The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 550

Chapter 550: 550 | The Man Everyone Paid To See

The walk to the stage took ninety seconds. Radiant used the time the way he always did, folding Arthur down into the smallest possible box and setting him aside, so that by the time the stage manager pointed and the applause sign lit, there was nothing left in the man but the man everyone had paid to see.

He stepped through the gap in the set, and the studio audience came up out of their seats.

The sound hit him like weather. Two hundred people on their feet, screaming, phones up, faces lit with the specific joy of being in a room with the number one Hero in America eleven days after the country had watched forty children nearly die on their screens. He raised one hand, and the noise redoubled, and he let it wash over him for exactly as long as it took to reach the chair across from Sabrina Jane’s desk.

He sat. The frame of the chair groaned under his weight. The audience laughed. He laughed with them, a big, easy sound that broke the room’s tension.

This was the rhythm he knew. The rhythm he had played for thirty years. Walk in, sit down, make them feel safe. Make them feel like the world was still standing and would continue to stand because he was in it. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Sabrina Jane sat behind her desk, a vision in an emerald blazer with red-gold hair and dagger earrings. She waited for the noise to die with the patience of a twenty-year veteran.

Her desk was glass and chrome. Her smile was professional. The lights were hot enough that Arthur would have been sweating by now, but Arthur was not here.

"Radiant," she said. "Thank you for being here."

"Thank you for having me, Sabrina. Although I have to say, your green room coffee is a crime against the state of California, and someone should be arrested."

The audience laughed. Sabrina’s mouth quirked, just enough to show she was in on the joke. In the wing, past the lights, Radiant could feel Marlene’s presence more than see it, a shape at the edge of the dark, arms crossed. Nancy would be there too, probably holding a tablet, probably already tracking social media response to the first thirty seconds of his entrance.

"We’ll get the DA on it," Sabrina said. She folded her hands on the desk. Her expression shifted, and Radiant watched it happen, the way a good interviewer could change the temperature of a room with nothing but a look. "Radiant. Eleven days ago, an organization calling itself the Twilight Society sealed forty first-year students inside a training facility at Halloran Academy. Two instructors were seriously injured. The country watched a lot of it happen in real time."

She paused. The audience had gone still now. Phones were still up, still recording, but the energy had changed. This was what they had come for. Not the jokes. Not the applause. This.

"I want to start where I think most people’s hearts are," Sabrina said. "The students. Are they all right?"

"They’re extraordinary," he said.

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