Steele let the room settle for approximately fifteen seconds longer than necessary. She possessed an instinct for silence that Radiant lacked, or rather, that Radiant didn’t need. Radiant filled silence with presence. Steele used silence the way other people used loaded weapons.

"Good afternoon, Class 1-B."

The greeting carried no warmth and no hostility. Just Steele, speaking to a room she owned regardless of whose name was on the schedule.

"I can see by your faces that you were expecting someone taller." She took another sip of coffee with zero urgency. "Radiant sends his apologies. His agency required his presence for an operational review that apparently couldn’t wait until after your lesson. Paperwork. Even the Symbol of Hope has to file quarterly assessments."

"So he’s doing... office stuff?" Eden sounded personally offended. "Instead of teaching us?"

"He’s doing office stuff instead of teaching you." Steele’s confirmation carried no sympathy. "Welcome to the Hero industry, Wilkinson. Even gods fill out forms."

The class absorbed this with varying degrees of grace. Hiro looked like someone had cancelled Christmas. Rina clutched her mug tighter, her purple eyes wide with the specific anxiety of a comfort source being removed from schedule. Maribelle whispered something to Eden that made him sit up straighter, which was her particular talent. Petra’s expression didn’t change at all, which was her particular talent.

Camille, from her seat at the far end of the row, looked at Steele with the focused interest of someone who’d just been handed an unexpected opportunity. Her brown eyes had that quality they got before she started firing, the one that said she’d already identified the weak points in whatever was about to happen and was simply waiting for authorization to exploit them.

"So what." Camille’s voice carried across the tiered seating without effort. "You’re here instead. What are we doing?"

Steele’s coffee cup lowered. Her pink eyes found Camille with the weight of someone who appreciated directness but would never say so out loud.

"I’m glad you asked, Ortega." Steele stood from the platform’s edge in one smooth motion, setting her coffee on the nearest surface with a soft click. "Because what I have planned is going to be significantly less fun than anything Radiant would have done, which means it’s going to be significantly more useful."

She walked to the smart board and tapped it once. The screen illuminated with a diagram I didn’t immediately recognize. It looked like a building schematic crossed with a chess board, overlaid with colored zones and numbered positions.

"Radiant teaches you what heroism looks like. That’s his gift. The man walks into a room and every person in it remembers why they wanted to wear the costume." Steele turned to face us, her gold jacket catching the light. "I teach you what heroism costs. That’s mine. And today, the cost is going to be your comfort zone."

She tapped the board again. The schematic expanded to fill the screen, revealing itself as a multi-floor building layout with labeled rooms, corridors, and what appeared to be civilian placement markers scattered throughout the structure.

"This is the Silverbrook Shopping Center. Fourteen months ago, a Villain with a spatial displacement Aspect took seventeen hostages across three floors and held them for six hours while four licensed Hero teams failed to resolve the situation."

The room got quiet. Not Radiant quiet, where silence came from awe. This was a different kind of quiet. The kind that settles over people who just realized they’re about to study something that went wrong and that people got hurt during the going wrong part.

"The eventual resolution required a Rank S Hero intervention and resulted in four civilian injuries and approximately twelve million dollars in structural damage." Steele paused to let the numbers land. "Twelve million. Four people in hospitals. Because four separate Hero teams couldn’t coordinate their approach, couldn’t communicate under pressure, and couldn’t prioritize civilian safety over engagement instinct."

Percy’s pen moved faster. Rina had gone very still.

"Today you’re going to study why they failed." Steele’s voice stayed at the same level it always occupied, conversational and lethal in equal measure. "You’re going to identify the decision points where the outcome changed from manageable to catastrophic. And then you’re going to tell me what you would have done differently."

"With no Aspect use?" Theo asked. His question came from the front row with the straightforward certainty that characterized everything Theo said. No posturing. No performance. Just a guy who wanted to know the parameters before committing.

"With full Aspect use. This is a theoretical exercise, Park. I want to know how you think, not how far you can throw something. You’ll be working in groups of four. Each group receives the same scenario from a different Hero team’s perspective. You have forty-five minutes to prepare a tactical brief and fifteen minutes to present it. Any brief that results in higher civilian casualties than the actual outcome gets the entire group additional conditioning miles on Thursday."

"That feels punitive," Caden said from behind me.

"It’s motivational."

"Those are the same thing when you say them."

Steele smiled. It was the wide, easy grin that communicated she was already having a better time than everyone else in the room and found no reason to apologize for it. The gold trim on her jacket seemed brighter when she smiled, which was either a trick of the light or her Ring Presence leaking out in response to her own amusement.

"Groups." She consulted her tablet. "Team one: Belmont, Ortega, Hardy, Mendoza."

My stomach dropped by approximately three inches.

Camille’s head snapped toward me from across the room. Her brown eyes held the specific temperature of someone who had been avoiding direct interaction for two days and just got conscripted into close quarters.

Felicity’s hand found my forearm under the desk and squeezed once.

Percy made a small notation in his notebook that I suspected was either a prayer or a tactical assessment of our group’s interpersonal dynamics. Possibly both.

"Team two: Park, Walsh, Sato, Osei..."