The figure stood in the center of the field, facing away from me, and the golden glow emanating from his chest should have been my first warning.

Hiro Sato occupied the exact center of Field Zeta like he owned the coordinates, like someone had measured the precise geographic midpoint and he had planted himself there as a matter of principle.

His body was positioned in a wide stance with both arms extended to his sides and his chin tilted upward at an angle that suggested either genuine communion with his own power or the world’s most committed selfie pose.

The late afternoon sun caught his profile in a way that couldn’t possibly be accidental.

Corona pulsed from his chest in a steady, rhythmic wash of golden-orange light that turned the late afternoon shadows into something warm and dramatic. The beam wasn’t at combat output.

It was low-grade, maintenance level, the kind of sustained activation that people did when they were working on control rather than force, calibrating the output threshold rather than testing the ceiling.

But even at reduced power, Corona lit the entire field with the specific intensity of a movie set where every angle was designed to make the leading man look like he belonged on a poster.

The grass around his feet looked greener somehow. The trees at the field’s edge cast longer shadows. Reality itself seemed to be adjusting its lighting profile to accommodate his presence.

Hiro’s costume wasn’t on. He wore the standard Halloran training gear like the rest of us, the fitted black fabric and gold accents that marked every first-year in the Hero track, but on him the standard issue somehow looked like it had been tailored.

His black hair was immaculate. An effortless look that must have taken forty minutes to achieve.

His lean frame carried itself with the theatrical confidence of someone who was perpetually aware that he might be photographed at any moment and had organized his entire physicality around that possibility.

Even his breathing looked deliberate.

I stopped at the edge of the tree line, keeping the shadows of the branches across my face more out of habit than strategy.

Hiro’s head turned. The Corona output flickered once, a brief dimming that might have been surprise or might have been a deliberate dramatic beat, then stabilized as his dark brown eyes found me across forty feet of unkempt grass.

Recognition flickered in his eyes, quickly followed by a cool assessment. He settled on a neutral mask, but the corner of his jaw was tight. He wasn’t as composed as he wanted me to believe.

Neither of us spoke.

The silence stretched for about four seconds, which doesn’t sound like a long time until you’re standing in an empty field staring at someone whose entire brand identity revolves around being the center of attention and who has just discovered that the space he chose for private practice is not actually private.

Four seconds is an eternity when the other person’s Aspect is literally making the air glow.

Hiro lowered his arms with a controlled grace that managed to look both casual and choreographed.

The Corona glow dimmed to a faint luminescence in his chest that caught the remaining sunlight and threw it back in fractured amber patterns across his training shirt, turning the black fabric into something that looked almost expensive.

His Radiant Presence trait operated at the same constant level it always did, a subtle background effect that made him fractionally more visually compelling than the physical situation warranted, which in the specific context of a deserted training field with golden hour light and nobody else around meant he looked like the opening shot of a Hero recruitment ad.

The kind agencies paid millions to produce. The kind that made fourteen-year-olds decide they wanted to attend Halloran.

"This field is taken," he said.

His voice carried across the distance with the projection of someone who had trained at volume since childhood. Not loud, exactly. But present, the way a spotlight is present, filling the space it occupies without giving you the option to look somewhere else. Every syllable landed with the precision of someone who knew exactly how sound traveled across open ground.

"Didn’t see a reservation sign," I said.

"I was here first."

"Cool. I can be here second."

Hiro’s jaw tightened by approximately one millimeter, a tell so small that most people would have missed it entirely. His dark eyes assessed me the way they’d assessed everyone in the cohort since day one, not for threat level or tactical capability but for aesthetic value and narrative importance.

I could practically see the internal ranking system running behind his pupils, the mental filing cabinet opening and closing as he sorted me into whatever category he’d assigned to people whose costume design philosophy didn’t meet his professional standards.

People who didn’t understand the importance of presentation. People who showed up to training fields in standard-issue gear that looked like standard-issue gear.

"You’re the one who kissed Ortega," he said.

There it was. The reason his jaw had tightened. The reason his Corona had flickered when he spotted me.

The thing that had been circulating through the cohort for the past three days in whispers and glances and the specific quality of attention that followed me through every corridor.

"During a supervised training exercise, yeah."

"That wasn’t training." Hiro’s chin lifted a fraction higher. The fading sunlight caught the small beauty mark beneath his left eye, a detail that might have been natural or might have been cultivated, and which he had never clarified because the mystery was more interesting. "That was a spectacle."

"It was effective."

"Effectiveness isn’t the only metric, Belmont. This is about appropriateness." Hiro crossed his arms, and the motion was so deliberately posed that I could see the muscle definition he was framing. "A Hero’s conduct reflects the profession. Every action, every choice, every moment of physical contact carries the weight of public trust. What you did on that floor undermined the dignity of the Hero name."

"The dignity of the Hero name," I repeated, letting the words sit in the air long enough to develop their own weight. "Did Radiant give you that line, or did you workshop it in front of your mirror?"

His nostrils flared. The Corona in his chest pulsed brighter by a full shade, the golden light spreading across his training shirt and casting new shadows across his features. Hiro Sato did not enjoy being mocked. This was not new information. What was new was the specific quality of anger that surfaced behind his dark eyes, something that went deeper than vanity and lived closer to conviction.

"Radiant doesn’t need to give me lines. Radiant embodies what heroism should be. Selfless, dignified, a symbol that ordinary people can look up to without wondering whether the person wearing the costume treats their colleagues as props for personal entertainment."

"I wasn’t entertaining myself."