The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 166: 166 | Bookshelf By Three, Princess

Ray and the bald mover looked at me. I looked at the room. The space Petra Lang intended for this dresser was obvious. Against the wall between the closet and the bedroom window, where a strip of painter’s tape on the floor marked exact dimensions that matched the dresser’s footprint down to the centimeter. She had measured the space before the furniture arrived. She had placed tape guidelines on the floor. For movers.

We set the dresser down on the taped outline. It fit like a puzzle piece snapping into place, which of course it did because Petra Lang did not order furniture without knowing precisely where every centimeter of it would live.

The bald mover straightened up, rolled his shoulders, and looked at Ray with the silent communication of men who wanted to get the hell out of this apartment before the woman on the phone noticed them and found something wrong with their performance. Ray nodded. They moved toward the door with the hushed speed of people escaping a dragon’s lair while it slept.

I should have followed them. I should have grabbed my duffel from the common area, taken the elevator to the East Tower second floor, found Room 205, and started unpacking my single bag like a reasonable person beginning his first day at a new school.

Instead I stood there in Petra Lang’s apartment like an idiot, watching her talk on the phone with her mother about ceiling heights and neighbor proximity, her free hand gesturing with the controlled expressiveness of someone who had been raised to communicate through motion as much as language. The Oracle Feed pulsed in my peripheral vision with information I hadn’t asked for.

PETRA LANG. Class 1-B. Recommendation Track.

Aspect: Conjuration. Legendary. Active.

Status: Unengaged. Occupied with phone call.

Temptation Gauge: 0%

Current Assessment: Has not registered your presence as relevant.

Zero percent. Not even the baseline courtesy bump that most people gave strangers in shared spaces. Petra Lang had categorized me as furniture before I’d said a single word to her.

She turned.

Her eyes were an emerald green so vivid they didn’t look entirely real. They swept over me in a single pass that lasted approximately one point two seconds and communicated a complete evaluation. Tall. Skinny. Hoodie. Not worth pausing her conversation for.

"One moment, Mother." She lowered the phone from her ear and directed those green eyes at me with the warmth of a bank teller who had already decided you didn’t have enough money to be interesting. "The dresser placement is acceptable. You may inform the delivery coordinator that the dimensions were correct. If you could direct the next team to prioritize the bookshelf, I’d prefer it assembled before three o’clock."

She thought I was a mover.

Of course she did. I was standing in her apartment in a black hoodie and jeans, having just carried furniture through her door with two men in grey jumpsuits. The logical conclusion was that I belonged to the same category of service personnel.

I opened my mouth to correct her. To introduce myself as her classmate, her neighbor across the building, the guy who ranked third on the entrance exam that she had skipped entirely via recommendation track. The guy whose parents died wearing costumes that people still put on memorial t-shirts in Verano.

But something stopped me. Call it instinct. Call it the part of my brain running at sixty-three Intelligence that processed social dynamics faster than my mouth could form words.

Petra Lang had just revealed more about herself in thirty seconds than most people revealed in a semester. She categorized people instantly and without apology. She communicated through expectation rather than request. She occupied space as though it had been designed to accommodate her specifically and anyone else present existed within her framework rather than alongside it.

A spoiled princess? Maybe. The kind whose confidence ran deep enough that she never questioned whether the world would arrange itself to her specifications because it always had. Whose parents had built an infrastructure around her talent that convinced her excellence was default rather than earned.

Or maybe something else entirely underneath that. Something I’d find out later, when the classroom forced us into proximity and she realized that the guy in the hoodie wasn’t there to move her furniture.

I smiled.

"Bookshelf by three. Got it."

I turned and walked out of Room 301 without another word. Behind me, Petra Lang’s phone returned to her ear and her conversation resumed seamlessly, the interruption of my existence already erased from her immediate priorities.

The Oracle Feed updated as I walked back down the hall toward the elevator.

Quest Progress: First Impressions (0/3 heroines)

Note: Subject Petra Lang did not register interaction as introduction. No impression established.

No impression. Zero gauge. She’d looked at me and seen background.

Good.

That meant when she found out who I actually was, the recalibration would hit twice as hard. There is nothing more satisfying than watching someone who dismissed you realize their initial assessment was catastrophically wrong. I’d seen that expression on people’s faces during the entrance exam. On Sloane’s face when I first demonstrated Spectral Reach. On Diane’s face when she watched the security footage.

Petra Lang would wear that expression soon enough. Probably within the first week of classes when she discovered that the delivery boy she’d dismissed with less attention than her white roses had ranked twenty spots above where her recommendation track placement would have landed on the general exam.

The elevator carried me back down to the ground floor. I grabbed my duffel from the couch where I’d left it, slung it over my shoulder, and headed for the East Tower entrance. Second floor. Room 205. My apartment. My space. Seven hundred fifty square feet of walnut desk and sage reading chair and a mattress that Diane had selected with the same attention she brought to managing the public images of California’s highest-ranked Heroes.

Three heroines by Friday. Petra Lang hadn’t counted. But the week was young and I lived in a building full of women whose power the Hero industry couldn’t ignore and whose names I would learn one by one, starting now.

The elevator opened on the second floor of the East Tower. The hallway stretched out before me, quiet and empty and waiting.

Room 205 sat at the far end.

I walked toward it.