The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

"Her agency repped my cousin for three years. Minotaur. Rank B-41. Good man. Terrible at interviews." Gerald resumed walking. "Tell Diane that Gerald says hello and that her garage still has the best floor coating in Creston Hills. I installed it myself eight years back."

This city was the size of a small country and somehow everyone knew everyone. I filed that information away and followed Gerald to the paint section, where he held up a phone-sized color scanner and handed it to me.

"You’ll need to match the existing wall color. Take this home, scan a clean section of wall at least six inches from the damage, and bring it back. I’ll mix you a quart. If the gym was painted more than three years ago, the existing color will have faded, so we’ll mix a shade lighter and feather the new section into the old." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"You know a lot about this."

"Son, I been fixing what people break for forty-two years." Gerald’s amber eyes crinkled. "Started when my Aspect came in at seven and I accidentally put my fist through the kitchen wall reaching for a cereal box. My daddy handed me a putty knife and said if I was big enough to break it, I was big enough to learn how it went back together. That lesson stuck." He placed one massive hand on my shoulder with enough weight that my knees flexed involuntarily. "Glad to see some young people still learning to fix things with their own hands, ya know. Back in my day, we didn’t have all these contractors and specialty crews for Aspect damage. If you knocked a wall down you rebuilt the wall yourself and your father stood behind you the whole time making sure your mud lines were straight and your corners were clean and—"

I nodded along at the appropriate intervals while my brain politely excused itself from the monologue. Gerald’s generation had opinions about the current generation’s inability to handle basic maintenance, and those opinions came with a minimum twenty-minute runtime that no amount of polite interruption could shorten.

"—and that’s why I always say, a man who can build a wall can build anything."

"Absolutely," I said, which was my universal response to any statement that I had not actually heard the middle sixty percent of.

Gerald led me to the register where the skinny teenager rang everything up with the dead-eyed speed of someone operating on autopilot. The total climbed as each item scanned. Drywall. Backer board. Compound. Tape. Tools. Adhesive. Fasteners. The scanner. Sandpaper. A new heavy bag mount rated for combat loads, which Gerald had pulled from a specialty section near the back and which alone cost four hundred and fifty dollars because it was built from reinforced steel with a sixteen-point joist attachment system.

Then Gerald added a few items I hadn’t considered. Plastic sheeting to protect the gym floor during the repair. A pair of sawhorses for supporting the drywall sheets during cutting. A respirator mask because drywall dust was nobody’s friend. An LED work light on a telescoping stand for the ceiling work.

The total hit one thousand six hundred and twelve dollars.

Not three hundred. Not even close to three hundred. But not six thousand either, and every single dollar was going toward something I would physically carry into that gym and install with my own hands at eighty Dexterity and eighty Intelligence, so the cost felt different. It felt earned.

I pulled out the card linked to the Belmont education trust. Marcus Belmont had established that fund for his son’s future. Repairing the training space where his son prepared for Halloran Academy felt close enough to the intended purpose that I could swipe without guilt.

Then I added one more thing.

"Gerald. Where are the hard hats?"

He raised an eyebrow.

"I’m doing ceiling work. Safety first."

Gerald pointed toward a display near the entrance. I walked over and picked up a bright yellow hard hat with a four-point suspension harness and an adjustable ratchet. It was the kind of hard hat that actual construction workers wore, not the plastic novelty versions they sold at costume shops. Heavy. Functional. Real.

I also grabbed a pair of safety glasses and a box of disposable gloves, because the domestic repair module in my System had been very specific about protective equipment during overhead drywall work and I wasn’t about to ignore the one piece of System advice that couldn’t be interpreted as manipulation.

New total: one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three dollars.

I swiped the card. Gerald bagged the smaller items while the teenager loaded the drywall and backer board onto a flatbed cart.

"You want delivery? We can have this at your door inside three hours."

I hadn’t considered that. The Range Rover had space for most of it, but a full sheet of five-eighths drywall was four feet by eight feet and weighed approximately fifty-seven pounds, which my eighty Strength could handle without effort but which wouldn’t fit through the car door without sawing the sheet in half and defeating the entire purpose of buying a full sheet.

"How much for delivery?"

"Forty-five bucks. Saturday premium."

"Do it." I gave him the Fitzgerald address and Gerald wrote it on a delivery slip with handwriting that was surprisingly neat for a man whose fingers looked like they could crack walnuts by accident.

"Three hours. Maybe less. I’ll have Bobby run it out."

"Gerald." I extended my hand. "Thanks. Seriously. For all of it."

He shook it with a grip that was so carefully modulated I could feel the awareness behind it, the awareness of a Branded man who had spent forty-two years calibrating exactly how much pressure to apply when touching things that were smaller than him. Which was everything.

"Fix it right the first time," Gerald said. "That’s all I ever tell anyone. Do the job once, do it proper, and you never have to think about it again."

I walked out of Consolidated Hardware into a Saturday morning that was already warming toward the kind of California heat that made sidewalks shimmer. The parking lot smelled like hot asphalt and the eucalyptus from the strip of trees along the property line. My phone showed seven-forty-two. The delivery would arrive by ten-thirty, maybe eleven. Sloane would be on her run until at least eight-thirty. Diane was either in her office already or had manufactured some errand that kept her away from the house long enough for me to work.

I loaded the bagged items into the Range Rover’s trunk, placed the hard hat on the passenger seat where it sat looking absurd against the leather upholstery, and started the engine.

The Oracle Feed pinged one more time on my drive back through Creston Hills.

Domestic repair: supplies acquired. Estimated completion with current attribute profile: 3.2 hours. Projected quality: professional grade. Gerald’s approval probability upon inspection: 94.6%.

I didn’t dismiss this one. I let it sit there in my vision, glowing faintly amber against the morning light, while the road unspooled ahead of me and the hard hat bounced gently on the seat beside me with every bump and turn.

A hero cleans his own messes. Not because it’s efficient. Not because it saves money. Not because the System recommends it or because some dead man’s trust fund makes it financially convenient.

Because the mess is yours. Because you made it. Because the wall was fine until you showed up with a weapon you couldn’t control and put your fist through it at one in the morning while two women who love you slept upstairs, and now the wall needs fixing, and the only person who should fix it is the person who broke it.

Three hours. Eighty stats. Seventeen hundred dollars in materials. One hard hat.

Untested.

We’d see about that.