The room detonated.

Not literally, though Sloane wasn’t present so the distinction felt academic. What happened was twenty teenagers who’d spent two weeks being evaluated, criticized, and systematically stripped of their illusions about hero work suddenly realized that someone among them was about to receive actual institutional power, and every single one of them wanted it.

Caden’s hand shot into the air before Steele finished her sentence. Not his standard lazy raise where he let gravity do most of the work and his wrist did the rest. Full extension, straight up, shoulder engaged, the posture of someone who had apparently been waiting for this specific opportunity since orientation and had been concealing that ambition beneath six layers of comedic timing and light manipulation.

"Self-nomination," Caden announced with a grin that communicated he found the entire concept of authority hilarious and also that he fully intended to wield it. "I’m putting my name in."

Marco leaned sideways. "You can barely put your name on assignments."

"Irrelevant. The people love me."

"Which people."

"All of them. I’m polling extremely well in the Caden Holt demographic."

Theo’s hand went up next. Of course it did. Theo Park was the human equivalent of comfort food crossed with a support column. He didn’t raise his hand with Caden’s theatrical speed. He just placed it in the air like he was holding space for everyone who needed someone reliable, which was his entire personality compressed into a single gesture. Several people around the room nodded immediately upon seeing Theo’s arm, their faces carrying the expression of voters who’d already decided and were simply confirming their positions.

Then Camille stood from her seat entirely, because sitting down while volunteering for leadership apparently violated a personal code she’d never documented but followed religiously. "I’m nominating myself for the female representative position." Her voice carried through the room like a thrown rivet, direct and impossible to dodge. "If anyone has a problem with that, they can bring it to my face. Preferably during sparring so I can address the problem and improve my technique simultaneously."

Nobody had a problem with that.

Nyx raised her hand from the back row without speaking, her grey eyes communicating that the prospect of attending faculty meetings where institutional decisions happened aligned perfectly with her documented hobby of knowing things about power structures that the people inside those structures would prefer she didn’t know. Maribelle whispered something beside her that made Nyx’s neutral expression flicker toward amusement.

Zara’s hand went up. Lyra’s hand went up. Eden’s hand went up, and Maribelle immediately pulled it back down while explaining something to him in a voice too low to carry.

Petra’s planner closed with a click that cut through the noise like a church bell at a wrestling match. She didn’t raise her hand. She simply said "I’ll serve" in a tone suggesting she considered the position already hers and this democratic exercise a formality the institution required before confirming what everyone already knew.

And then.

Percy Mendoza raised his hand.

The notebook stayed on his desk. His navy blue hair caught the overhead fluorescent in a way that made the color look almost supernatural.

His brown eyes held something I’d never seen in them before, not confidence exactly, but a version of courage that didn’t require the absence of fear to function.

He raised his hand with a visible tremor in his fingers and his voice carried enough uncertainty to make the words sound like they might break apart midway through the sentence and scatter across the floor like dropped marbles.

"I’d, um. I would like to nominate myself. For the male representative position." He swallowed. "If that’s, I mean, if self-nominations are acceptable under the current procedural framework, which I believe they are based on the student handbook section four point seven regarding cohort governance, subsection B, which addresses electoral procedures for class liaison positions and specifies that nominations may originate from any enrolled student including the nominee themselves provided the nomination is submitted during the designated nomination window which appears to be, um, right now."

The room went quiet.

Not the tense quiet from before Steele’s announcement. A different kind. The kind that happens when someone does something so unexpected that collective consciousness needs a moment to recalibrate.

Percy Mendoza, the kid who apologized to doorframes when he bumped into them, who kept his notebook angled away from other people’s sight lines because sharing his observations felt like imposing on their attention, who had spent the first week of classes mapping routes and timing elevator congestion and building a thirty-two-page insurance regulatory analysis because he literally could not stop his brain from processing the world faster than he could explain what he found. That Percy Mendoza was raising his hand for class representative.

Rina, sitting beside him, looked at Percy with an expression that mixed surprise with something warmer. Her sheep tail swished once.

I stared at him from one seat over and felt something in my chest that I refused to categorize because categorizing it would require acknowledging that I cared about people in ways the System couldn’t monetize.

"Good," Steele said. "Anyone else?"

Fourteen hands remained in the air across the room. Fourteen out of twenty students wanted this position. Fourteen people who’d been told they barely deserved their Combat Operations placement two weeks ago now competed for the privilege of doing extra work.

I leaned back in my chair and tried to understand what I was seeing.

More paperwork. More meetings. More accountability. More time spent in rooms with faculty leadership discussing curriculum changes and training adjustments while the rest of the cohort continued doing the actual hero work that everyone had enrolled to do.

The representative position was a management track disguised as an honor, a bureaucratic responsibility wrapped in a shiny title, and approximately seventy percent of my class was fighting over it like it came with a sponsorship deal and a corner office.

Why would anyone voluntarily sign up for more administrative overhead?

I’d watched Diane manage fourteen Heroes for two decades and the woman drank sweet tea like it was an intravenous medication because the stress of managing other people’s careers while maintaining her own sanity required constant chemical intervention. C

astillo had literally shown us a case study of an agency that collapsed because nobody understood the paperwork.

The entire hero industry ran on contracts, insurance premiums, and compliance reviews that could strip licenses for documentation inconsistencies.

And these people wanted to add more of that to their already compressed schedules voluntarily?