The letter sat on the counter between us, Diane’s manicured nail tapping the section she’d been reading while I’d been busy processing the fact that I wasn’t in the sa class as my girlfriend. My bad.
"Lukas."
"Mm?"
"Lukas Belmont, I know you heard talking."
I had not, in fact, heard a single word she’d said for the last forty-five seconds. But admitting that to Diane Fitzgerald was like admitting to a lion that you were made of steak. You just didn’t do it.
"I was listening, I was just also thinking about—"
Her hand shot out with the speed and precision of soone who had spent two decades managing temperantal Heroes with brand crises and fragile egos. Her thumb and forefinger closed on the upper curve of my left ear in that specific grip mothers reserve for children who have decided that consequences are theoretical. She twisted.
Not hard. Diane Fitzgerald had never once caused actual physical harm in the nine years I’d lived under her roof. But the pressure was imdiate, sharp, and absolutely non-negotiable. I yelped. It wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t quiet. It was the sound a man makes when he rembers, very suddenly, that the woman currently holding his ear had raised a daughter who could detonate concrete with her feelings and had sohow survived the experience with her sanity intact.
"Ow—Diane, okay, okay—"
"When I am speaking to you, sugar," she said in that warm Charleston drawl that sohow made the reprimand worse, "I expect both of those pretty amber eyes pointed directly at . Not off sowhere in the middle distance doing whatever it is you do when you zone out like that." She gave my ear one final squeeze, just enough to make sure the lesson landed, before releasing with the kind of grace that suggested she’d never grabbed at all. "Now. As I was saying, before you decided to take an unscheduled vacation inside your own head."
I rubbed my ear. It was already warm. I was not going to win this.
Sloane covered her mouth, but the laugh escaped anyway. She leaned against the counter with her shoulders shaking, pink ponytail swinging with the force of her amusent at my suffering. Real supportive, babe. Thanks.
〘 Main Quest Complete: Academic Excellence 〙
〘 Final Written Examination Score: Top 7.5% (Third Overall) 〙
〘 Primary Objective Achieved: Top 15% — COMPLETE 〙
〘 Bonus Objective: Top 5% — FAILED (Missed by 2.5%) 〙
〘 Rewards Granted: 500 Scumbag Points. One (1) Silver Gacha Pull Ticket. 〙
〘 Bonus Rewards: Forfeited. The margin was close. The System acknowledges this with sothing approaching sympathy. Approaching. Not arriving. 〙
Third overall. Out of fourteen hundred applicants. Out of the forty who actually got accepted into the Hero Course, I’d placed third, which put in the top seven and a half percent of the entire applicant pool. Two and a half percentage points from the bonus tier. Two and a half points from an extra three hundred SP and a Gold pull with selection.
That stung more than Diane’s ear twist, honestly.
But five hundred SP and a silver ticket weren’t nothing. My total climbed to eight thousand one hundred forty, which was a war chest by any asure. The silver ticket joined the growing collection in my inventory like a consolation prize that was still worth taking to the bank.
Third place. The Unmarked kid who manifested two months ago placed third in the hardest Hero academy entrance exam on the planet. Radiant himself delivered my acceptance ssage. If soone had told the original Lukas Belmont that his body would be doing this nine years after his parents died, the kid probably would have cried.
The soul currently running the body was too busy getting his ear yanked by a pink-haired CEO to cry about anything.
"Are you back with us?" Diane asked, her tone the specific brand of sweet that ant she was about three seconds from getting an about it.
"Fully present. One hundred percent here. Ear still throbbing, if that matters to anyone."
"It does not," Sloane said, popping a grape into her mouth from the fruit bowl on the counter. "You deserve it. She was explaining the housing situation and you were staring at the wall like it owed you money."
"The housing situation," I repeated, reaching for the section of the letter Diane had been referencing. She slid it across the counter toward with two fingers, her expression clearly communicating that if I zoned out again, the next ear grab would involve significantly more force.
I picked up the pages and started reading.
The housing layout was actually insane.
Halloran didn’t do dormitories. They did mansions. Each Hero Course class lived together in a dedicated residence on campus, and the word ’residence’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence because what I was looking at in the enclosed photographs was closer to a luxury estate than student housing. Class 1-A had their own house. Class 1-B had their own house. Two separate buildings, each sitting on its own section of the Halloran grounds, surrounded by training facilities and connected to the main academic campus by covered walkways.
I flipped to the next page and my eyebrows climbed toward my hairline.
Each student room was a seven hundred fifty square foot apartnt. Not a dorm room. Not a shared suite. A full apartnt with a master bedroom, a bathroom with walk-in shower, and enough floor space that you could actually move around without bumping into your own furniture. The layout drawings showed a bedroom area, a small living space, a study nook built into the wall, and the bathroom, which featured double sinks and a rain shower head that looked like it belonged in a hotel.
"This is where students live?" I said, flipping back to confirm I hadn’t accidentally grabbed a brochure for a resort.
"Top academy in the world, sugar. They invest in their assets." Diane sipped her coffee with the calm superiority of soone who’d known exactly what Halloran housing looked like before either of us opened our letters.
But it got better.
The basent level of each residence house contained a communal bath house and sauna. I read that line three tis. A bath house. With a sauna. In the basent of a college dormitory that was already nicer than most apartnts in downtown Verano.
The photographs showed a space that could have been ripped from a high-end Japanese resort. Stone floors, warm wood paneling, deep soaking pools with steam curling off the surface, and a separate dry sauna with cedar benches. The whole thing was apparently temperature-controlled and available to residents twenty-four hours a day.
"There’s a bath house," I said, sowhat stupidly.
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