The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

"From the progressive manifestation."

I nodded. The cover story we’d agreed on. Everything I gained from the System fell under the umbrella of an evolving Aspect that continued developing past initial activation. It was the truth the way a photograph of a building is the truth about what’s inside it.

Diane’s hands slid from my knees up to my thighs. Not far. Just enough to shift the contact from concerned to something adjacent to concerned. Her fingers pressed into the muscle through the thin sweatpant fabric.

"How much stronger, specifically?"

"Enough that I need somewhere without walls to practice."

"The nearest open space large enough to contain whatever you just did to my gym is the athletic field behind the community center on Ninth."

"That’s three miles away."

"Then you’ll run there. Good cardio."

She was already problem-solving. The CEO underneath the lace had clocked the situation and started generating logistics before the woman underneath the CEO had finished assessing whether I was physically intact. Both versions existed simultaneously. Both were real. Both were looking at me with an expression I couldn’t fully decode even with eighty Intelligence.

"I should fix this before Sloane comes down for training," I said.

Diane looked at the ceiling hole. The dead bag. The twin craters in the drywall.

"How do you plan to explain the damage?"

"Aspect training got out of hand. New kinetic output function manifested unexpectedly. I panicked and overcommitted on a strike."

Diane’s left eyebrow rose half an inch. "That is almost believable."

"I had a really good teacher."

She didn’t smile. She did something worse. She looked at me like she was recalculating my value, and whatever number she arrived at made her pupils dilate fractionally in a way that Read the Room couldn’t have intended for me to notice but eighty Intelligence caught anyway.

"You’re going to patch the drywall."

"Obviously."

"You’re going to replace the bag."

"Tomorrow."

"Today. Because it is already tomorrow." She glanced at the clock on the wall. One-fourteen AM. "You are going to order a replacement bag from the sporting goods store on Fifth that opens at seven, and you are going to have it delivered before noon, and you are going to reinstall the ceiling mount using proper lag bolts into the actual beam this time rather than the secondary plate, which I will note was the original contractor’s fault and not yours."

"Yes ma’am."

"Don’t call me ma’am."

The command came out automatic. The same voice she used on clients who tried to negotiate after the deal was closed. But her fingers tightened on my thighs when she said it, and the robe had given up pretending it was doing its job. The whole left side had slipped to her elbow. Her lace bra sat against her body like it had been designed specifically to ruin concentration.

The panties visible between her parted knees caught a sliver of the dim overhead light and I could see the lace pattern clearly enough to count the stitches if I wanted to, which I did not want to do because thinking about counting stitches on Diane Fitzgerald’s underwear at one in the morning while she knelt in front of me with her hands on my thighs was the kind of thought that created additional problems.

I looked at her face instead. The blue eyes watching me. The warm pink hair falling across one shoulder. The particular quality of stillness that meant she was thinking about something she hadn’t decided to say yet.

"You’re really not hurt," she said.

"Not even a little."

"The hook." She nodded toward the one embedded in the wall behind me. "It was aimed at your head."

"I ducked."

"You ducked."

"Eighty Agility. I ducked fast."

Something shifted in her face. The concern didn’t leave. It just made room for something else. Something that looked like the expression she wore when she watched Radiant’s rescue footage and recognized the gap between ordinary capability and what lived beyond it.

"How fast is fast, Lukas?"

I stood up from the stool. The motion was smooth. No wobble. No stiffness. My body responded to the command the way a sports car responded to the accelerator, with an immediacy that made everything before the upgrade feel like I’d been operating through a layer of cotton.

Diane’s hands fell away from my legs as I rose, and she remained kneeling, looking up at me with an angle that was becoming increasingly difficult to interpret as purely medical concern.

I extended my right hand. Palm down. Fingers loose. Then I closed them. Hard. Fast. The snap of my fist closing broke the quiet of the gym like a gunshot.

Diane blinked. Once. She hadn’t tracked the motion.

"I’m not the same person I was this morning," I said.

"No," she agreed. Her voice came out quieter than before. The drawl stretched the word into two syllables. "You’re not."

She rose from the kneeling position with the grace of someone who turned standing up from a floor into a performance. The robe shifted. Settled. Did not close. She stood in front of me close enough that I could smell the jasmine from her evening routine and something underneath it that was just her, just skin and warmth and whatever Luster did to the air around her at rest.

"Nine days until Halloran." She reached up and brushed drywall dust from my hair with her fingers. The touch lingered at my temple. Trailed down to my jaw. "Nine days until you walk into a building full of people whose entire lives have been built around becoming stronger than the person standing next to them."

"I know."

"Do you know what you look like right now?"

I didn’t answer. Her thumb traced the scar through my left eyebrow. The one the original Lukas got in childhood. The one I’d inherited along with everything else.

"You look like someone who’s about to walk into a room and make a lot of people very, very uncomfortable." Her smile arrived slowly. The kind that started in her eyes and took its time reaching her mouth. "And I want a front-row seat."

She kissed me. Not the quick peck of earlier that night when she’d dropped her bomb about knowing something was different. A real kiss. The kind that tasted like sweet tea and the particular brand of Southern aggression that she kept holstered during business hours.

Her hand on the back of my neck. Her body pressing against mine through the open robe, lace and silk against sweat-damp cotton, and the gym smelled like drywall dust and exertion and Diane’s perfume and I kissed her back.

The kiss lasted exactly long enough to make a point. She broke it. Stepped back. Pulled her robe closed with one hand, finally, an eternity too late for my blood pressure to recover.

"Fix my wall. Order my bag. Get some sleep." She turned toward the door. Paused with her hand on the frame. Looked at me over her shoulder with one blue eye visible through the curtain of pink hair. "And Lukas?"

"Yeah."

"Next time you want to test something that destroys load-bearing structures, drive to the athletic field first. My property insurance does not cover progressive manifestation syndrome."