The cafeteria hit different at noon.

Every food station operated at maximum capacity, the sushi chef’s knife catching fluorescent light in rhythmic flashes while the ramen station’s queue snaked past the smoothie bar and nearly reached the dessert wall. The noise level sat somewhere between a stadium and a hostage negotiation, two hundred teenagers with superpowers arguing about everything from Aspect theory to who ate the last mozzarella stick.

I loaded my tray with Korean BBQ short ribs, a bowl of tonkotsu ramen so rich the broth looked like liquid gold, four gyoza because I’d earned them, and a bread roll from the bakery station that was still warm enough to steam when I tore it open. The Demigod trait burned through calories like a furnace burning through newspaper, and my body demanded fuel with the insistence of a landlord demanding rent on the first of the month.

The 1-B table was impossible to miss. We’d claimed territory near the south windows during the first week, a fact the surrounding tables seemed to have accepted. Not because we were dangerous. Well, not only because we were dangerous. More because Caden had a habit of making food disappear mid-bite when someone told a particularly good joke, and watching your lunch become invisible tends to kill the appetite of anyone sitting within splash range.

"Finally." Marco didn’t look up from his plate. He had an entire section of the table designated as his personal chip zone, marked by the invisible borders of a man who took snack territory more seriously than most people took national defense. "I was about to send a search party."

"I was in class."

"Yeah, and I was in line for twenty minutes because some 1-A kid couldn’t decide between the tonkotsu and the miso. Twenty minutes, Belmont. That’s a war crime."

I dropped into my usual seat and immediately felt the table’s social geography register my arrival. Caden sat across from me with his feet propped on the empty chair beside him, blonde hair falling across his face in the specific way that suggested he’d either just woken up or spent forty minutes making it look like he’d just woken up. Knowing Caden, the answer was somehow both. Finn occupied the far end of the table with his characteristic boneless posture, his fingers threading invisible filaments between his knuckles while he appeared to be listening to something only he could hear. Percy had his notebook open beside his tray, pen moving in tight strokes between bites of his nutritionally optimized grilled chicken arrangement.

Felicity had claimed the seat to my right before I arrived, her blonde hair pulled into a loose side ponytail that kept falling over her shoulder every time she leaned forward to steal one of Caden’s fries. Her white fitted top had ridden up just enough to reveal a strip of tan stomach above the waistband of her skirt, and every time she reached across the table the gap widened by exactly the amount necessary to make the act of eating french fries look like a federal offense. Ecchi Logic hummed somewhere beneath my awareness, doing absolutely nothing I could prove and everything I could feel.

"You look like someone who just survived something educational." Felicity popped a stolen fry into her mouth with zero remorse.

"Vincent Hale made us give thirty-second statements on camera about why we want to be Heroes."

Caden’s feet hit the floor. "Tell me everything. Did anyone cry? Did Hiro talk about his costume? Did Petra give a speech that sounded like it was written by her mother’s legal department?"

"Petra’s speech sounded like it was written by a committee of her mother’s legal department. And yes, Hiro mentioned his costume."

"Called it."

Rina appeared at the table’s edge like she’d materialized from the furniture itself, sheep mug in both hands, white hair catching the cafeteria’s overhead light in a way that made her look like she belonged in a painting rather than a lunch line. Her spiral horns had that opalescent quality they took on under certain lighting, dark obsidian shot through with purple veins that matched her eyes. She wore the standard Halloran uniform with the skirt hemmed to regulation length, but the fabric couldn’t quite conceal the curves she spent most of her waking hours trying to pretend didn’t exist. Her tail swished once behind her as she assessed the available seating, then settled into the chair beside Percy with the careful deliberation of someone who had spent years learning to take up as little space as possible.

"Is there room?"

"There’s always room." I said it before anyone else could, and the slight relaxation in her shoulders told me the reassurance landed where it needed to.

Percy immediately shifted his notebook to give Rina more table space, a gesture so natural it was obvious they’d developed their own shorthand for coexistence. Rina set her mug down between them, the cartoon sheep grinning up at the ceiling with the vacant happiness of something that had never been evaluated by Steele.

"I heard Vincent’s class is intense." Rina’s voice was soft but carried the specific quality of someone who had decided the statement was worth making before she opened her mouth. "Someone from 1-A told me he makes you watch your own footage and critique yourself."

"That’s Thursday’s assignment."

"That sounds terrible." Rina took a sip of chamomile tea. "I would dissolve."

"You’d dissolve figuratively or literally?"

The corner of her mouth twitched. "Both. Simultaneously."

Across the table, Theo arrived with a tray that could have fed a family of four. The orange and white of his hero costume had been replaced by the standard Halloran uniform, which his shoulders tested with every breath. He dropped into the seat beside Caden with the gravitational certainty of a man who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and had never once worried about breaking a chair.

"Yo." Theo’s smile could power a small city. "Anyone else feel like Dravid’s class just rearranged their entire brain? Because I walked out of there wanting to apologize to every opponent I’ve ever punched without thinking about positioning first."