The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 476: 476 | My Students Will Understand [CASTLE BONUS]

He flew her down to the street and passed her to the first paramedic who stepped forward, then launched himself back toward the fourth floor before anyone could ask questions.

Three minutes and eighteen seconds until structural failure.

The three in the bathroom were a mother, a father, and a boy around eight years old. They had sealed the door with wet towels and filled the bathtub with water in case they needed to submerge themselves. Smart. Resourceful. The kind of civilians who gave themselves extra time by not panicking.

Radiant punched through the wall beside the door rather than opening it and exposing them to the hallway’s heat.

"Good morning!" His voice filled the small bathroom with the kind of cheerful confidence that made people believe things would be okay even when the evidence suggested otherwise. "I have excellent news! Your rescue is currently in progress!"

The mother burst into tears. The father said something that might have been thank you but came out as a sound without consonants. The boy stared at him with the same expression the girl in the car had worn, hero worship in its purest form, the thing that made all of this worth doing.

Radiant gathered all three of them in his arms. The mother weighed maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. The father closer to one-eighty. The boy couldn’t have been more than sixty. Four hundred pounds of human being pressed against his chest as he walked back toward the hole in the wall.

The timer pulsed. Three hours and thirty-one minutes.

His nose was bleeding again.

He felt the warm trickle running down his upper lip and there was nothing he could do about it because his arms were full of civilians and the ceiling was starting to groan above them in the way that preceded collapse. He flew out of the building with all three of them clutched against his body and descended to the street in a controlled spiral that kept the wind from whipping at their faces.

The crowd cheered.

He set them down and the mother grabbed his arm and said something through her tears that he couldn’t hear over the roaring in his ears. The father was shaking his hand and the boy was tugging at his cape and emergency services were swarming around them with blankets and oxygen masks.

Radiant smiled.

"Another successful rescue! Remember, citizens! When disaster strikes, heroes answer!" He wiped his nose on his glove and the blood smeared red against the white fabric, but nobody noticed because they were all looking at his face and his face was showing them exactly what they needed to see. "Stay safe! Stay vigilant! And have an absolutely outstanding day!"

He launched himself into the air before anyone could ask if he was okay.

The timer read three hours and twenty-eight minutes.

Halloran was twelve minutes away by normal flight speed. He had time. He could make it. The Crucible didn’t begin until nine-thirty, and it was only eight-forty-two. He could be there in time to greet the students, deliver his prepared remarks about the importance of civilian protection, watch them deploy into the simulation environments.

He turned east toward the hills.

"HELP! PLEASE, SOMEONE!"

Another voice. Another direction. South this time, toward the commercial district near the waterfront.

Radiant stopped again.

The explosion came two seconds later, a fireball rising from somewhere near the Strand that painted the morning sky orange. Not an Aspect discharge. Not a gas main rupture. The signature was wrong. Too hot at the center, too cold at the edges. Chemical, maybe. Industrial.

His comm crackled with emergency dispatch.

"All available heroes to the Strand! Industrial accident at the Maxwell Chemical plant! Multiple confirmed casualties! Hazmat protocols in effect!"

Three hours and twenty-six minutes on his timer.

Halloran was twelve minutes away.

The Maxwell plant was eight minutes in the opposite direction.

Radiant hung in the air above the city with the blood drying on his glove and the timer counting down and forty first-year students waiting for him to chaperone their most important evaluation of the semester, and he thought about what it meant to be a hero.

Not what the IHL Accord said it meant. Not what the ranking system measured. Not what the sponsorship deals and the media coverage and the public approval ratings suggested.

What it actually meant.

Reina Belmont had known. She had known it better than anyone he had ever met, and she had died proving it. Twenty-seven civilians rescued from a collapsing parking structure in thirty-four minutes. She had gone back for the last two when her Aspect was already failing and her body was already breaking and she had known, she had absolutely known, that she was not going to walk out of that structure.

She had gone anyway.

Because that was what heroes did. Not the ranked ones. Not the famous ones. The real ones. The ones who understood that the costume was a promise, not a privilege. The ones who knew that every life mattered more than any schedule, any career, any quota of hours remaining on a body that was eating itself from the inside out.

Radiant turned south toward the explosion.

"This is Radiant, responding to the Maxwell incident! I’m inbound, approximately four minutes! What’s the status on civilian evacuation?"

The dispatcher’s voice came back tight with stress. "Three confirmed trapped in the eastern wing! Fire suppression failed! Building integrity compromised!"

"Understood! Clear a landing zone and have medical standing by! Those civilians are coming out!"

He rocketed toward the Strand with everything his deteriorating body could give him, and the timer counted down, and the blood dripped from his nose, and somewhere in the hills behind him, forty first-year students waited for a chaperone who was never going to arrive.

His comm crackled again as he crossed over the waterfront.

"Radiant, this is Halloran dispatch. Dean Mercer’s office is asking for your ETA. The Crucible muster begins in forty-three minutes."

"Tell the Dean I am currently engaged in an active rescue operation! My students will understand that hero work does not pause for scheduling conflicts!"

A pause on the other end. Then, quieter: "Sir, this is the third time this month you’ve been delayed by emergency response. Is everything..."

"Everything is outstanding!" He cut the connection with a tap of his earpiece. "Everything is exactly as it should be!"

The Maxwell plant rose before him, a complex of industrial buildings surrounded by emergency vehicles and a crowd of workers in safety equipment. The eastern wing was fully engulfed, flames pouring from every window in sheets that would have been beautiful if they weren’t killing people.

Radiant descended into the fire.

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