The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism
Chapter 252 | Being a Hero is The Shit
Felicity materialized at my elbow like she’d been teleported there by a fashion-obsessed deity.
"Okay bestie, no cap, your costume is giving main character energy and I am literally deceased." She grabbed my arm and turned me sideways to get a better angle, her vivid blue eyes moving across the charcoal and amber with the focus of someone evaluating a runway collection. "The half-mask? The high collar? The little amber lines? Lukas, this is so snatched I could cry. Who designed this because I need their number immediately."
"Diane had opinions."
"Diane had VISION is what Diane had. You look like you just stepped out of a manhwa panel and I am not okay about it."
I was about to respond with something appropriately deflective when Felicity tugged at the neckline of her own costume, pulling the white and pink material away from her chest with a frown that had nothing to do with dissatisfaction and everything to do with the way the fabric snapped back into place the second she released it.
"Meanwhile the costume department apparently went with the skin-tight vibe for mine, which like, lowkey I’m not mad about it because the silhouette is fire, but also?" She stretched the front panel of her hoodie bodysuit outward and let it go.
The material clung back to her body with the loyalty of something that had been engineered at a molecular level, conforming to every curve from her collarbones to where the pink harness crossed her chest, and the resulting visual was the kind of thing that would generate three hundred comments on a Hero fan forum within twelve minutes of being photographed.
Her breasts pressed against the white material in a way that left very little to the imagination regarding either shape or scale. "I feel like I’m wearing body paint that someone decided to add a zipper to."
"It’s a compression suit. They’re all like that."
"Yeah but some of us have more to compress than others, Lukas."
She had a point. And as my eyes drifted past Felicity to the rest of the cohort gathered near the entrance to Ground Beta, the point became aggressively obvious.
Every female student in the group wore some variation of skin-tight. Every single one.
Camille’s orange and charcoal number hugged the powerful curve of her hips and the thick definition of her thighs with the devotion of something that had taken a vow.
Nyx’s purple and black bodysuit outlined every line of her body from collarbone to ankle, and combined with the choker and the combat boots, the overall effect landed somewhere between underground nightclub and professional combatant.
Maribelle’s violet costume showcased the athletic build beneath her crimson skin, her tail swaying behind her in a way that drew attention to the dramatic flare of her hips.
Rina’s rose-pink suit left absolutely nothing ambiguous about the softness she usually concealed, and she stood with her arms half-folded across her midsection in the universal posture of a girl who had just realized how much of herself was on display and had not yet decided how she felt about it.
Even Petra’s emerald and white ensemble, which probably cost more than some people’s cars, conformed to her figure with the fidelity of a second skin, the fabric somehow managing to look simultaneously modest and completely devastating.
Twenty students in hero costumes standing in the afternoon sun outside a fake city, and roughly half of them were wearing outfits that belonged on the cover of a doujinshi.
What a sight for sore eyes.
The Ecchi Logic trait hummed at the base of my awareness with the quiet satisfaction of something whose long-term investment strategy was paying dividends ahead of schedule. I told it to shut up. It did not shut up.
Caden appeared beside me with his arms spread wide and his head tilted back, white and blue costume panels shifting with light that refracted off his Aspect in ways the designers had clearly intended, and his grin stretched so far across his face that it threatened to achieve geometric impossibility.
"Dude. Being a hero is the shit!"
Marco punched Caden’s shoulder from behind. "I literally have a saw blade in my belt and nobody has told me to put it away. This is the greatest day of my life."
"Can you imagine what our parents are gonna say when they see the costume photos? My mom is going to frame them and put them above the fireplace and I will LET her."
Hiro Sato pushed forward through the group, his gold and white costume catching the sunlight in ways that made him appear to be generating his own personal sunrise, which given his Corona Aspect was probably only half theatrical. His dark brown eyes scanned the cityscape of Ground Beta with the evaluative intensity of someone comparing real estate to his personal standards.
"Hold on, hold on. This looks like the spot from the entrance exams. Like, structurally." Hiro gestured toward the buildings rising beyond the gate with a sweep of his arm that was seventy percent observation and thirty percent pose. "Same kind of fake buildings, same urban layout. Are we fighting robots again? Because I have notes about how the last batch handled beam attacks and I feel like the engineering team could benefit from my feedback."
Radiant’s laugh hit the group like a warm shockwave. The man was six feet away from the nearest student and his voice still made the ground vibrate.
"No robots today!" He swept one massive arm toward the gate behind him and the city that waited beyond it. "Today’s training will be INDOOR!"
The word landed with the weight of institutional intent. Indoor. Not the open field chaos of the entrance exam where students could scatter and choose their engagements from a distance. Indoor meant walls. Indoor meant corners you couldn’t see around and doors that could hide anything behind them and ceilings that compressed the available space into something that favored close-quarters instinct over ranged Aspect deployment.
A tall guy near the back of the group, one of the students I hadn’t learned the name of yet, raised his hand with the hesitant energy of someone who knew his question might sound stupid but was asking it anyway.
"Isn’t indoor combat kind of advanced for our first day? We just got these costumes like ten minutes ago."