The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 313

Chapter 313: 313 | The Girl Was Too Smart for Her Character

The classroom smelled like new carpet and institutional coffee, which meant someone on the facilities staff had made the catastrophic decision to brew a pot in the common area before seven in the morning. The scent followed us through the hallway like a war crime, clinging to uniforms and hair and the inside of my nostrils with the tenacity of something that wanted me to suffer personally.

Room 214 had been restored to its standard configuration since Radiant’s demolition session. The tiered seating climbed in clean semicircular rows toward the back wall, the podium stood at the front where it belonged, and the reinforced wall panels had been swapped back to standard acoustic dampening. No matting on the floor. No equipment racks. No simulation dummies waiting to have their trauma sensors ruined by teenagers with emotional problems and government-sponsored superpowers.

Wednesday morning homeroom. The first official one since orientation week had bled into the actual semester like a wound that refused to clot.

I claimed my usual seat in the third row, center-left, with clear sightlines to the door and the podium. Percy materialized in the seat beside me at the same moment I sat down, his notebook already open and his pen moving across the page in tight, controlled strokes. The kid operated on a schedule that existed outside conventional spacetime.

"You’re trending," Percy said without looking up.

"What?"

"Trending. Your interview from Monday morning. Channel 7 ran the segment during their evening broadcast on Monday night. It was picked up by three aggregator accounts on Tuesday morning. As of six forty-seven this morning, the clip has been shared four thousand two hundred and eleven times across major social platforms."

He turned the notebook toward me. A graph. Percy had graphed my social media engagement in a notebook he carried to homeroom on a Wednesday morning at seven AM.

"The share rate accelerated between eleven PM and two AM, which suggests the content was consumed primarily by adults in the twenty-five to forty-four demographic who browse media during post-dinner wind-down periods. Your name recognition within Halloran’s public discourse sphere has increased by approximately three hundred percent since the broadcast."

"Percy."

"Yes?"

"Did you sleep last night?"

"I slept from eleven fourteen to three forty-two. Four hours and twenty-eight minutes. Adequate." He paused his writing. "I also compiled a folder of every online comment referencing you by name, sorted by sentiment. Eighty-three percent positive, eleven percent neutral, six percent negative. The negative commentary primarily consists of individuals questioning your qualifications based on your late manifestation timeline and three accounts that appear to be bots."

"You compiled a folder."

"It seemed relevant."

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