The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 473: 473 | I Didn’t Have to Hold Back

I maintained neutral expression. Steele maintained neutral expression. The room maintained the kind of silence that happened when two people communicated through the things they chose not to say aloud while thirty-eight ears tracked the frequency of the exchange.

"All four suits are ready and in your lockers as of seven this morning. Check them before Wednesday. If anything doesn’t fit, doesn’t flex, or doesn’t feel right at full extension, bring it to support track before close of business Tuesday. You will not have time to fix problems on Wednesday morning because Wednesday morning you will be inside the Crucible."

Caden’s breath changed behind me, a sharper inhale that he turned into a cough. Felicity’s knee pressed harder against mine. Percy’s pen stopped moving for the first time since I’d sat down.

"Joint exercise. Class 1-A and Class 1-B. Both cohorts deploying simultaneously into the Verano Crisis Response Facility, which those of you who have been paying attention to the curriculum know as the Crucible." Steele set her coffee on the podium with the gentleness of someone handling a loaded weapon. "Four simultaneous crisis environments. Fire, structural collapse, flooding, and hazardous materials. Civilian dummies distributed across all four zones with trauma sensors that will flag every impact, every temperature exposure, and every moment of negligence with the indifference of a machine that does not care about your intentions."

She paused and let the information fill the room like water filling a container, finding every crack and low point.

"Your grade for this exercise constitutes twenty percent of your first semester evaluation. Twenty percent of the thing that determines whether you remain in the Combat Operations track or get reassigned to a department that does not involve other people depending on your performance under pressure. The scoring metric is singular. Lives saved. Not villains neutralized. Not property preserved. Not how good your beam looks in slow motion." Her eyes swept past Hiro, who had the decency to look chastened. "People alive at the end who were not alive at the beginning of your intervention. That is the only number that matters. That is the only number I will read when I assess whether this cohort deserves the investment this institution has placed in them."

Eden stopped clicking his lighter.

"Odette Reyes of the Lang Agency will attend as a credentialed floor observer with faculty-level access to trauma sensor feeds." Steele’s voice carried the particular weight of someone delivering information that she had opinions about and was choosing to present without those opinions. "She will not interact with students during the exercise. She will not evaluate your performance for ranking purposes. She will observe. What she does with those observations afterward is between her, her agency, and whatever conclusions she reaches about the people she watches."

Petra’s pen scratched across her planner in the sharp strokes of someone documenting details that might matter in fourteen hours. Her posture had not changed since Steele began speaking, which meant Petra had already known this information and was merely confirming her existing intelligence against the official record.

"Your class representatives, Belmont and Lang, attended a coordination meeting with 1-A’s representatives on Friday. The amended brief has been submitted to faculty and approved with modifications." Steele glanced at her tablet. "The weighted randomization protocol for team assignments was accepted. You will receive your squad designations and environmental assignments Tuesday evening. Study the brief. Study the environment specs. Study each other’s capability profiles, because the person standing next to you on Wednesday will be someone from 1-A that you have not trained with, and the hundred and twenty seconds you lose trying to figure out what they can do is a hundred and twenty seconds a civilian dummy bleeds."

Theo raised his hand. "Are we graded individually or as squads?"

"Both. Individual scores determine your personal ranking. Squad scores determine whether your name appears on the list of students I recommend for advanced track consideration."

The room’s energy shifted from apprehension into something harder and more complicated. Advanced track. The two words that lived inside every combat operations student’s chest like a second heartbeat, the three-year program with facilities inaccessible to standard students, the pipeline that produced the Heroes whose names ended up on billboards and sponsorship contracts and the kind of rankings that Diane managed for a living.

"Wednesday. Oh eight hundred muster. Oh nine thirty deployment. Exercise duration: four hours. Mandatory recovery period afterward. Full debrief Thursday morning." Steele picked up her coffee and drank without breaking eye contact with the room. "Questions."

The room generated eleven questions in ninety seconds. Camille asked about inter-cohort communication protocols. Theo asked about medical response procedures within the simulation. Nyx asked whether the Crucible’s surveillance system archived footage for later institutional review, a question that carried implications she did not elaborate on. Percy asked about the trauma sensor threshold tolerances and whether the flooded sublevel specifications matched the amended brief his recommendations had influenced, and Steele confirmed they did with a nod that carried three milligrams of respect.

Hiro asked whether there would be cameras suitable for capturing his Corona beam at maximum output, and Steele told him to focus on saving people rather than his highlight reel.

I sat in my chair and let the information settle across the landscape of everything I already knew while the debuff hummed at the base of my skull like a persistent migraine and the Oracle Feed tracked the room’s rising stress signatures without generating useful commentary.

Wednesday. The Crucible. Joint exercise. Four hours.

I pulled up the debuff timer in my peripheral vision and the numbers glowed with the specific indifference of a System that delivered consequences without malice and without mercy.

Systemic Suppression. Active.

Wednesday at approximately four in the afternoon, the debuff would expire.

I would enter the Crucible operating at eighty-eight percent across all physical stats. Twelve percent slower. Twelve percent weaker. Twelve percent less durable. My reaction time would be degraded by eighteen percent and my stamina regeneration reduced by a quarter, meaning I would fatigue faster and recover slower and every physical demand the Crucible placed on my body would cost more than it should have cost and deliver less than it should have delivered.

I would walk into the most important evaluation of my first semester at Halloran Academy wearing a performance ceiling that I did not choose and could not remove, in front of an agency observer whose entire purpose for attending was to determine whether the fiction of my registration could survive contact with my actual capabilities.

And the debuff would lift approximately six hours after the exercise concluded. Too late to matter.

I leaned back in my chair and something in my shoulder protested, a twinge of muscular resistance that Demigod recovery at seventy-five percent had not fully addressed from morning conditioning.

The thing was, though.

I didn’t have to hold back.

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