The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 404

Chapter 404: 404 | The Irreconcilable Picture [CASTLE BONUS]

Dravid did not nod, did not shift his posture, did not adjust the position of his cane against the podium. His stillness score was genuinely terrifying. I had seen people who were good at being still. Dravid existed at a frequency where stillness became a weapon, where his complete absence of movement communicated more than most people’s full body language.

"On what subject."

This was the part where I had to choose between the several truths available and the one truth that would not get me expelled, investigated, or placed in a laboratory. The gap between what I could say and what I needed to say was exactly the kind of information asymmetry Dravid had spent ninety minutes teaching us to exploit, and the irony of deploying his own curriculum against him in real time was not lost on me.

"Three agencies have pulled my file in the last seven days," I said. "My registration is Category Seven, progressive manifestation, which means it triggers an automatic secondary verification if two or more independent inquiries land within thirty days. That trigger should have fired. It hasn’t appeared on the public docket."

Dravid’s expression did not change. His grey eyes remained precisely where they had been, focused on my face with the attention density that his Dead Air signature concealed from the world.

Anyone looking at Cole Dravid from the outside would see a mid-range Channeler at best. The reality underneath was a Legendary-classification Aspect called Suppress that could shut down anyone in his line of sight, and the gap between those two truths was the broadest in the building.

"You are describing a regulatory concern," Dravid said.

"I am describing a regulatory concern that is about to become a personal concern during a coordination meeting tomorrow afternoon with a representative from the Lang Agency."

"The Lang Agency." Something in the flat register shifted by a degree so small that my hundred Intelligence barely caught it. "Margot Lang’s operation."

"Her daughter is my co-representative for Class 1-B."

"I am aware of Miss Lang’s position." Dravid’s cane lifted from the podium by approximately half an inch and settled back with a click that sounded like a period at the end of a sentence. "I assigned her the position."

This information rearranged several things in my understanding of the past two weeks. Steele had told the class that representatives were elected by their peers, which was true.

But class assignments, curriculum design, and the structural parameters within which student elections occurred were faculty decisions. If Dravid had positioned Petra in 1-B specifically, knowing that the Lang family would respond to their daughter’s proximity to a Category Seven registration with federal-level curiosity, then the chess game I was playing had pieces I hadn’t placed.

"You knew this would happen," I said.

Dravid looked at me for four seconds. The seconds passed with the specific weight of a man deciding how much information to release and how much to retain.

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