The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Marcus Belmont had been a licensed Hero. Reina Belmont had been a licensed Hero. They had both pulled salaries, both earned case bonuses, both accumulated nine years of dual income before they died in the Eastside during that S-class incident. The education trust wasn’t some scraped-together emergency fund. It was a proper estate-planned trust with diversified holdings that Diane Fitzgerald’s financial advisor had managed for nine years while the original Lukas sat in his room feeling sorry for himself.

I had money. Real money. Enough money that Dale’s six-thousand-dollar estimate wouldn’t have made a dent. Enough money that I could have called him back, said yes to the Saturday premium, and been sitting on the couch right now with a protein shake instead of standing on sawhorses with my arms above my head applying compound to a ceiling at eight-thirty in the morning.

And here I was. Hard hat. Safety glasses. Respirator. YouTube tutorials from a man named Carl whose mustache deserved its own licensing agreement.

I set down the taping knife.

I pulled off the gloves.

I removed the respirator and let it hang around my neck.

"I don’t have to do this shit."

The words sat in the air for a long moment. My constructs hovered beside me, amber and patient, waiting for instructions.

I climbed down from the sawhorses and stood in the middle of the gym, surrounded by plastic sheeting and tools and materials and the quiet evidence of forty-five minutes of honest manual labor that had produced genuinely professional results. The wall patch was clean. The ceiling patch was half done. The compound on the wall had already begun to set, and it looked good. Really good. Better than I had any right to produce on a first attempt, even with eighty Dexterity and Carl’s guidance.

I pulled out my phone.

I stared at it.

Dale’s number sat in my recent calls. One tap. One conversation. "Hey Dale, ignore the appointment, just come fix everything, charge whatever you want." He’d have a crew here by Monday. Professional finish. Guaranteed work. No hard hat required.

My thumb hovered over the call button.

I thought about Gerald. A man built like a small building who had spent forty-two years fixing what people broke because his father handed him a putty knife at seven years old and told him that being big enough to break something meant being big enough to learn how it went back together.

I thought about the grey walls of that state facility where the original Lukas spent six weeks. The fluorescent lights. The wobbling cafeteria table. The three empty parking spaces outside a window that looked onto nothing. A building where nothing got fixed because nobody who lived there was expected to fix anything, because the people in that building had been filed under the category of things that couldn’t be fixed.

I put the phone away.

I put the gloves back on.

I climbed back onto the sawhorses.

"The things I do for character development," I muttered to nobody.

The ceiling compound took three coats.

Three. Separate. Coats.

Each one required four to six hours of drying time between applications, which meant I spent the better part of two days living in that gym like some kind of drywall goblin, climbing up and down sawhorses, sanding between layers with increasingly fine grit paper, and watching Carl’s mustache explain feathering techniques until I could hear his voice in my sleep.

The wall patch finished first because gravity cooperated with wall patches. The ceiling was a war of attrition between me and physics, with physics holding an overwhelming advantage at every stage.

But I finished.

I stood in the center of the gym at four-seventeen in the afternoon, covered in white dust from my hair to my boots, sweat turning the dust into a thin paste across my forearms and neck, and stared at two surfaces that looked like they had never been touched. The wall was smooth. The ceiling was smooth.

The color scanner from Gerald had matched the existing paint within two percent, and after two coats of semi-gloss the patch lines had vanished completely. The new heavy bag hung from lag bolts sunk deep into the actual joist, rated for four hundred pounds, which was probably still not enough if I pulled out Joyful Cloud again but represented a meaningful upgrade over the toggle bolt disaster that the original contractor had left behind.

My shirt was ruined. The hard hat had a smear of compound across the brim that gave it character. The respirator had saved my lungs from approximately eleven metric tons of sanding dust, and I owed Gerald a fruit basket for recommending it.

I peeled the plastic sheeting off the floor, folded it into a rough square, and stuffed it into the garbage bag with the rest of the debris. Swept the floor twice. Mopped it once. Moved the sawhorses back against the wall and hung the tools on the pegboard where Sloane kept her training gear, each item on its own hook because somewhere in the last forty-eight hours I had apparently developed opinions about tool organization.

My hands ached. Not from exhaustion. Boundless Stamina made sure I could keep going long after a normal person would have collapsed, and my eighty across the board meant the physical labor itself never approached anything resembling a limit.

But Phantom Touch had been running almost continuously for the overhead work, my spectral constructs holding tools, catching drips, steadying the drywall sheets while I screwed them into place, and the sustained use left a low throb behind my eyes that pulsed in time with my heartbeat. Not painful exactly.

More like the feeling you get after reading for six hours straight without looking up, that deep-socket pressure that tells you a system was working at capacity for longer than its designer intended.

Good. That was actually useful information. Two days of sustained Spectral Reach use, with constructs active for six to eight hours at a stretch, and the cost was a headache. Not collapse. Not nosebleed. Not blackout. A headache. That meant in a real engagement, I could keep the constructs running through an extended fight without worrying about sudden failure, and that knowledge was worth more than the seventeen hundred dollars in materials.

I pulled the garbage bag to the bottom of the stairs and sat on the lowest step with a water bottle, drinking half of it in one go while the sweat cooled on my skin and the gym lights hummed softly overhead. The repaired surfaces stared back at me, perfect and unremarkable, which was the entire point. Nobody would look at those walls and think anything had happened. The damage had been erased. The evidence was gone.

I felt good.