The period between raising my hand and walking out of Room 214 lasted approximately eleven minutes. In that time, fourteen separate conversations erupted across the tiered seating, three of which directly concerned whether I was serious, two of which concerned whether Percy was serious, and one of which was Caden pitching Marco on the idea of campaign merchandise featuring a cartoon version of Caden’s face with the slogan "VOTE HOLT: I PROMISE NOTHING."

Marco told him the slogan was the most honest thing he’d ever said and also guaranteed to lose.

Steele let the chaos run for exactly the amount of time it took her to finish her coffee, then dismissed us with a reminder that nominations closed Wednesday morning and that she expected the process to remain civilized. Her definition of civilized, based on two weeks of observation, meant nobody ended up in the medical wing. A low bar for a room full of teenagers who could manipulate light, generate explosive projectiles, and paralyze people with a single spoken word.

I gathered my materials and stood. Felicity fell into step beside me with the gravitational inevitability she’d perfected over the past week, her arm finding its usual position threaded through mine before I’d finished zipping my bag. Behind us, Caden’s voice carried through the hallway at a volume suggesting he believed volume equated to voter turnout.

"Listen, the thing about me is I CONNECT with people. I have RANGE."

"You have range because you disappear during training and people assume you’re somewhere important." Marco’s response landed with the casual brutality of someone who’d been friends with Caden long enough to weaponize honesty.

"That IS importance, Marco. The mystery IS the brand."

Percy appeared at my left shoulder without transition, his notebook open and his pen hovering above a fresh page. He’d written ELECTION ANALYSIS at the top in capital letters and already begun subdividing the page into columns labeled CANDIDATES, PLATFORM STRENGTHS, VOTER DEMOGRAPHICS, and a fourth column simply marked VARIABLES.

"I’ve identified seventeen potential voter motivations among our cohort based on observed behavioral patterns over the past twelve days," Percy said, his voice carrying the specific tone of someone who had been waiting approximately nine minutes to deliver this information and could not hold it for a single second longer. "Eleven of those motivations are predictable. Six involve interpersonal dynamics that are, um, statistically complicated."

"Statistically complicated how?"

Percy’s eyes flicked toward Felicity’s arm linked through mine, then toward the hallway behind us where Camille walked with Zara, then toward the stairwell where Petra had already vanished.

"I’m still calculating the variables."

Felicity leaned across me to address Percy directly, her blonde ponytail swinging close enough to brush my jaw. "Percy, are you running his campaign or running against him?"

"Both scenarios remain under consideration."

"That’s the most diplomatically terrifying thing anyone has said to me today." Felicity squeezed my arm. "I love this school."

We reached the hallway junction where paths diverged toward different afternoon sessions. Percy peeled off toward the library with a promise to deliver voter analysis by dinner, his blue hair disappearing around the corner with the focused trajectory of someone whose Aspect ran constantly and whose brain never fully stopped organizing the world into processable categories. Felicity released my arm and took two steps backward while maintaining eye contact, her blue eyes bright with something between amusement and genuine investment.

"Start thinking about what you actually stand for, Belmont. Not the interview version. Not the Diane-approved version. The real one."

She turned and walked toward her next class with the unhurried stride of someone who’d said exactly what she meant and trusted the recipient to handle it.

I stood alone in the hallway for approximately four seconds.

The Oracle Feed pulsed once.

No quest notification. No gauge update. No mission parameters or tactical recommendations.

Just a single line of text in the System’s clean bracket notation:

The host has voluntarily entered a competitive social structure requiring public performance, peer evaluation, and institutional visibility.

A pause.

This will be entertaining.

I dismissed the notification and headed toward Aspect Development Lab, where Dravid would spend ninety minutes watching me pretend that four amber constructs represented the entirety of my capability while his grey eyes cataloged every inconsistency between my registered output and my actual performance.

The walk took seven minutes. I spent six of those minutes thinking about what Felicity had asked.

What I actually stood for.

Not the version I’d given Elena Vasquez on camera. Not the brand positioning statement that Crane would approve. Not the careful narrative Diane had been constructing around me since the day she picked up an orphan from a government facility and decided to turn him into something.

The real answer was ugly and simple and I’d been avoiding it since the day I opened my eyes in this body.

I wanted to matter.

Not in the abstract sense that every teenager with an Aspect wants to matter. Not in the Radiant sense of being a symbol that makes civilians feel safe. Those were true enough, and I’d meant them when I said them. But the core of it, the thing that drove every decision from the first morning in the Fitzgerald kitchen to raising my hand eleven minutes ago, was more selfish than any of those noble framings.

I wanted to be the person in the room that nobody could ignore.

I wanted to walk into Halloran, into agencies, into the Hero rankings themselves, and have every single person present understand that I belonged there by right rather than by charity. That the Unmarked kid, the dead heroes’ son, the ward who lived in someone else’s guest room for nine years, was not a footnote in anyone else’s story but the main character of his own.

The Scumbag System hadn’t created that desire. The System had simply identified it, monetized it, and built a progression framework around a hunger that already existed before the first notification ever appeared in my vision.

Felicity was right. I needed this position. Not for the access, not for the meetings, not for the institutional leverage.

I needed it because being elected by nineteen people who’d watched me fight, fail, recover, and improvise for two weeks straight would mean something that no gacha pull could replicate. It would mean that in at least one room in the world, the people who knew me best had looked at who I actually was and decided I deserved to represent them.

That was worth more than eight hundred Scumbag Points.

That was worth more than anything the System had ever offered me.