The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 304: 304 | A Kingdom Built on Resentment [PS BONUS]

Percy took the chair on my other side and immediately began documenting the room’s dimensions, noting the distance between each chair and the smart board with quiet intensity.

Rina appeared in the doorway, hesitated for the length of one full breath, then walked to the chair beside Percy and sat without her usual preamble of apologies.

The sheep mug was conspicuously absent.

Her white hair fell across the collar of her blazer, and her horns caught the afternoon light with that opalescent quality that made them look carved from something more interesting than bone.

She caught me looking and offered a small nod. Not a smile. Something quieter than a smile, but warmer than politeness.

Camille entered and chose a seat at the opposite end of the table from me, her jaw set at the angle that communicated she was pretending I didn’t exist with such aggressive commitment that the pretending itself became a declaration. Her folder sat in front of her unopened, her arms crossed over the charcoal blazer that fit her body the way combat gear fits soldiers, which is to say it technically covered everything while somehow drawing attention to the exact contours it was supposed to obscure.

Petra came in last, because of course she did. She walked to her chair with the unhurried grace of someone who believed the class could not properly begin without her, settled her leather planner on the table’s surface with a soft click, and opened it to a page that already contained handwritten notes for a lecture that hadn’t started yet. Her emerald eyes swept the table once, found me for exactly half a second, and moved on.

The corner of her mouth twitched. Not a smile. Something closer to a warning that I had been weighed, measured, and filed under a category I would learn about later.

The room filled around me. Nyx and Maribelle claimed adjacent seats with the synchronized movement of people who had been orbiting each other since day one, Nyx’s choker catching light as she leaned back in her chair with the looseness of someone who had decided comfort was more important than posture.

Theo took a seat beside Camille and immediately began radiating the kind of friendly warmth that made everyone within three chairs feel marginally better about their lives without quite understanding why.

Percy settled into a middle seat with his blue hair catching the overhead lights in a way that made ignoring him functionally impossible.

Lyra materialized two seats over with such understated presence that I only registered she was there when the light caught her hazel-gold eyes and the faint shift of her position reminded me she had weight.

Twenty chairs. Twenty students. One instructor who still hadn’t looked up from her tablet.

At precisely two o’clock, Castillo set her mug down with the gentleness of someone handling a live explosive. The ceramic met the wood without a sound. She locked the tablet, placed it beside the mug, and looked up.

"Good afternoon. I’m Vera Castillo. Ms. Castillo is acceptable. Professor Castillo is also acceptable if the formality makes you comfortable. What is not acceptable is late arrival, incomplete readings, or the assumption that this course exists to bore you into compliance with institutional standards."

Her voice carried without effort. Low register. Warm in the way that Southern California accents become warm when the speaker has spent twenty years learning how to make difficult information sound conversational. No drawl. No affectation. Just someone who talked the way she breathed, which was to say without wasting anything.

"This course covers the operational, legal, and financial infrastructure that makes hero work possible. You are here because you believe you will become heroes. This class exists because heroes who do not understand how their profession actually functions become liabilities. Liabilities cost money. Money that comes from agencies, sponsors, and insurance companies who will drop you the moment your liability exceeds your value."

She tapped the table twice with one manicured nail.

"Open your folders."

Twenty folders opened in near-unison.

Inside sat a single sheet of paper bearing a case study. The header read AGENCY DISSOLUTION: VANGUARD COLLECTIVE, EST. 2009, DISSOLVED 2017.

Castillo let us read for thirty seconds. Then she began walking.

"Vanguard Collective was a mid-tier agency operating out of Sacramento. Six licensed heroes. Combined case resolution rate of seventy-one percent. Public approval averaging sixty-six percent across all members. Revenue of approximately four million annually from government contracts and sponsorship agreements."

She stopped behind Theo’s chair.

"On paper, a functioning agency. In practice, a time bomb. Can anyone identify why?"

Silence.

Then Percy’s pen stopped moving.

"The revenue split," he said. His voice came out steadier than I expected. Quieter than the stutter he defaulted to in larger classes but firm enough that Castillo turned toward him with genuine attention. "Four million split across six heroes after agency overhead, insurance premiums, equipment costs, and legal fees leaves each hero with approximately four hundred thousand annually before personal taxes. That’s below the median income for Rank B heroes in California, which means the agency was either underpaying its heroes or operating on margins too thin to absorb any disruption."

Castillo’s eyebrows rose by a fraction of a degree. "Name?"

"Percy Mendoza. Room 204."

"You included your room number."

"Force of habit. I apologize."

"Don’t apologize. Your analysis is correct." She resumed walking. "Vanguard Collective was underpaying three of its six heroes while the agency’s founder maintained a personal draw that exceeded the combined compensation of the bottom two performers. This created resentment. Resentment created performance inconsistency. Performance inconsistency created case resolution drops. Case resolution drops created sponsor withdrawal. Sponsor withdrawal created the financial pressure that eventually forced three heroes to leave simultaneously, collapsing the agency’s case coverage below the IHL’s minimum operational threshold."

She reached the smart board and touched a control that displayed a timeline of the agency’s financial performance over eight years. The graph looked like a heart monitor during cardiac arrest. Steady, steady, spike, crash.

"Vanguard Collective did not fail because its heroes were weak. It failed because nobody in the organization understood that compensation equity is the foundation of institutional stability. The founder treated the agency like a personal kingdom rather than a shared enterprise, and when the subjects revolted, the kingdom fell."

Camille leaned forward. "What happened to the founder?"