The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 405

Chapter 405: 405 | What Comes After [CASTLE BONUS]

"I don’t know."

The words sat in the air between us with more weight than any analysis could have carried. Dravid did not rush to fill the space after them. He let the silence do what silence does when a precise man has just admitted the boundary of his own knowledge. It was the most unsettling thing he had said in twenty minutes, and the competition for that position had been considerable.

"When Cole Dravid asks you something, he does not know the answer." He said his own name the way he said everything else. Flat. Complete. A final draft delivered at conversational volume.

"I do not know what Radiant saw when he looked at you. I know that he saw something. I know that he has not mentioned it to me. I know that he has not mentioned it to Steele, or to Dr. Ashby, or to anyone whose communication I have access to." A pause. Precisely calibrated. Long enough for the implication to land but not long enough for me to interject.

"And I know that Arthur Vance does not overlook things."

Arthur Vance.

Radiant’s civilian name. Spoken aloud in an empty classroom on a Thursday afternoon with the casual weight of someone who had graduated from the same academy two positions ahead of the man, which meant Dravid knew Radiant before Radiant was Radiant, before the costume and the golden hair and the booming declarations about hope.

Before the Eastside Cataclysm. Before my parents died buying time for someone Dravid had shared a graduating class with. The layers to this institution went deeper than I had begun to excavate, and every time I thought I had found the floor, someone like Cole Dravid opened his mouth and showed me another basement.

He reached for his cane and lifted it from the podium in a single fluid motion. The movement was economical in the way everything about him was economical. Nothing wasted. Nothing performed.

His blue-black hair shifted as he turned, those few strands that fell across his face staying exactly where they had always been, because they had not been arranged and he had not moved them and they had simply stayed.

The cane settled against the floor with a quiet tap that carried through the amphitheater’s acoustics more clearly than it should have.

"It is now two oh seven," he said. He did not check a clock. He did not need to. "You have cost me seven minutes that I intend to recover before my three forty-five session. If you speak about this conversation to anyone, I will deny it occurred, and I will be believed because my record of professional honesty is unblemished."

He turned his head just enough that one grey eye caught me over his shoulder. Heavy-lidded. Perpetually exhausted in a way that was functionally indistinguishable from perpetual contempt.

"If you need to discuss this further, my office hours are Tuesday and Thursday mornings before class. Do not bring coffee. I have opinions about the brand available in the faculty kitchen and I do not wish to share them."

The last sentence landed as the closest thing to a joke I had ever heard Cole Dravid produce. It was also, I was fairly certain, completely sincere. Both things could be true. With him, both things usually were.

Dravid walked toward the observation room door, his cane marking a rhythm against the amphitheater floor that was steady and unhurried and entirely his own. Each tap smaller than the last as the distance grew. The door opened. Closed. The rhythm continued beyond it, fainter, receding down the corridor like the trailing end of a sentence he had finished and had no intention of repeating. Then it was gone.

I sat in the third row of an empty classroom at two oh eight on a Thursday afternoon.

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