The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

The house went quiet around ten. Diane finished her Sterling damage control call and retreated to her office to draft a media response strategy. Sloane showered, kissed me goodnight with a bite to my lower lip that she definitely left on purpose, and disappeared into her room with her laptop and a protein bar. I heard her door close. Heard the lock click. Heard the faint thump of her body hitting the mattress through the wall.

I sat on my bed with the lights off and the curtains open. Moonlight came through the window and painted a silver rectangle on the floor that looked like a doorway to somewhere cleaner. Somewhere a guy could just be a guy without a System tracking his every interaction and a countdown to the next time he’d need to lie to someone who trusted him.

Somewhere that didn’t exist.

I pulled up the status screen.

The blue panel materialized in the dark, casting faint light across my hands. I’d been avoiding this for hours, the same way you avoid looking at your bank account after a weekend you know went wrong. But the shopping trip was done. The furniture was ordered. The laptops were unboxed and charging. The bags were unpacked and the receipts were filed and Diane had kissed my cheek and dropped a bomb in the garage and gone back to running her empire like nothing had happened.

Nine days until Halloran.

And I was sitting on attributes that needed to be somewhere significantly higher than where they were.

I looked at the numbers.

LUKAS BELMONT

Level: N/A (Post-Tutorial)

Path: The Scumbag’s Path

STR: 50

AGI: 50

DEX: 63

INT: 63

END: 51

Active Skills: Spectral Reach (Rare), Blitz (Rare), Lightning Cloak (Epic)

Passive Traits: Boundless Stamina (Epic), False Data (Uncommon), Sexercise (Common), Musk (Uncommon), Family Man (Uncommon)

Items: Faceless Veil (Rare), Usurper (Legendary), The High Priestess (Rare), Joyful Cloud (Elite)

SP: 9,700

Fifty Strength. Fifty Agility. Sixty-three Dex and Int from my last allocation. Fifty-one Endurance because Boundless Stamina had been carrying the weight while I neglected the actual foundation.

Nine thousand seven hundred Scumbag Points sitting in my account like a fat wad of cash I’d earned through methods my parents would have killed me for. Assuming they’d lived long enough to form an opinion.

Alright. Time to stop being precious about this.

The post-tutorial cost scaling was brutal. Attributes fifty-one through one hundred lived in Tier 1, where the base cost was fifty SP per point with an additional ten SP tacked on for every ten-point threshold I crossed. Which meant pushing from fifty to sixty cost fifty per point. Sixty to seventy cost sixty per point. Seventy to eighty cost seventy per point.

I pulled up my calculator app and started running numbers, because even at sixty-three Intelligence I wasn’t doing this math in my head at ten PM after the day I’d had.

Strength, fifty to eighty. Ten points at fifty SP each, that’s five hundred. Ten points at sixty SP, that’s six hundred. Then fifty per point again from seventy to... no, wait. Seventy to eighty was seventy SP per point. Ten points times seventy.

I backed up. Did it properly.

50 to 60: 10 points at 50 SP each = 500

60 to 70: 10 points at 60 SP each = 600

70 to 80: 10 points at 70 SP each = 700

Wait. That didn’t feel right. Fifty to sixty was the 51-60 bracket at 50 base. Sixty to seventy was the 61-70 bracket at base 50 plus the escalation. The escalation was plus 10 SP for each 10-point threshold crossed within the tier. So 51-60 was 50 per point. 61-70 was 60 per point. 71-80 was 70 per point.

Strength from 50 to 80:

51-60: 10 x 50 = 500

61-70: 10 x 60 = 600

71-80: 10 x 70 = 700

Total: 1,800

No. I was already at 50. Fifty to fifty-one was the first point in the new tier. So going from 50 to 80 was thirty points total.

I rechecked. The tier system said 51-60 cost 50 SP per point. I needed to go from 50 to 80. That meant buying points 51 through 80. Thirty points.

51-60: 10 points at 50 = 500

61-70: 10 points at 60 = 600

71-80: 10 points at 70 = 700

Total for Strength: 1,800.

But my budget was 9,700. If I dumped 1,800 into Strength alone, that left 7,900 for four more attributes. And Dex and Int were already at 63, which meant I’d save on the first bracket for those two.

I started the full breakdown.

Strength (50 to 80): 500 + 600 + 700 = 1,800

Hmm. Let me double check that with the system.

"System. Cost to raise Strength from fifty to eighty."

〘 Strength 50 → 80. Cost: 1,430 SP. Confirm? 〙

I blinked. That was less than my manual calculation. The System was giving me the actual cost accounting for the fact that I was at exactly 50, not 51. Point 51 was the first purchase. So the math was slightly different from my napkin version because the brackets started at 51, not 50.

Fine. I wasn’t going to argue with a lower number.

"Cost for Agility, fifty to eighty."

〘 Agility 50 → 80. Cost: 1,650 SP. 〙

Different from Strength by over two hundred points. Agility was always the expensive date.

"Dexterity, sixty-three to eighty."

〘 Dexterity 63 → 80. Cost: 900 SP. 〙

The savings from already sitting at sixty-three were real. Seven points I didn’t have to buy in the cheap bracket, which meant the expensive bracket still hurt but less.

"Intelligence, sixty-three to eighty."

〘 Intelligence 63 → 80. Cost: 1,020 SP. 〙

"Endurance, fifty-one to eighty."

〘 Endurance 51 → 80. Cost: 1,380 SP. 〙

I added it up. 1,430 plus 1,650 plus 900 plus 1,020 plus 1,380.

Total: 6,380 SP.

That left me with 3,320 from my 9,700 bank. A comfortable reserve for emergencies, gacha pulls, or whatever fresh hell the System decided to manufacture during orientation week. Not generous, but not empty either. Enough to buy maybe one more stat push to 90 in a single attribute if something went catastrophically wrong, or a handful of pulls if the gacha dangled something I couldn’t walk away from.

Good enough. I was never going to outstat the monsters at Halloran. But eighty across the board put me at a level where I could compete with trained second-years and hold my own against most first-years without relying on abilities that might blow my cover.

"Do it. All five. Allocate now."

〘 Allocating 6,380 SP across five attributes. This will be painful. Brace for impact in 3... 2... 〙

"Wait, can you at least count down from fi—"