The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 475: 475 | Heroism Waits For No Schedule

"Radiant does not get tired!" He spread his arms wide in a gesture that encompassed the entire intersection and the city beyond it. "Radiant gets energized by the opportunity to serve! Every rescue is a reminder of why we do this work!"

"Right." Apex didn’t look convinced. "Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at Halloran this morning?"

The timer pulsed in his awareness. Three hours and forty-three minutes.

"I am indeed scheduled to chaperone the Crucible exercise! My students are counting on me to provide guidance and wisdom and the occasional demonstration of proper heroic form!" He was already turning toward the eastern sky, where Halloran Academy sat in the Creston Hills like a beacon of everything the hero system aspired to be. "Those young heroes represent the future of our profession, and I refuse to let them down!"

"Then maybe stop responding to every single call between here and there?"

"Every call is someone in need! Every need is an opportunity to help!" Radiant launched himself into the air with a burst of golden light that left afterimages burned into the retinas of everyone watching. "Heroism waits for no schedule!"

He rocketed eastward, the wind of his passage whipping his cape behind him in a stream of white and gold. The city spread below him in geometric patterns of streets and buildings, morning traffic crawling through arteries that fed into the commercial heart of downtown. From up here, Verano looked peaceful. Manageable. A city that could be protected by a single person if that person tried hard enough.

The blood was dripping again.

He wiped his nose without slowing down and the red smeared across his glove and he pretended he didn’t see it.

Two minutes of flight. Halloran was visible now, the white architecture of the campus catching the morning sun on the hillside. He could see the Crucible’s exterior structure, the massive simulation complex that would host forty first-year students in approximately seventy minutes. He could see the parking lot filling with faculty vehicles. He could see, if he focused, the tiny figures of students making their way across campus toward the muster point.

He was going to make it.

"HELP! SOMEONE HELP US!"

The voice came from below and to his left, somewhere in the residential district between downtown and the hills. A woman’s voice. Desperate. Raw in the way that only genuine terror could produce.

Radiant stopped.

He hung in the air above the city with the Crucible visible in the distance and the timer counting down in his peripheral vision and the blood still wet on his glove, and he turned toward the sound.

Smoke. A column of black smoke rising from a four-story apartment building three blocks south. Orange light flickered in the windows of the top floor. People were gathering on the street below, pointing upward, their voices carrying on the morning air in the universal frequency of civilians who needed someone to do something.

The woman screamed again from somewhere inside that burning building.

Radiant changed direction.

He covered the three blocks in under two seconds, the golden afterglow of his passage painting a streak across the morning sky. The fire was worse than the smoke had suggested. Flames poured from the windows of the top two floors in sheets of orange and red that consumed everything they touched. The heat hit him as he descended, a wall of thermal pressure that would have killed an unprotected human before they got within fifty feet.

The crowd below surged toward him as he landed.

"Radiant! There are people trapped on the fourth floor!"

"My daughter is in there! Please, you have to save her!"

"The stairwell collapsed! The firefighters can’t get up!"

He raised one hand and the crowd fell silent with the immediacy of people who had been conditioned by a lifetime of media to trust that gesture.

"Citizens! I need you to maintain a safe distance! Emergency services are doing excellent work establishing a perimeter, and you can best support their efforts by not being in the way!" His smile never wavered, even as he tracked the structural integrity of the building through visual inspection and recognized that he had approximately four minutes before the third floor ceiling gave way. "Trust in your heroes! We will bring everyone home!"

He launched himself toward the fourth floor windows.

The glass shattered inward as he punched through it, and then he was inside the fire, surrounded by smoke and heat and the screaming of people who had given up hope of rescue. His eyes adjusted instantly, cutting through the murk to identify heat signatures. Four people on this floor. Three clustered in what his brain identified as a bathroom, the only room with an exterior wall and no immediate flame exposure. One more in a bedroom at the end of the hall, not moving.

He went for the one that wasn’t moving first.

The hallway was an inferno. Flames crawled along the ceiling in waves that dripped liquid fire onto the carpet below. Radiant walked through it without slowing down. His costume was designed to handle temperatures that would have vaporized normal fabric, and his body could take punishment that would have killed most heroes three times over.

Most heroes. Not him. Not yet.

The bedroom door was blocked by a fallen beam. He grabbed it with both hands and threw it through the exterior wall, opening a hole to the outside air that created a backdraft surge powerful enough to knock a normal person off their feet. He walked through the flames and found her.

A girl. Maybe twelve years old. Unconscious on the floor beside her bed, her face smudged with soot and her chest rising in shallow breaths that told him the smoke had done its work but hadn’t finished the job.

"I’ve got you." He lifted her with the same gentleness he had shown the little girl in the car, cradling her against his chest as he turned toward the hole he had created. "Nobody dies today. Not on my watch."

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