Chapter 300 | The Bureaucratic Side of Being a Hero [PS BONUS]
Chapter 300: 300 | The Bureaucratic Side of Being a Hero [PS BONUS]
We sat there for another ten minutes finishing our food, the bond between us settling into something warm and steady like embers after a fire burns down. Sloane demolished her chicken sandwich with the same aggressive efficiency she brought to everything else in her life. No small bites. No pretense. Just a girl who burned four thousand calories before noon eating like she meant it.
I watched her wipe her mouth with the back of her hand and then immediately correct herself by grabbing a napkin, which told me more about the competing influences of Diane and Sloane’s own feral nature than any psychological profile could.
"So today’s Tuesday," I said.
"Congratulations on knowing what day it is."
"Which means you’ve got Hero Basics this afternoon."
Her hand stopped halfway to her smoothie. The bond carried a jolt of something raw and electric. Not fear exactly, but that specific frequency of excitement that lives right next door to it.
"With Radiant."
"With Radiant," I confirmed.
"I wasn’t thinking about it."
"Your pulse just jumped thirty beats per minute."
"It did not."
"I can literally feel your heartbeat through our bond."
"That’s an invasion of privacy and I’m filing a complaint with the housing office."
I leaned back in my chair and let her process. The cafeteria noise washed around us like water around a rock. Two tables over, Caden was attempting to convince Marco that ranch dressing belonged on sushi, a crime against humanity that Marco was resisting with increasingly desperate hand gestures.
"Tell me about your Monday afternoon," I said. "What did your class do after lunch?"
Sloane blinked at the topic shift, then relaxed visibly. Safe ground. Academic territory. She could talk about this without her voice threatening to crack from the sheer weight of meeting her childhood hero.
"Hero Agencies and the Bureaucratic Side of Being a Hero," she said, delivering the course title like it personally offended her. "Which is exactly as soul-crushing as it sounds."
"Who taught it?"
"Some woman named Vera Castillo. Used to run agency operations for a mid-tier firm in San Diego before transitioning to academia. Her Aspect apparently lets her read contracts at superhuman speed, which is both the most boring power I’ve ever heard of and probably the most financially useful one in the entire Hero industry."
"That sounds like something Diane would love."
"Mom would marry that woman’s Aspect if she could." Sloane pulled her smoothie closer and sipped through the straw. "The class covered how Hero Agencies function from the inside. Like, the actual operational structure. Not the glamorous part where you fight villains and get sponsorship deals. The part where someone has to file liability paperwork after every engagement, maintain Villain Insurance coverage that costs more than most people’s mortgages, and navigate IHL compliance reviews that happen every three years and can strip your license if your documentation has a single inconsistency."
She paused to see if I was actually listening. I was.
"Castillo spent the first forty minutes walking us through the difference between solo agencies, collective agencies, and corporate agencies. Solo is one high-ranked Hero running their own shop with sidekicks. Collective is a bunch of mid-ranked Heroes pooling resources. Corporate is basically a talent firm that happens to deal in superpowered individuals instead of actors."
"And which model does Diane run?"
"Something between solo and corporate. She manages individual Heroes but operates at a scale that gives her corporate leverage without the corporate overhead." Sloane’s voice carried a thread of grudging pride that she would deny if I pointed it out. "Castillo actually used Mom’s agency as an example during the lecture. Called it one of the most efficient boutique operations in California. Koda nearly lost her mind when she realized I was Diane Fitzgerald’s daughter."
"Koda didn’t already know?"
"Koda knows exactly three things about any given topic: whether she can fight it, whether she can eat it, and whether it would make a good story. Parental employment history doesn’t make the list."
I grinned. "What else did Castillo cover?"
"The Hero Network. How it functions, who gets access, what information flows through it. Basically a restricted website only licensed Pros can use, containing activity reports and intelligence on known Villains. It’s where Heroes post requests for backup when they need an Aspect that covers a gap in their own capabilities." She swirled her straw through the green liquid. "Castillo showed us a redacted version of an actual Hero Network posting from last month. Some agency in Nevada put out a call for anyone with a containment-type Aspect because they had a villain whose power involved converting ambient sound into kinetic force. Regular combat Heroes kept escalating the fight and making the villain stronger because every punch they threw generated noise that the villain absorbed."
"How’d they solve it?"
"Castillo wouldn’t say. Classified. But she pointed out that the Hero who eventually resolved the situation wasn’t a combat specialist at all. She was a Rank B support Hero with a localized sound dampening Aspect that created a bubble of silence around the engagement zone. The villain lost access to fuel and went down in under ninety seconds."
"Rina could do that."
Sloane looked at me sharply. "What?"
"Not the sound thing. The principle. The idea that the most effective solution to a combat problem isn’t always a bigger punch. Sometimes it’s removing the conditions that make the fight possible in the first place."
"You keep talking about Rina like she’s some secret weapon nobody’s noticed."
"Because she is."
Sloane studied me for a long moment, and I felt the bond carry something complicated between us. Not jealousy this time. Something more like recalibration. Sloane processed the world in terms of combat capability and competitive hierarchy, and the idea that a quiet girl with sheep horns and wool generation might represent a more significant tactical asset than a Legendary-class combat Aspect challenged her framework in ways she wasn’t sure she liked.
"Maybe," she conceded. "Anyway. Castillo also covered Villain Insurance in detail. Apparently it’s mandatory for any active Hero but the coverage is garbage. There’s a famous case from three years ago where a Hero’s debut fight caused two million dollars in property damage and her agency nearly went bankrupt paying the difference between what insurance covered and what the actual repairs cost."