The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 301: 301 | A Ceramic Mediator and a Hostile Takeover

"Grande Dame?"

"How did you know that?"

"Lucky guess." I hadn’t forgotten the statuesque woman with violet eyes who’d cornered me at an arcade and tried to recruit me while insulting my parents. Her mall incident was public record. "What else?"

"Standard contract structures between Heroes and agencies. Revenue splits on sponsorship deals. Merchandise licensing rights. The legal obligations agencies take on when they sign a Hero, including liability for any unauthorized Aspect use that occurs on agency premises."

She ticked items off on her fingers. "Honestly, the class made me realize why Mom drinks wine every night. The amount of legal and financial infrastructure required to keep a single Hero operational would bankrupt a small city."

"Your mom handles that for a dozen Heroes simultaneously."

"Fourteen, last time I checked. Fifteen if you count the new signing she mentioned last week."

"Diane Fitzgerald doesn’t get enough credit."

"Diane Fitzgerald gets exactly the amount of credit she engineers for herself, and not one drop more or less."

She had a point. Diane operated with a level of intentionality that made the System look amateurish. Everything about her public image was constructed to project competence without inviting competition. She wanted to be known as exceptional without being known as threatening, which was a tightrope that most people couldn’t even see, let alone walk.

"Did Castillo say anything about the recommendation track?"

Sloane’s expression hardened by a fraction. "You’re asking about Petra."

"I’m asking about the institutional mechanics of a system that lets some people skip the entrance exam while everyone else gets crushed by fifty-foot robots."

"Sure you are." But she answered anyway because Sloane Fitzgerald was constitutionally incapable of passing up an opportunity to share knowledge. "Castillo didn’t address it directly, but she covered the broader issue of academy-to-agency pipelines. Basically, the academy you attend is the first brand decision of your career. A Halloran graduate gets name recognition before they’ve resolved a single case. A graduate from some regional school in a mid-tier city doesn’t, and they might spend years as an agency sidekick before their rank reflects what they can actually do."

"That’s messed up."

"It’s the system. Castillo wasn’t endorsing it. She just laid out how it works and let us draw our own conclusions." Sloane paused. "She also mentioned that some Heroes never work through agencies at all. The Accord technically allows for independent operation above Rank C, but practically nobody does it because the administrative burden is impossible without institutional support. Filing your own case reports, maintaining your own insurance, negotiating your own sponsorships, handling your own legal defense when something goes wrong in the field. It’s a full-time job on top of the full-time job of actually being a Hero."

"Tempest does it."

"Roza Guseva has one assistant and a documented hatred of social interaction. She’s the exception that proves the rule." Sloane finished her smoothie with a final aggressive pull through the straw. "The point Castillo made that actually stuck with me was this: the Hero profession looks like an individual sport from the outside, but it runs on infrastructure. The solo Hero standing on a rooftop at sunset is standing on a foundation built by lawyers, accountants, media managers, insurance brokers, and about forty other people whose names never appear on a billboard."

"Including people like Diane."

"Especially people like Mom." Something softened behind Sloane’s eyes when she said it. "She built a career making sure other people got to be heroes while she handled everything that wasn’t heroic. The scheduling. The contracts. The damage control when Victor Sterling posts something stupid on social media at two in the morning."

I reached across the table and took her hand again. She let me, and the bond carried a quiet warmth that had nothing to do with combat or competition or the complicated mess of romantic entanglements surrounding us.

"She’d be proud of you right now," I said. "Sitting in that class. Learning how the machine works from the inside."

"Don’t make it weird."

"I’m being genuine."

"I know. That’s what makes it weird." But she squeezed my fingers and didn’t let go.

We sat like that for another minute while the cafeteria churned around us. Students from both cohorts moved between tables, some still wearing gym uniforms from morning conditioning and others having changed into civilian clothes for the afternoon. I spotted Percy at a corner table with Rina, their heads bent close together over what appeared to be a notebook comparison session. Rina’s sheep mug sat between them like a ceramic mediator.

"Okay," Sloane said, pulling her hand back with visible reluctance. "My turn. Tell me about your afternoon. You had Aspect Theory with Dravid, right?"

"This morning. And Hero Brand Management with Isabelle Crane."

"Alistair’s mom."

"She wore a mask to class."

"Like a domino mask?"

"Purple. Covering the eye area. She looked like she’d walked off a runway and decided teaching was her next hostile takeover."

Sloane’s jaw tightened in a way that had nothing to do with maternal rivalry. "Is she attractive?"

"She’s Alistair’s mother."

"That’s not an answer."

"She wears stockings to lecture in and her hair is midnight blue and falls past her shoulders in waves that probably cost more than my monthly food budget."

"So yes."

"So objectively, yes. Like Steele is objectively terrifying and Mercy is objectively competent."

"You’re listing women again."

"You asked."

"I regret asking." She stood from the table and gathered her tray with movements that communicated displeasure without crossing into genuine anger. The bond told me the rest: mild irritation at the universe for surrounding her boyfriend with attractive women, amusement at herself for being annoyed by it, and underneath everything else, a bone-deep confidence that none of them were her.

I stood and grabbed my own tray. "What time is your Radiant session?"

"One thirty."

I checked my phone. Twelve fifty-seven. "That gives you thirty-three minutes to process the fact that you’re about to be in the same room as the man who inspired your entire life."

"I don’t need to process anything."

"You’ve been vibrating since I mentioned his name."

"That’s the protein. High metabolism. Aspect-related caloric conversion."

"Your ears are pink."