The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 272: 272 | An Object in Motion

The remaining matches blurred together in that way combat footage does when you’ve already burned through your personal drama quota for the day. H-4 versus V-4 involved a lot of running and someone getting stuck in a ceiling vent.

H-5 versus V-5 ended when Nyx flowed through a wall nobody knew was hollow and captured both heroes before they’d finished arguing about entry protocols.

By the time Radiant called the final match complete, the observation deck had settled into the comfortable exhaustion of students who’d been running on adrenaline for four hours straight.

"Alright, heroes." Radiant stepped away from the monitors and positioned himself at the front of the room, his crimson costume catching every available photon in the observation deck.

The man’s presence was genuinely absurd. Like someone had taken the concept of American heroism and given it physical form with excellent bone structure.

"You survived your first day of Hero Basics. Some of you barely." His eyes swept the room with what might have been amusement. "But you survived."

He planted his fists on his hips in that signature pose, the one that had launched a thousand action figures and at least three breakfast cereal campaigns.

"What I saw today was potential. Raw, unpolished, occasionally inappropriate potential." His gaze landed on me for exactly half a second. Long enough to make a point. Short enough to deny making a point. "But potential nonetheless."

The room sat straighter. Even Petra adjusted her posture, which was saying something given that her baseline posture already looked like she’d been raised by finishing school instructors and marble statues.

"You’re going to fail." Radiant’s smile didn’t waver. "Repeatedly. Spectacularly. In ways that will make you question why you ever thought you were good enough to be here. That’s not a threat. That’s a promise."

He began walking slowly across the front of the room, his boots somehow not making any noise despite the reinforced flooring. "Because failure is the only teacher worth paying attention to in this profession. Success just tells you what you already did right. Failure shows you what you didn’t know you were doing wrong."

Caden leaned toward me without taking his eyes off Radiant. "Is he doing the speech thing? He’s doing the speech thing."

"Shut up," I whispered back. "This is the speech thing."

"The heroes you’ll become don’t exist yet." Radiant stopped at the center of the room, his cape settling around his shoulders with the kind of perfect draping that suggested it had its own dedicated wardrobe team. "They’re waiting for you to fail enough times to find them. To strip away the assumptions and the ego and the comfortable belief that you already know who you are."

His blue eyes found every single student in the room, one by one. "You don’t. Not yet. But you will."

The silence in the observation deck was total. Somewhere in the building, climate control hummed softly. Outside, the afternoon sun had shifted toward evening, casting long shadows across Ground Beta’s simulated cityscape.

"This is day one." Radiant’s smile widened into something that looked genuinely warm rather than professionally heroic. "You can only go up from here. Every single one of you." He clapped his hands together once, and the sound rang through the room like a starting gun. "Now get out of those costumes, get some food, and be ready to do it all again tomorrow. Class dismissed."

He turned toward the observation room’s exit with a casual wave, and then something happened that my brain needed a second to process.

Radiant moved.

Not walked. Not jogged. Moved, in a way that made the air itself flinch. One moment he was standing at the front of the room, cape settling. The next moment the observation room door was open, Radiant was gone, and a wall of displaced air hit the entire front row of students hard enough to send papers flying and hair whipping backward.

Eden caught his lighter before it hit the ground. Felicity’s ponytail slapped Nyx in the face. Percy’s notebook pages ruffled so hard that three of them tore loose entirely.

Then he was just gone. Through the door and down the hallway and probably halfway across campus before the air had finished settling.

"Holy shit," someone said.

"That was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen," Caden breathed.

I stared at the empty doorway where Radiant had been standing approximately one hundred milliseconds ago. The man’s acceleration had to be pushing physics into the territory of suggestions rather than rules.

No wonder his combat ceiling was classified. Deploying that kind of speed in populated areas would turn civilian bystanders into collateral damage through air pressure alone.

The observation deck slowly regained its ability to function. Students stood up on shaky legs, gathering their things and processing the fact that they’d just been dismissed by the number one hero in America through the medium of localized sonic displacement.

I filed out with everyone else, my mind still doing math I didn’t have the equations for. If Radiant could accelerate that fast from a standing start, his combat applications were essentially unlimited. Speed was the ultimate force multiplier. Everything else was just flavor.

The changing rooms were exactly as institutional as I remembered from an hour ago. Grey lockers. Fluorescent lighting. The faint smell of whatever industrial cleaner Halloran used to prevent bacterial colonies from achieving sentience.

I found my assigned locker and began the process of peeling off my hero costume, which had accumulated more damage than I’d realized during the exercise.

The shoulder tear from Camille’s graze had dried into a stiff edge. The back of the compression suit was scuffed from hitting the hallway floor. Twice. One of the amber accent lines had gotten caught on something during the bathroom ambush and now hung loose along my left wrist.

I stripped off the tactical jacket and hung it in the locker, then peeled the compression layer over my head in one motion. The cool air hit my skin and I let myself appreciate the fact that this body had come with genuinely unfair physical gifts.

The Demigod trait had done work overnight that normal training would have taken years to achieve. My abs were defined in ways that made biological sense and also no sense simultaneously. My arms had the kind of lean muscle that suggested regular activity without the bulk of dedicated weightlifting.

I was admiring the results of supernatural genetic optimization when movement to my left caught my attention.

Hiro Sato stood three lockers down, his own costume half-removed and his expression approximately as friendly as a tax audit.

"Can I help you with something?"