Jacob was pain-free when he woke up, and he stood without trouble. No clicking in his knees. That was good. He healed when sleeping, just like he’d assumed.

Becca wasn’t in the office, but he could hear her voice from the taproom. He padded through, barefoot, and took in the scene.

The room was disturbingly clean. Becca sat at a table with the cleaner bot, who was wearing a black t-shirt and a pair of sunglasses blu tacked to his face. Another man lay slumped over the bartop, a half-empty bottle of vodka in one hand. He looked like a bum.

Jacob wasn’t sure where to start. “Becca,” he said calmly. “Why aren’t you in the office? And why is this place all clean? And who the fuck is this?”

“Don’t be mad!” Becca bounced over to him and folded him into a tight squeeze. “I’m happy you’re better,” she murmured into his shirt.

Jacob was not satisfied. “Answer, please.”

“Well, I couldn’t really stop Bob—that’s the robot’s name—from cleaning, so that just kind of happened. And the office was so cramped, and I didn’t want to disturb you or Mr. Beau while you were sleeping. And this guy, uh, he just came in a bit ago. But he’s not really making any trouble, so I didn’t see a reason to throw him out. I don’t even know if I could’ve convinced Bob it was necessary.”

“You named the robot? You know you can’t keep it, right?”

Becca pulled back from his chest and looked up, pouting. “Why can’t I? He’s got a work t-shirt, he’s part of the crew! And don’t call him an ‘it’, that’s rude!”

“How do you know it’s a ‘he’?”

“All cleaner bots are male. You didn’t know that?”

“No, what?”

“Yeah. Cleaner bots are male, construction bots are male, nursing bots are female, tutoring bots are female, and so on.”

“Okay, whatever. Bob the robot, sure. Why not?”

“Thanks. He just Snapped, you know. I helped him pick out his rewards. He was a lot more grateful for my help than some people.”

Jacob chuckled. “Suppose I deserved that. Look, the place is clean anyway, so there’s not much point in camping out in the office at this point. Do as you like, and I’ll keep you safe.”

Jacob moved to deal with the drunk, but Becca called him back.

“I have more news,” she announced. “I’ve been listening to the radio. Apparently the urgeks have started to pull back from all the cities except Arcadia. No one really knows why. The UEC has got a bunch of soldiers outside the city, ready to attack, but they’re waiting for something.”

“Waiting for something,” Jacob echoed. “Wonder what for. Maybe they’re just trying to get their ducks in a row before committing to a large-scale operation.”

Becca shrugged. “Dunno. You’d know more about that kind of stuff.”

Jacob stowed this information away in the back of his mind as he approached the drunk and jostled him to get his attention. The man barely moved and muttered something incomprehensible.

“Hey, man,” Jacob said. “Happy hour is over. Time to get up. Come on.”

The only reply was a long, wet burp. He followed it up with a swig of vodka.

This guy had to go. He was calm enough for the moment, but no one who drank this much could be of a remotely stable disposition.

“All right. Up you go. Last chance.”

The man took a drink.

Jacob grabbed the bottle and expected to pull it away, but found a steely grip. The man’s eyes darted to him through his sweaty fringe. In a fraction of a second, with a flash of movement, the man had a revolver against Jacob’s forehead. He swayed and shuddered, holding back a wave of vomit, but his gun hand was steady as stone.

Jacob glanced up at the revolver pressed between his eyes. It was a gaudy piece of work, covered in gold paint that had begun to chip.

“Let go,” the man said, not allowing his grip on the bottle to slip a hair. There was a murderous intensity in his voice.

Jacob had no doubt that the man would actually kill him. But it wasn’t as though he could back down, either.

Of course he’s a User. Why wouldn’t he be?

Fuck everything about the last few days.

“Oh. My. God,” Becca said. “Jacob, do you know who that is?”

“I’m guessing you’re about to tell me,” Jacob muttered.

He relinquished the bottle, and the drunk ended up pulling back too hard, tipping off his barstool and landing on the floor, spilling booze on himself. He wasn’t in any hurry to get up as soon as he got his lips around the bottle.

“That’s the Golden Son.” She put a lot of emphasis on the name, like it should have meant something to Jacob.

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“The Golden Son? You know, the Golden Son with the Golden Gun? He was an S-Rank hero in the 90s.”

“Slightly familiar, maybe.” Jacob squinted down at the man on the floor, but couldn’t make out anything heroic through all that subhuman misery. “I thought that guy died years ago, though.”

