Chapter 582 | I Am Glad You Survived

Chapter 582: 582 | I Am Glad You Survived

There were WARDEN pillars stationed at every single building entrance across campus now. Not just the admin buildings or the training complexes, but every building.

The drones had multiplied too. Small ones, maybe the size of a dinner plate, drifting in slow, deliberate patterns along the Academic Spine. They’d pause whenever someone lingered too long in one spot, hovering just long enough to make a point before continuing their patrol routes.

Every single training field now had new signage posted at the gates. Four separate levels of access clearance listed in clean block text. The fields themselves looked exactly the same as they had three weeks ago, but the administrative layer on top of them had thickened considerably.

Then there was the covered walkway leading toward the residential district. Where there used to be just decorative planters with small trees and seasonal flowers, there were now Heroes. Actual licensed Heroes in full costume, standing in pairs at regular intervals along the path, on visible rotation schedules, watching eight hundred teenagers walk past them on the way back to their dorms after a terrorist attack had made national headlines.

The optics were deliberate. The message was clear.

"Fourteen on security contract before the incident," Diane said quietly, following my line of sight as we walked. "Twenty-six now. The requirement used to be two Heroes above Rank B on campus at all times. That’s been doubled to four."

We split at the fork. Sloane’s building up the hill, mine down the branch, the same geometry as three weeks ago except now there were two Heroes standing at the junction and a pillar at each door.

Diane hugged Sloane, then me, longer than she should have in public, then stepped back and became the CEO again in the space of one breath.

"Classes Wednesday," she said. "Text me tonight. Both of you. And Lukas."

"Yeah."

"When Reyes calls tomorrow, let her talk first."

Then she was walking back toward the visitor lot, gold earrings catching the grey light, and Sloane kissed me in front of a licensed A-rank who very deliberately looked at the sky.

1-B Prometheus House smelled like industrial cleaner and burned kettle corn, which meant Caden had already been home for at least an hour.

The pillar at the door said my name and welcomed me back and told me it was glad I survived, and I told it thanks, and then I pushed through into the common room and twelve people turned around at once.

"OH," Caden said, up off the couch, arms already spread. "The GOLD MAN RETURNS."

"Don’t."

"Four million posts, bro. Four million. There’s fan art. There’s a theory you’re a time traveler."

"There’s a theory I’m a government experiment."

"That one’s better, I’m switching to that one." He crashed into me and then immediately flinched back. "Wait. Ribs. Are the ribs a thing still?"

"The ribs are fine."

Marco threw a chip at me from the kitchen island. "You look disgustingly healthy for a guy who died."

"I didn’t die."

"Percy’s document says you were non-responsive for three seconds," Finn said from the couch, eyes closed, filaments drifting off his fingers in a shape I was pretty sure mapped the room’s exits. "That’s dying. That’s the whole definition."

Percy appeared at my elbow with his notebook already open, blue hair flat and combed, collar pins aligned. "Your gait has normalized to within two percent of your baseline. Your color has returned. Your left shoulder still carries a protective micro-adjustment when you reach above sixty degrees."

"Hello, Percy."

"Hello." He wrote something. Then he stopped writing, and he looked up, and for one second the analysis fell away entirely. "I did not like the part where the roster reached your name and nobody answered."

"I know."

"I have adjusted the model." He closed the notebook. "The revised version has you answering."

Rina was in her corner chair with the sheep mug, white hair catching the overhead light, horns opalescent in that way they only go when she’s relaxed. She didn’t say anything. She lifted the mug an inch, which from her is a parade.

And across the room, leaning against the far wall with her arms folded and her blonde-to-brown hair loose, Camille Ortega watched me walk in and said absolutely nothing at all.

Her palms weren’t glowing. That was the tell.

"Hey, Ortega," I said.

"Belmont." A beat. "You’re upright."

"Disappointing?"

"Inconvenient." She pushed off the wall and crossed the room, and she stopped a foot closer than the conversation required, and I could smell cardamom. "You get one. One thing where you throw yourself in front of something and everybody calls it heroic. You’ve used it. Next time you do that math and you come out the other side of it with somebody else standing in the fire, I will shoot you myself."

"Noted."

"I’m not joking."

"I know you’re not." I held her eyes. "That’s why I noted it."

Something moved across her face that she shut down before it finished. Then she walked past me toward the stairs, shoulder brushing mine hard enough to count as a statement, and the pillar in the hallway said good evening, Camille Ortega, and I am glad you survived.

Caden watched her go. Then he looked at me. Then he looked back at the stairs.

"So that’s happening," he said.

"Shut up."

"That’s absolutely happening."

"Caden."

"I’m just saying the gold thing works on women is all I’m saying, I’m not saying anything else, I’m a very supportive friend."

Marco threw another chip at him.

I went up to 205. Key card, pillar, welcome back, glad you survived. Diane’s furniture exactly where she’d left it. Marcus and Reina on the desk in their costumes with the sun behind them.

Eleven days ago I’d stood between a monster and my friends and let something out that I still didn’t have a name for, and now there was a machine at every door in this building that had looked at me for a quarter of a second and said the word anomaly out loud in front of a woman with a stylus.

Thirty days on Sloane’s re-scan. A call with Odette Reyes tomorrow. Classes Wednesday.

I sat down on the terrible mattress, opened the interface, and looked at the number in the corner that had been sitting there since Sunday morning without a single notification attached to it.

The System still hadn’t said anything.

That was the part I didn’t like.