Chapter 240: 240 | Hero Law and Other Distractions [GT BONUS]
Twenty minutes into Sable Mercy’s lecture on the Unbound Era, I understood two things with absolute clarity.
First, this woman could teach a masterclass on making eighty years of historical chaos sound like a personal indictment of everyone in the room. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t gesture. She stood behind the podium and delivered facts with the same weight a surgeon would deliver a terminal diagnosis, and every single fact landed like she’d aimed it at someone specific.
Second, she was genuinely, distractingly gorgeous in a way that was becoming a problem for my ability to retain information about the legislative history of Aspect regulation.
It wasn’t the obvious kind. It was the kind that crept in through peripheral vision and settled into the back of your skull while you were trying to focus on something important. The way her mouth formed words with no wasted motion.
The way her dark eyes held the room without effort, like holding the room was the default and releasing it would require actual intention. The way the morning light from the classroom windows caught the line of her jaw and made the soft features underneath her professional composure suddenly, aggressively noticeable.
I looked down at my tablet. The syllabus stared back at me. I had read approximately none of it.
"The Unbound Era lasted from roughly 1943 to 2023," Mercy said, and her voice had that quality of someone who has said the correct thing so many times that the correctness has become structural.
"Eighty years. In that time, three hundred and twelve documented Aspect-bearers operated as independent actors in the United States alone. Of those, one hundred and forty-seven were killed in territorial disputes with other Aspect-bearers. Sixty-three were killed by conventional military response. Twenty-nine were imprisoned. The remaining seventy-three either retired voluntarily, disappeared, or were absorbed into government programs whose documentation remains classified."
She let the numbers sit.
"The survival rate for an unlicensed Aspect-bearer operating publicly in the pre-Accord period was twenty-three percent across a ten-year window. The survival rate for a licensed Hero operating under the Accord is eighty-one percent across the same window." Mercy paused. "If you remember nothing else from this course, remember those two numbers and understand what they represent."
Caden leaned forward from behind me. "So the government made heroes legal because unlicensed ones kept dying?"
Mercy’s eyes found him. The attention didn’t change temperature, but it changed quality. "The government made heroes legal because unlicensed ones kept dying and kept killing civilians in the process. The Accord was not designed to protect Aspect-bearers. It was designed to protect everyone else from Aspect-bearers."
Caden nodded slowly. "Noted."
"Good. Continue reading section one, paragraph four through twelve. We will discuss the founding provisions in detail."
I scrolled through the tablet and forced my eyes to process text instead of processing the way Mercy’s uniform sat against her shoulders and the fact that the non-standard placement of her faculty insignia on her left shoulder rather than her lapel suggested she’d made a deliberate choice about drag coefficients and that this was the single most attractive thing anyone had ever done with an institutional pin.
What was wrong with me.
The Ecchi Logic trait pulsed somewhere in the back of my awareness like a second heartbeat. I ignored it. Mercy wasn’t a heroine flagged by the System. She was a faculty member. A former Rank A Hero. Someone whose reaction time the IHL assessment board had described as "approaching the functional limit of biological possibility." The Oracle Feed had no gauge on her and no profile beyond what public records contained.
She was completely, totally, one hundred percent off-limits.
Which was exactly why the Ecchi Logic probability field had apparently decided to make the morning light hit her collarbones at a specific angle that made her skin look like it had been designed in a lab for the express purpose of being looked at.
I hated this ability. I hated it with my entire body, which was currently betraying me by responding to visual stimuli that had nothing to do with the International Hero Law and everything to do with the fact that Sable Mercy had a waist-to-hip ratio that should not have been possible on someone who could outrun light.
Percy’s pen stopped moving beside me. He glanced at my tablet screen, then at my face, then back at his notebook. He wrote something in the margin. I leaned over enough to read it.
You have not scrolled past page three in four minutes. Your reading speed at baseline Intelligence is approximately 340 words per minute. Page three contains 127 words.
I scrolled to page four.
Percy wrote another note.
Better.
The lecture continued for another forty minutes. Mercy covered the founding provisions of the Accord, the twelve signatory nations, the distinction between the academy licensing path and the independent path, and the specific legal consequences of unauthorized Aspect use. Her delivery was clean and unadorned. She said each thing once, correctly, and expected you to have processed it before she moved on. If you hadn’t, that was your problem and she would not be circling back to solve it for you.
She was good at this. Not passionate, not theatrical, not inspiring in the way that made students feel warm and motivated. She was good in the way that a surgeon was good. The information arrived where it needed to be, when it needed to be there, with nothing extra attached.
I took actual notes for the first time since arriving at Halloran. Not because the material was new to me. I’d spent weeks studying Hero Law before the entrance exam, and my hundred-point Intelligence meant I could recall the Accord’s provisions from memory. I took notes because the act of writing gave my eyes something to focus on besides the instructor, and because Percy would notice if I stopped and write another margin commentary about it.
When Mercy finally set her marker down and turned to face the class, the room went quiet with the kind of attention you couldn’t manufacture through volume or intimidation. She’d earned it by being worth listening to. Nothing more.
"Questions."