“You really need to brush up on your hero lore, bro.” Becca came over and helped the drunk to his feet with some difficulty, righting the stool so he could sit back down. “The Golden Son was part of the failed void expedition. No one heard from him after that, so he was presumed dead, but it was never confirmed. And, well, here he is.”

“Doubtful,” Jacob opined. He addressed the drunk. “What’s your name, guy?”

“People call me Sonny.” He smiled a yellow smile. “Other than that… don’t remember. Isn’t that funny?” He chuckled to himself.

“Sonny! See! And then there’s this.” Becca picked up the fallen revolver from the floor, almost reverently, and placed it on the counter next to its owner. “The Golden Gun. It has to be. That’s the weapon that killed the dragonlord Buldothun. Isn’t that right?” She shook the man gently to prompt some kind of response from him.

A low snore rose from him. The bottle fell from his grasp, tipping over and rolling away across the counter before falling and smashing on the floor.

“Looks more like a cosplay piece to me.” He sighed. “Listen. It doesn’t matter who he was—right now he’s just some old boozer.” Jacob took the revolver and threw it to the robot, who caught it on reflex. He then bent down to pick up the supposed S-Rank hero, lifting him over his shoulders. Better to get rid of him while he was asleep.

“Don’t toss him out,” Becca pleaded. “It’s him, I know it is. He could be useful to us, couldn’t he? An S-Rank, Jacob.”

Jacob hesitated.

“He’s not hurting anyone just having a drink or two.”

“You mean aside from nearly blowing my head off?”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

I’m sure.”

He didn’t have time to make a decision. His System interface appeared in front of his face, flashing a bright red message. The others all got one, too. Even the robot. They all blared a loud alarm, filling the taproom with overlapping noise.

[WARNING: IMMINENT SOLAR EVENT]

[PLEASE GET INDOORS AND STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS]

[AN ALL-CLEAR MESSAGE WILL BE RELAYED ONCE THE EVENT HAS PASSED]

Jacob dropped the drunk none-too-kindly, ignoring his weak groan of pain. “Solar event?”

“No idea,” Becca said, trying in vain to scroll for more information.

“Instructions were clear,” Bob said. “We are to remain indoors.”

“You two should,” Jacob agreed, already moving towards the stairs. “I can handle a bit of sun. I want to see what’s going on.”

“Are you sure?” Becca asked. “It sounds dangerous.”

Jacob turned back towards her with a grin. “Don’t worry. I don’t die. I’ll be back.”

He took the steps two at a time, emerging into the darkened alley. It was night. How could a solar event be happening?

He scaled a nearby wall and swung onto the roof and scanned the black, dull sky. No sign of anything. He called Becca to keep her updated.

Several minutes passed. Still nothing. Jacob was almost ready to head back when he saw a single mote of light high above him, like a distant star. He craned his head to look at it.

It began to get brighter.

Starman, that was his first thought. But Starman couldn’t fly, and he had no other way that Jacob could think of to get that high up. Starman also shone silver, but this light was a deep gold. Staring at it was putting spots in his vision, and he was forced to look away briefly, blinking.

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Realization hit him.

Not Starman.

Paragon.

Has to be.

One of the heroes sent to save the Aribel colony, she was Earth’s only U-Rank. There wasn’t much information about her, but since she was almost never deployed on Earth, people speculated that it was because her Blessing was just too powerful to be used on domestic territory. There was barely any footage of her in action.

But one thing was well-known.

The name of her Blessing.

Second Sun.

Jacob had always believed that the name of a Blessing didn’t have anything to do with its utility or power level. But if there was such a thing as a powerful name, it was that one.

The star exploded into a brilliant orb of gold, instantly dispelling the night and burning away all surrounding clouds. It was suddenly bright as day. It was hard to gauge its size from this far away, but it had to be big. Probably a few dozen meters across.

Jacob couldn’t bring himself to look away, despite his eyes burning and his vision going blurry. He thought he could just make out a larger-than-life female figure inside the orb of concentrated light.

A hundred white pillars shot out from the orb, so quick that Jacob couldn’t observe any movement at all. Each one pierced an urgek vessel. They cracked open like shellfish pierced by harpoons, distorting with the heat. The sounds of distant explosions echoed across the city as the ships’ fuel lit up in many places.

The ships began to dip towards the ground, out of control. Not one remained untouched.

The pillars splintered and multiplied tenfold as they thinned out, splitting off and directing to street level. One landed just a block or two away, and Jacob’s vision was filled with white. He felt intense heat blister the skin of his face, even from this distance.

If Starman was a candle, Paragon was a forest fire.

