The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

My blood went cold.

Diane watched my face change with the calm of someone who’d been expecting exactly that reaction. Her mouth curved. Not a smile. Something sharper. Something that said I see more than you think I do, and I’ve been waiting for the right moment to let you know.

"I don’t know what it is," she said. "I don’t know how it works. I don’t need to know right now. But you talk to something, Lukas. When you get that unfocused look and your eyes go slightly left and your lips move without sound. You’re not daydreaming. You’re reading an interface that isn’t there."

The garage felt smaller than it had thirty seconds ago.

"Read the Room doesn’t give me specifics," Diane continued. Her voice was steady in the way a surgeon’s hand is steady when the blade is already inside you. "It tells me resonance. Gaps between what someone is projecting and what they actually feel. And you, baby, have had a gap in you since the first morning you came downstairs and looked at Sloane like you’d never seen her before in your life."

I couldn’t breathe.

My lungs were operational. Boundless Stamina was keeping every biological function cycling at full capacity, oxygen processing at optimal rates, cardiovascular system responding with the efficiency of a machine that never knew fatigue. None of that changed the fact that the air in the garage felt dense, almost solid, and my chest had locked in a way that had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the specific realization that I’d been walking around exposed for nine years without knowing it.

"I’m not asking you to tell me," Diane said. Her voice was still calm, still carrying that Charleston warmth that sounded like an invitation and functioned like a scalpel. "I’m telling you I know there’s something to tell. And when you’re ready, when you decide it’s time, I’ll be here."

She leaned across the console.

The movement was deliberate, unhurried, the kind of physical choice someone makes when they know exactly what effect it’s going to have and have already decided that effect is acceptable. Her perfume reached me first, the specific scent she wore that probably cost more than most people’s monthly rent, the kind of fragrance that settled into your senses and refused to leave even after the wearer had. Her lips brushed my cheek. Soft. Warm. Lingering just long enough that my brain registered it as more than casual, less than accidental, exactly the amount of contact that communicated intent without requiring verbal follow-up.

She pulled back slowly, her blue eyes holding mine for two full seconds. Not searching. Not questioning. Just looking, with the specific quality of someone who had already found what they were looking for and was simply confirming it was still there.

Then she opened her door, stepped out of the Range Rover with the kind of fluid composure that made it look like she’d just finished discussing quarterly revenue projections instead of calmly informing me she’d been tracking my behavioral anomalies since the transmigration event, and walked toward the house. Her heels clicked against the concrete garage floor in a steady rhythm that somehow managed to sound both casual and final, like the closing argument in a case that had already been decided.

The door to the house opened.

Closed.

I sat alone in the driver’s seat with the engine ticking as it cooled, the Oracle Feed running a notification I didn’t need to read in the corner of my vision, and the absolute crystalline certainty that Diane Fitzgerald was the most dangerous woman I had ever met, was currently sleeping with, or would encounter at any point in my remaining natural lifespan regardless of how long the Scumbag System decided that lifespan was allowed to be.

She knew.

Not everything. Not the specifics, not the System architecture, not the gacha mechanics or the Temptation Gauge or the fact that the soul currently operating this body hadn’t been present for the first eighteen years of Lukas Belmont’s documented existence.

But she knew something fundamental had shifted. She’d known since the beginning, since that first morning when I came downstairs and looked at Sloane like I was seeing her for the first time because I was, and she’d been building her case one micro-expression at a time while I operated under the comfortable delusion that I was getting away with it.

The System materialized a notification in my peripheral vision, structured text appearing with the kind of timing that suggested it had been waiting for exactly this moment to make its editorial position known.

〘 DIANE FITZGERALD HAS DEMONSTRATED AWARENESS OF ANOMALOUS BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS CONSISTENT WITH HOST INTERFACE INTERACTION. 〙

〘 CURRENT THREAT LEVEL: LOW. 〙

〘 RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN CURRENT DECEPTION FRAMEWORK WITH MINOR ADJUSTMENTS TO MICROEXPRESSION MANAGEMENT DURING INTERFACE ACCESS. 〙

〘 NOTE: HOST FACIAL CONTROL DURING SYSTEM INTERACTIONS HAS BEEN FLAGGED AS SUBOPTIMAL SINCE DAY ONE. THIS UNIT HAS MENTIONED THIS FOURTEEN TIMES. HOST HAS IGNORED THIS FOURTEEN TIMES. CORRELATION BETWEEN CURRENT SITUATION AND HISTORICAL FAILURE TO ADDRESS DOCUMENTED VULNERABILITIES IS NOTED FOR THE RECORD. 〙

"Shut up," I said to the empty garage.

〘 THIS UNIT IS SIMPLY NOTING A PATTERN. 〙

"Shut. Up."

〘 THIS UNIT WILL COMPLY. 〙

A pause that felt deliberately timed for maximum irritation.

〘 THIS UNIT WOULD ALSO LIKE TO NOTE THAT DIANE FITZGERALD’S TEMPTATION GAUGE HAS NOT DECREASED DESPITE HER STATED AWARENESS OF HOST ANOMALIES. CURRENT READING: SIXTY-TWO PERCENT. STATUS: DEVOTED. 〙

〘 INTERPRETATION: SHE KNOWS SOMETHING IS FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG WITH YOU AND WANTS YOU ANYWAY. 〙

〘 THIS IS EITHER THE BEST OR WORST POSSIBLE OUTCOME. THIS UNIT IS GENUINELY UNCERTAIN WHICH. 〙

I dropped my forehead against the steering wheel and let it rest there. The leather was cool against my skin. Through the garage walls I could hear Sloane’s voice calling something about lunch, muffled by distance and drywall but recognizable in the specific frequency that meant she was hungry and expected someone to address this immediately.

Inside the house, Diane was pouring herself sweet tea from the pitcher she kept in the fridge, the one she made from scratch every Sunday because California could not adequately provide for a Charleston woman’s hydration needs. She was probably standing at the counter with one hip against the marble, scrolling through her phone with one hand and holding the glass with the other, looking exactly like someone who hadn’t just calmly detonated a conversational bomb in her own garage.

Two women. One house. One System that wouldn’t stop talking. An academy I hadn’t started yet. A weapon in my inventory I hadn’t tested. Abilities I was still learning. A cover story held together with progressive manifestation syndrome and Diane’s professional willingness to commit registration fraud on my behalf. A body that wasn’t originally mine. A name that still felt foreign when people said it too fast.

And Diane knew.