The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 546

Chapter 546: 546 | Aim Correctly [CASTLE BONUS]

She had watched him for weeks. She had known from the first day, the way she knew when a student was carrying an injury they hadn’t reported, that his file and his body did not match. She had pulled him aside and told him she knew he was holding back, and she had meant it as a challenge, the kind that produced the students whose case records she followed after graduation with the pride she never advertised.

She had not meant for it to become this.

She had not meant for the gap between his registration and his reality to be measured in a creature that no-one could suppress and a boy who stood up at four percent stamina and put himself between the fire and a girl he loved. She had not meant to be pulled out of a killing blow by an eighteen-year-old whose golden aura was still the color of the sky outside her window.

The thing was, she owed him now.

That complicated matters. Imara did not like owing people, and she especially did not like owing a first-year student who was so obviously lying about who and what he was that half the faculty had opened files on him. Cole had the longest one. Radiant, apparently, had something too, though Radiant kept his cards closer than a locked vault and had arrived at the debrief looking like a man who had already reached conclusions he wasn’t sharing.

But she owed him her skull, which was still in one piece, and that was not a debt she could ignore.

So she wouldn’t lean on him. Not hard. He had earned that much.

She would just get to the bottom of it. Slowly. The way she read the difference between a tired student and a student who had given up, cataloging the difference until the pattern resolved. She had three years to teach Class 1-B and one of them was a boy with a legendary weapon on no equipment manifest, a body that healed faster than a Branded, an electrical field his file didn’t cover, and enough raw output to stand in front of a thing that had crushed her charge like it was made of paper.

Why hide it?

That was the part that snagged. She turned it over in the fading light while Sera collected her tablet and her tea and moved with that same unhurried grace that made the whole medical wing feel like the calmest place in the building.

A student with that kind of power should be showing it off. Halloran ran on spectacle. Crane taught an entire course on it. Radiant sat at the top of the national rankings because he understood that a symbol was worth more than raw output, and every ambitious first-year in the building understood the same math. Power meant rank. Rank meant sponsors. Sponsors meant a career that didn’t collapse into a case study in Castillo’s class about agencies that failed to read the paperwork.

And here was Lukas Belmont, sitting on abilities that would have made him the most-watched student in either cohort, deliberately performing at sixty percent, quoting Radiant in interviews about symbols and service, letting people underestimate him.

You didn’t hide power like that unless the power itself was the thing you couldn’t afford to have seen.

Which meant the secret wasn’t the strength. The strength was just the symptom.

"You’ve gone somewhere," Sera observed from the doorway. She had a way of appearing at doorways. Imara had never once caught her walking through one.

"I’m processing."

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