The Oracle Feed pulsed softly in my peripheral vision.

The System remained silent.

I crossed my arms and watched my classmates campaign for the privilege of attending meetings.

Then something landed on my desk.

Not something. Someone.

Felicity Hardy planted herself on the edge of my desk in a single motion that combined athletic grace with absolute disregard for personal space boundaries, furniture protocol, and the fact that we were currently in a classroom during an official announcement. She swung her legs up and over, rotating sideways so her body faced me from above, and settled onto the wooden surface with the confidence of someone who had decided this desk belonged to her and the universe was welcome to disagree.

Her legs crossed at the ankle and hung over the side closest to me.

I tried to lean back.

Her thigh landed against my forearm.

The contact registered through my nervous system like a voltage spike. Not because Felicity was touching me, that happened daily and I’d developed something approaching immunity to her casual physicality. But because today she wore the regulation charcoal stockings that Halloran required with the uniform skirt, and those stockings covered thighs that I had been aggressively not thinking about since the moment she sat down, and now my hand rested against the smooth fabric stretched across the softest skin I’d encountered outside of Sloane’s bedroom and Diane’s office.

My fingers sat against the outside of her left thigh where the stocking material clung to the generous curve of muscle and softness that Felicity’s athletic build produced. The fabric was warm. The warmth radiated through the material and into my palm with the kind of directness that the Ecchi Logic trait usually required several minutes of environmental manipulation to orchestrate, except Felicity had accomplished the same result in approximately one point four seconds through the simple act of sitting on my desk without asking permission.

The stocking material was impossibly smooth under my fingertips. Not silk, something synthetic that captured body heat and redistributed it across the surface in a way that made the fabric feel alive. Her thigh pressed against my hand with the weight of someone who’d noticed exactly where my arm was and chosen to sit there anyway, which was either coincidence or the most confident tactical positioning I’d witnessed since Sigma herded Monolith into a collapsing building.

Felicity swung her legs. Once. Twice. The motion shifted her weight across my hand and forearm, sliding the stocking material against my skin in a rhythm that felt deliberately calibrated to make rational thought progressively more difficult.

She looked down at me.

From this angle, with the overhead fluorescents behind her and her blonde ponytail catching light, Felicity Hardy appeared like a painting someone had commissioned specifically to ruin my concentration during institutional announcements. Her blue eyes carried that particular warmth she reserved for moments when she wanted something and had already decided she was going to get it. The freckles across her nose stood out against skin that had gone slightly pink, though whether from the classroom’s temperature or from the fact that she was currently sitting on my desk with her thigh pressed against my hand remained an open question.

"So." She tilted her head. The ponytail shifted. A strand of blonde hair fell across her collarbone and disappeared beneath her collar. "Are you gonna go for class rep?"

I looked at her thigh against my hand. Looked at her face. Looked at the fourteen raised hands around the room. Looked back at her face.

"I was planning to sit this one out."

"Wrong answer." She swung her legs again. My hand moved with the motion, fingers catching against the stocking’s seam along the outside of her thigh where the fabric gathered slightly over the fullest part. The contact produced a sound from somewhere in the vicinity of my hindbrain that I did not permit to reach my vocal cords.

"You’re trending on social media. Radiant personally acknowledged you during the first class. Steele pulled you aside to tell you she knows you’re holding back and intends to push you harder than anyone else. You have the most recognizable name in the cohort thanks to your parents and the most recognizable face thanks to that interview. If you don’t run for rep, someone less qualified gets the position, and then you spend the entire year complaining about decisions made without your input while pretending you’re too cool for institutional responsibility."

"I don’t complain."

"You complained about the cafeteria’s ramen seasoning for eleven minutes on Thursday."

"That was advocacy for culinary standards."

Felicity’s foot swung forward and tapped against my knee. The stocking whispered against her skin with the motion. I watched the fabric stretch across the curve of her thigh as her leg extended, the charcoal material going slightly transparent where it pulled tightest against her, and I made myself stop cataloguing that information before the Oracle Feed decided to start tracking it.

"You need this, Lukas." Her voice dropped half a register, losing the performative brightness and finding the real Felicity underneath, the one who’d told me she lacked genuine friends and wanted someone who’d saved her life to acknowledge that connection meant something. "You keep saying you want to be the number one Hero. That you want to be what Radiant represents. The symbol. The face that makes people feel safe just by existing. You think that happens by sitting in the back row and letting other people make decisions about your trajectory?"

She had a point.

I hated that she had a point.

The number one Hero didn’t avoid institutional responsibility. The number one Hero shaped the institution around himself.

Radiant hadn’t achieved his position by being the strongest fighter in the room.

Radiant had achieved his position by being the person everyone trusted to represent what heroism meant, and trust came from visibility, from showing up to the meetings and the decisions and the unglamorous administrative work that determined how power was distributed and who benefited from it.

Diane had told me the same thing a hundred different ways across nine years of watching her manage other people’s careers.

The person in the room when decisions happen controls the outcome.

The person who hears about decisions afterward manages the consequences.

I want to be in the room where it happens.