs burned from the convulsions.

A two-hundred-pound bag. Across the room. Into the wall. Hard enough to leave a crater.

I was still wheezing when I heard the footsteps. Two sets. One heavy and fast, coming down the stairs like a stampede of one very angry person. The other lighter, quicker, the careful pace of someone who hadn’t bothered putting on shoes and was navigating hardwood in bare feet.

The gym door swung open.

Sloane stood in the doorway wearing an oversized sleep shirt that hung to mid-thigh and nothing else. Her pink hair stuck out at four different angles from the side of her face she’d been sleeping on, and her blue eyes were narrowed into the kind of slits that usually preceded someone getting punched through a wall.

Behind her, Diane appeared in a black silk robe that she’d thrown on without tying, the lapels hanging open over a matching black lace bra and panties, her own pink hair loose around her shoulders and her expression somewhere between maternal concern and professional assessment of property damage.

Sloane’s gaze moved from me to the crater in the wall. To the dead bag lying on its side like a leather corpse. To the hole in the ceiling where the chain mount used to live. To the hook embedded in the opposite wall. Back to me, sitting on a stool, covered in sweat and drywall dust, laughing so hard my ribs ached.

"No," she said.

One word. Flat. Final. The vocal equivalent of a brick wall.

"Sloane, I can explain—"

"No." She held up one hand. The other rubbed her left eye with the heel of her palm. "It is one in the morning. I have training in four and a half hours. I am not doing this."

She looked at the crater again. At the ceiling hole. Back at me.

"You’re insane and I’m going back to bed."

She turned around, shoulder-checked past Diane in the doorway without breaking stride, and her footsteps retreated up the stairs with the rhythm of someone who had made a firm decision about the amount of nonsense she was willing to process before sunrise. Her bedroom door closed. Not slammed. Closed. Somehow that was worse.

Diane remained in the doorway. She took in the destruction with the slow, methodical scan of someone cataloguing insurance claims. The bag. The wall. The ceiling. The hook. Me. Her blue eyes completed the circuit and landed on my face with the weight of a woman who had spent two decades making sense of people who destroyed things and needed her to make it look intentional.

"Lukas."

"Yeah."

"Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Is the house going to fall down?"

I looked at the ceiling hole. The structural beam underneath the drywall appeared intact. The bolt had torn free from a secondary mounting plate rather than the beam itself. "Probably not."

Diane nodded once. Stepped into the gym. Let the door swing shut behind her. She moved through the debris field with her feet bare on the mat, and I watched drywall dust settle on her toes as she crossed the floor. The robe still hung open. The black lace underneath caught the gym’s dim lighting in ways that made my brain want to prioritize information incorrectly.

She stopped directly in front of me and knelt.

Not the quick kneel of someone checking on an injured person. The slow, deliberate descent of a woman who understood exactly what the angle was doing when she lowered herself to eye level with a man sitting on a stool. Her knees parted as she settled her weight back on her heels, and the robe fell open further, and there it was. Black lace. The expensive kind. Sitting perfectly against skin that Luster kept looking like it was lit from the inside. My gaze dropped before I could stop it, and Diane made absolutely no move to adjust her position.

Her hands found my knees. Warm palms against sweatpant fabric.

"Sugar." The drawl came out soft. The vowels stretched longer than they did during business hours, which meant she was genuinely worried underneath the composure. "You want to tell me what happened in my gym at one o’clock in the morning?"

I looked at the crater in the wall. At the bag that would never hold sand again. At the ceiling that now had a ventilation feature Diane hadn’t requested.

I smiled.

Not the smile I used when I was performing for the System. Not the one I deployed when Sloane caught me staring and I needed to deflect. The real one.

The one that came from a place where eight weeks of training and fighting and lying and navigating two women who could individually destroy me and a System that wanted me to be something I hadn’t fully decided to become all converged on a single, stupid, glorious moment where I hit a bag with a magic stick and it flew across the room like I’d shot it from a cannon.

"I got a bit stronger, Diane."

Her thumbs traced small circles on my kneecaps. The motion looked absent. It was not. Diane Fitzgerald did nothing by accident. Every touch was a sentence in a language she’d spent thirty-something years perfecting. freeωebnovēl.c૦m

"A bit," she repeated. Her eyes tracked to the crater. Back to me. "That wall is reinforced, Lukas. The contractor I hired assured me it could handle direct Aspect discharge from a mid-tier Channeler."

"Well." I rubbed the back of my neck. Drywall dust fell from my hair onto my shoulders. "Good news is we found the upper limit."

"You hit the bag."

"I hit the bag."

"With what, exactly?"

The question hung between us like the dust still floating in the air. Diane’s blue eyes held mine with the particular quality of attention that meant her Read the Room was running and she was gathering data whether I cooperated or not. The robe had slipped further down her right shoulder.

Black lace strap visible against the curve where her neck met her collarbone. The kneeling position put her face level with my chest, and every breath she took moved the lace across her skin in ways that were extremely distracting and almost certainly intentional.

"Something new," I said.