The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 249

Chapter 249: 249 | Today’s Lesson is About Three Seconds [GT BONUS]

The silence lasted exactly one point three seconds. I know because my brain counted it involuntarily, the way you count the gap between lightning and thunder to figure out how far away the storm is.

This storm was zero feet away.

Rina’s mug slipped from her fingers. The ceramic hit the seat fabric with a dull thump and rolled, chamomile tea spreading across the padding in a slow brown circle that she did not notice because her purple eyes had gone so wide they’d consumed her entire face. Her horns caught the fluorescent light and her tail went rigid, pointing straight up like a startled cat’s.

Eden stood up from his chair. Just stood. His lighter clattered to the floor and his mouth hung open in a perfect circle, and the sound that came out of him was something between a laugh and a sob and a word that might have been "holy" but never got the rest of the sentence attached.

"RADIANT!" Koda screamed from wherever she was watching. That voice carried from the hallway, through a closed door, and somehow arrived in Room 214 at concert volume.

No. Wait. That was from 1-A’s room two doors down. Their class could hear him through the walls.

Radiant filled the demonstration floor the way the sun fills a room when you open the curtains. Not by demanding attention but by existing at a scale that made everything else in the space feel like furniture arranged around him. The crimson and white costume moved with his body as he turned, taking in the rows of frozen students, and every movement looked choreographed despite being completely natural. His shoulders were broader than the doorframe he’d just demolished. His forearms were thicker than my thighs. And his smile, that legendary, indestructible, billion-dollar smile, held enough wattage to power the building’s emergency lighting for a week.

"I know what you’re thinking!" His voice dropped from the theatrical boom to something merely deafening. "Why is the number one Hero standing in your classroom?"

Nobody answered. Nobody could. Petra’s composure had cracked for the first time since I’d met her, her emerald eyes wide and her leather planner abandoned on her desk. Vivienne’s chin had lifted from its perpetual analytical tilt into something that looked like genuine surprise, and Vivienne did not do genuine surprise. Even Lyra, who existed in a permanent state of molecular composure, had shifted forward in her seat by an inch.

"Because HERO BASICS is not about theory!" Radiant slammed one fist into his open palm and the impact generated a shockwave that ruffled papers three rows deep. "It’s not about laws or classifications or which box the IHL puts your Aspect in!"

He paced across the matting with strides that covered six feet each, and the floor groaned under him in a way that suggested the building’s structural engineers had made optimistic assumptions about their load-bearing calculations.

"Hero Basics is about THIS." He stopped center stage and spread his arms wide enough that his fingertips nearly touched both reinforced walls simultaneously. "The moment when everything goes wrong and you have three seconds to decide who you are!"

My Oracle Feed sat completely dark. No gauge readings. No probability assessments. No tactical recommendations. The System had gone silent the moment Radiant entered the room, and I couldn’t tell whether that meant the System was calculating something so enormous it required all available processing power, or whether even the Scumbag System knew better than to run analytics on Radiant while he was standing twenty feet away and generating enough ambient energy to register on seismographic equipment.

Caden’s hand appeared on my shoulder from behind. His grip was tight enough to communicate actual emotion rather than his usual casual performance.

"Dude," he whispered. "Dude. Dude. That’s actually him."

"I know."

"He’s actually here. In our room. Standing on our floor."

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