Chapter 555 | A Ghost Town

Chapter 555: 555 | A Ghost Town

The hashtag GoldCloak had accumulated approximately four million posts in the few days since the incident. Most of the posts speculated about who I was. They questioned what my Aspect actually did. A popular theory was that I was a time-traveling Hero from the future to prevent a tragedy.

Someone had made a detailed thread arguing that my fighting style showed clear influence from a combat school that wouldn’t be founded for another twenty years. I had no idea how they’d arrived at that conclusion, but they had charts.

The other major theory was that I was a secret government project, a super-soldier created in a lab somewhere and planted at Halloran to test my capabilities against real-world threats. This theory had less traction than the time travel one, which told me something about the internet’s priorities.

Buried in the speculation were the clips. The nineteen-second video from the maintenance door. The body camera footage from the Network responder. The security camera feed that should never have been leaked.

The student recording that had captured me standing in golden light with my arms out, electricity crawling across my skin, staring down a twelve-foot monster like I had any business being there.

I looked different in the footage.

Not physically. The costume was the same. The half-mask was the same. The amber eyes above the matte black fabric were mine. There was something in the way I stood. A difference in the angle of my shoulders. A change in the set of my jaw.

That guy in the video looked like he knew exactly what he was doing. Like he’d calculated every possible outcome and decided this was the one worth dying for.

I hadn’t calculated anything. I’d just moved.

Sloane’s arm. The fire. The three-second gap in the bond that had felt like the end of everything.

I hadn’t thought about any of it. I’d just known, in that moment, that letting the fire hit her was not an option that existed in any version of reality I was willing to live in.

The System called it Combat Symbiosis. A fifteen percent increase in overall combat efficiency when fighting as a unit. Unconscious, predictive synergy. Reaction times that seemed precognitive.

The System was full of shit. What happened in that plaza wasn’t synergy. It wasn’t efficiency. It wasn’t anything the interface had a bracket notation for.

It was just me, seeing the arc leave Silas’s hands, and knowing where I needed to be.

I put the phone away.

The campus was still empty. The bird had left. The fountain was still splashing. The sun had moved maybe half an inch across the sky, which meant I’d been sitting here for approximately five minutes and still had an hour and fifty-five minutes to kill.

I got up and started walking again.

The residential district was on the southern end of campus, a cluster of dormitory buildings arranged around smaller courtyards and connected by covered walkways.

The architecture was the same aggressive white concrete as everywhere else, but someone had tried to soften it with plants. Potted trees stood at regular intervals along the walkways. Flower beds lined the approaches to the main entrances.

A small meditation garden occupied the space between the Year 1 dorms and the Year 2 housing, complete with a koi pond that had been stocked with fish that probably cost more than my tuition.

The fish were still there. They swam in lazy circles, completely unbothered by the absence of students to feed them. Someone on the skeleton crew must have been maintaining the pond. Or maybe the fish had just decided to fend for themselves. They looked capable.

My room was on the third floor of the Year 1 dormitory, in the section reserved for Combat Operations track students. The door was locked, but my student ID still worked, the biometric scanner reading my Aspect signature and clicking the bolt open with a quiet electronic hum.

The room looked exactly like I’d left it eleven days ago.

Bed unmade. Desk covered with textbooks I’d been meaning to organize. The closet half-open, revealing the row of identical black hoodies I owned because shopping for variety required energy I preferred to spend elsewhere.

The window faced east, toward the Combat and Training District, and through it I could see the distant bulk of the Crucible rising against the sky.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, just looking.

This was mine. This small space with its institutional furniture and its view of training facilities I’d almost died in. This room that smelled like my laundry detergent and the specific staleness of air that hadn’t been circulated in eleven days.

I’d almost lost it.

Not the room itself. Halloran would have reassigned it to someone else, someone who would have arranged the desk differently and actually made the bed and probably organized the closet like a functional human being. The room would have continued existing just fine without me.

But this specific configuration of space and objects and the particular angle of light through the window at three-forty-seven in the afternoon, this exact moment of standing in the threshold and knowing that I was home, that would have been gone. That would have died with me on that plaza floor while Sloane counted my breaths and waited for the count to stop.

I walked in and sat down on the bed.

The mattress was the same cheap institutional foam that every Halloran dormitory used, firm enough to be supportive and thin enough to remind you that comfort was a luxury the academy’s budget hadn’t prioritized. I’d complained about it during orientation week. Now it felt like the best bed I’d ever sat on.

My phone buzzed.

are you okay?

Sloane. She’d lasted approximately twenty-three minutes before the not-texting became more stressful than the texting would have been.

sitting in my room. it’s weird being here alone.

weird how?

quiet. too quiet. like a horror movie before the monster shows up.

don’t say that. don’t even joke about that.

sorry. bad joke.

you’re full of bad jokes. it’s one of your worst qualities.

and yet you keep me around

someone has to. you’d get into trouble otherwise.

i thought you said i was always getting into trouble anyway

you’d get into worse trouble. much worse. catastrophic.

probably true

definitely true. i have documentation.

I smiled at the phone again. The afternoon light through the window caught the screen at an angle that made the text glow.

hour and a half

hour and a half. don’t do anything stupid.

wouldn’t dream of it

liar

I put the phone on the nightstand and lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

The ceiling was white. Standard institutional drop tiles, the same as everywhere else on campus. I counted them without really meaning to. Eight by twelve. Ninety-six tiles total.

Somewhere outside, the fountain was still running. The fish were still swimming. The ghost town that used to be the highest-ranked Hero academy in the world was still sitting there in the Creston Hills sunlight, waiting for its students to come back and fill it with noise again.

And in an hour and a half, Sloane would walk through that door with her pink hair and her blue eyes and the specific way she looked at me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, the look that said she’d spent the last eleven days counting my breaths and wasn’t planning to stop anytime soon.

I closed my eyes.

The bed was terrible. The room was too quiet. The campus was a ghost town and I was the only living thing in it besides some fish and a bird that had probably already forgotten I existed.

It was perfect.