This is the power of a god, Jacob thought.

*****

And that was how the urgek invasion of Arcadia ended. As quickly as it had begun.

The UEC moved in to neutralize any alien survivors once Paragon finished decimating their forces. With no ships, they had nowhere to run. All the fighting was over inside four days. The urgeks fought to the last.

Relief efforts were swift, all things considered. Jacob and Becca were forced to stay in a camp outside the city for a few days, checked over by doctors and given bland, tightly rationed food. Jacob went blind for a while from looking directly at Paragon’s Second Sun, but quickly recovered after two nights of sleeping. Once they were cleared, they were free to return to the wreckage that was Arcadia.

It was unclear why the urgeks had moved out of the other cities but kept up the pressure on Arcadia. Very little official information was given out, but Becca did her usual trawling online and came up with some theories from supposed leakers and eyewitnesses. The most likely of these theories seemed to be that the single ship that Starman had downed was actually the urgek flagship for the Arcadian invasion force, from which their warleader directed the underlings.

Rather than allow the warleader to escape onto another vessel, Starman had then challenged him to single combat, a call that no self-respecting urgek could refuse. As a mid-level leader of their empire, the warleader was also imbued with the power of their own alien System. Their battle had raged on for close to a full day, with neither yielding to the other. Without official orders to retreat, the other urgeks had remained in place long enough for Paragon to return from Aribel and vaporize them.

Jacob was especially willing to believe that this theory—or at least some version of it—was true since he had himself witnessed Starman fighting by the crashed urgek ship.

The A-Rank hero had just barely survived the ordeal, and had been rushed out of the city to receive a slew of emergency surgeries and regenerative treatments. It was still unclear if he would pull through.

News stations were sharing his story nonstop. Though vague on details, they made it clear that he had fought the urgeks without rest for the entire duration of the invasion, and that he had killed many of their kind. The number grew continuously in the telling. First it was a hundred, then two hundred, then five hundred. Some even attributed the warleader’s death to Starman, even though that was almost certainly Paragon’s handiwork.

There was a lot of talk about upgrading Starman’s ranking to S, and the mayor of Arcadia had shared this sentiment as well, but there was no official statement from the Guild.

On the other hand, Paragon had refused all interviews, and any footage of her intervention had been fried by her Blessing, leaving only word-of-mouth speculation to fuel public discourse. This was nothing new for her. She'd always been an elusive type. Whether that was her own preference or the Guild's was anyone's guess.

Arcadia's casualties were extensive, estimated around 800 000. It was the deadliest alien attack Earth had faced in three decades, since the disastrous first contact with the Arantharans—commonly known as dragons—had sparked the First Draconic War.

No one said as much on the news, but at least several thousand of the deaths had been collateral damage from Paragon’s devastating nova. And, of course, a lot fewer would have died if Starman hadn’t prevented the urgeks from retreating in the first place, as reflected by other cities in the NEHZ that had suffered deaths between 400 000 and 600 000.

Not that Jacob was judging. The urgeks had at least been forced to pay a steep blood price for their aggression. Their invasion force on Aribel had also been broken, again largely thanks to Paragon. He was mostly annoyed that no one else seemed to appreciate the nuance. Hero worship was a powerful thing. He kept his thoughts to himself, though, not wanting to upset Becca.

The U-Rank hero had arrived several days ahead of the others returning from Aribel. As it turned out, there weren’t many of them. In repelling the colonial invasion, which had been far larger in scope, the heroes sent out had lost most of their numbers. Only Excelerate, Titaness, and Steelfeather from the S-Ranks made it back, leaving less than a dozen S-Ranks in total to defend Earth.

And of course, many heroes had died in the NEHZ invasions themselves, hundreds in the lower ranks. The Guild was recruiting aggressively to fill this lack of manpower, but it would take them months or years to completely recover, especially for the S-Ranks, who could not be so easily replaced.

Since he was a User now, Jacob had spent long hours thinking about what to do with his new power. The goal had always been to join the Guild and become a sanctioned hero, largely for Becca’s sake, but the invasion and its aftermath had made him doubt that approach.

Heroes at C and B-Rank made decent money, a moderately inflated government salary, but nothing amazing. Only A and S-Ranks made something close to celebrity money, partially due to brand deals and TV appearances.

But, as had become abundantly clear, heroes died. They died a lot. They were asked to throw themselves into danger almost constantly. Against villains. Against aliens. Against threats more esoteric and unknown, like in the void expedition.

It was entirely possible that Jacob was functionally immortal now, given the description of Cheat the Hangman, but there was no way for him to confirm that hypothesis without flipping a coin with his mortality.

