The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 240

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.

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.

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