Chapter 248 | Holy Shit [GT BONUS]
Chapter 248: 248 | Holy Shit [GT BONUS]
We finished lunch with the specific energy of twenty people trying not to think about the thing they were all thinking about. The cafeteria noise swelled and receded around our table like ocean surf, punctuated by Eden accidentally setting his napkin on fire with the lighter and Maribelle extinguishing it with her smoothie while calling him an absolute child in a tone that communicated approximately fifteen years of practice.
Caden made three separate jokes about wall reinforcement, each worse than the last, and Marco laughed at every single one with the loyalty of a best friend whose standards had been demolished long ago.
Percy calculated our optimal departure time, factoring in hallway congestion from 1-A students leaving their own post-lunch session, and Rina appeared from nowhere with her sheep mug, settling at the edge of our table without speaking. Her white hair fell across her face as she stared into the ceramic, and the tension in her shoulders suggested she’d spent lunch eating alone before gathering the courage to approach.
Nobody commented on her arrival. Caden shifted his tray to make room, Marco offered her a chip without looking up, and the space she occupied became occupied the way spaces do when people simply belong in them.
At twelve-forty-seven, Percy closed his notebook and announced departure in three minutes. The table began moving.
The walk from the Athena Wing back to Building C took the full seven minutes, with our group expanding and contracting as other 1-B students merged into the flow. Camille fell into step on my right without greeting or explanation, her stride matching mine exactly and her dark curly hair bouncing with each step. Theo and Lyra appeared from a branching path, Theo’s massive frame drawing a visible wake of personal space as students instinctively gave him room. Zara walked alone at the rear of our group with the focused attention of someone who treated every transit between buildings as a tactical exercise.
Room 214 came into view at the end of the Building C corridor.
Nyx was right. The room had changed.
The podium from Mercy’s lecture was gone. The tiered seating had been compressed backward and upward, creating an open floor space in the center roughly twenty feet across. The floor itself had been covered with impact-rated matting that I recognized from the training fields. And the walls, which this morning had been standard institutional white with acoustic panels, now displayed reinforced composite sheeting bolted at six-inch intervals. Whatever was going to happen in this room, the administration had prepared for significant physical contact with the architecture.
Students filed in and found seats in the compressed tiers. The energy in the room ran hotter than it had for Mercy or Dravid. People sat straighter. Talked less. Glanced at the reinforced walls and the open floor space and the matting and did the same math I’d already done.
I took my seat in the third row with Percy on my left and Caden behind me, his feet conspicuously absent from the back of my chair for the first time all day. Even Caden had picked up on whatever frequency the room was broadcasting.
The clock on the wall read 1:28.
Two minutes.
Petra sat in the top row with her leather planner unopened on her desk, her emerald eyes fixed on the demonstration floor with an expression that combined professional curiosity and aristocratic disdain. Felicity claimed a seat one row up and slightly to my right, close enough that I could see her foot bouncing against the chair leg in a rhythm that betrayed the composure she wore on her face. Rina sat at the far end of the second row with her mug and her tail wrapped tight against her leg.
1:29.
Nyx whispered something to Maribelle that made Maribelle’s golden eyes go wide.
Marco pulled a saw blade from his pocket and turned it between his fingers, the metal catching the fluorescent light.
Theo cracked his knuckles, and the sound echoed off the reinforced walls in a way that the original acoustic panels would have absorbed.
1:30.
Silence.
Nobody spoke. Twenty first-year Combat Operations students sat in compressed tiered seating around an empty demonstration floor lined with impact matting and stared at a door that had not opened.
Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen.
Caden leaned forward. "If this is another Steele power move where she shows up twenty minutes late to make a point about mental conditioning, I’m transferring to the cooking school across town."
The door to the observation room burst open so hard it cracked against the interior wall with a sound like a cannon shot.
A figure filled the doorframe. Filled it completely, shoulder to shoulder, the top of his head ducking to clear the lintel by fractions of an inch. The sun from the observation room’s windows blazed behind him in a corona of golden light that turned his silhouette into something from a cathedral painting.
He stepped through.
Seven feet two inches of physical impossibility walked onto the demonstration floor in a costume that I’d only ever seen in museum archives and documentary footage. Deep crimson bodysuit with white accents across the shoulders and down the arms, blue trim at the collar and cuffs, gold emblem across the chest that caught every photon of light in the room and threw it back at us like a challenge. The old design. The original design. The Bronze Age silhouette that every kid in America had grown up seeing on lunchboxes and action figures and the sides of buildings.
His hair was swept back in the iconic twin horn-shaped bangs, golden blonde and perfect. His jaw could have been used to demonstrate right angles in a geometry textbook. His teeth were white enough to generate their own light source. And his eyes, brilliant sky-blue and radiating something that went beyond confidence into a territory where confidence became atmospheric, swept across twenty frozen teenagers with the warmth of someone who had spent decades making people feel safe just by being in the room.
He planted both fists on his hips, chest forward, chin up, and his smile split his face wide enough to encompass every person in the classroom and most of the surrounding campus.
"IT IS I!"
The voice shook the reinforced walls. The matting on the floor vibrated. Three students made sounds that were not words.
"COMING THROUGH THE DOOR LIKE A TRUE HERO!"
Percy’s notebook fell off his desk.
Caden’s energy drink hit the floor.
Felicity’s hand covered her mouth and her eyes filled with something between tears and disbelief.
And I sat in my third-row seat with every nerve in my body firing at once and my brain refusing to process what my eyes were reporting, because the number one ranked Hero in the United States, the man whose rescue footage the original Lukas Belmont had watched forty-seven times from a bedroom in the Fitzgerald estate, the Symbol of Hope who had maintained a ninety-eight percent approval rating for fifteen years and whose actual combat ceiling remained classified because deploying it in populated areas would constitute a geological event, was standing on the demonstration floor of Room 214 in his Bronze Age costume.
Radiant.
Here.
Teaching our class.
Holy shit.