He wasn’t going to stay idle, though, and using his Blessing to win simple underground fights was a hopelessly narrow and unlucrative application of his new power. Vigilantism was out of the question. He felt no obligation to his fellow man, and being wanted by the law didn’t appeal in the slightest. Not to mention that it wouldn’t pay a flora, unless he decided to go villain, which besides being suicidal would certainly earn Becca’s eternal hatred.

He was going to get her someplace nicer. He was going to give her the things they had never had—at least that he’d never had, and she hadn’t since her parents died. That had always been the plan for when he Snapped.

He would need a lot of money to make that happen.

So he had formulated another plan. Becca hadn’t liked it at all when he told her, but she had come around a bit, albeit reluctantly.

He gathered everyone at the Sleeping Cat Bar for a meeting. ‘Gathered’ in the loosest sense of the word, because they were always there anyway. Mr. Beau had recovered nicely, and having a missing arm added a certain rugged mystique to him. He’d bought out the entire building above the bar, which had been cheap on account of everyone living there being dead. The Sleeping Cat Bar was now the Sleeping Cat Bar and Inn. The ‘inn’ part was still receiving renovations.

Bob was now an employee of the bar, or maybe more like an unpaid intern. Regardless, he seemed happy with the arrangement.

Bob had taken Becca’s advice and ‘quit’ his job as a sanitation unit. The city had never received such a request from a supposedly mindless automaton before, and after a quick investigation Bob’s sapience and sentience had been firmly established. He was set free, and the Sagittarius Corporation, responsible for the manufacture of that line of sanitation units, had made several large-scale recalls and dumbed down the AI placed into the units to prevent ‘unintended issues of spontaneous ego generation’ in the future. It didn’t matter. The corporation was already embroiled in a dozen expensive lawsuits, and stock prices were in the toilet. It was expected to go under before the end of the year.

None of that mattered to Bob. He was happy to clean around the bar and take pictures with curious citizens who had heard about his story. His presence brought a lot of new patrons to the Sleeping Cat, to the chagrin of the old clientele of seedy regulars who preferred their haunt devoid of normals.

Then there was the drunk. Sonny, as he liked to be called. He frequented the bar a lot once the invasion ended and outdrank all the regulars. Him, they liked. The more Jacob saw of him, the more he started to be convinced that the alcoholic was indeed the famous Golden Son, especially after doing his research on the S-Rank hero. He’d always been known for his love of the bottle. He also seemed to have a good supply of flora to buy alcohol with, despite clearly not holding up a job of any kind.

Overall a waste of space, regardless of any prior achievements, but Jacob could use his name, so he’d been invited to the meeting. Meaning Jacob had peeled him from his barstool and carried him there kicking and screaming. He calmed right down after being bribed with whiskey, like a baby given its bottle.

Everyone was gathered in one of the empty rooms upstairs from the bar. They’d dragged a few chairs and a table in for the occasion. Him, Becca, Bob, Mr. Beau, Sonny, and one other person that he had invited.

Her name was Jennifer Fenway, and she was a Heroes’ Guild rep.

She had already arrived when Jacob wrangled the former S-Rank into the room, and she regarded the whole situation with a vague look of disgust, hands primly folded in her lap. She was a well put-together woman in her mid-thirties, long black hair pulled back and wearing a gray blazer with a pencil skirt of the same color.

“Charming,” Fenway said once they were all seated. Becca offered her water, but she declined with a shake of her head. “Who is responsible for this… initiative?” She looked towards Jacob. “You, I take it? Are you Mr. Sorenson?”

Jacob nodded. “That’s right.”

“And you want to establish an independent hero agency, am I understanding that correctly?”

“Yup.”

“Why would the Guild ever approve such a thing?”

“I don’t see that you have much choice. You need Users bad. I’ve got three of them right here. Including a former S-Rank.” Jacob lifted Sonny’s head off the tabletop by his hair so the rep could get a decent look at him.

Fenway leaned forward to regard Sonny’s face more closely. She clicked her tongue, brought out a System interface and did some sort of quick scan. “Facial is a match. Is that you, Mr. Farraday?”

“Hmm?” Sonny choked out. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Mr. Farraday, that’s me.”

Fenway typed quickly on her interface, slander fingers with long, lacquered nails dancing across the screen. “I see. That is interesting. And you’ve agreed to be part of this enterprise?”

Sonny slowly nodded. “Mmhmm.”

“The Guild was led to believe that you would never consider hero work again, and that you wanted to be left alone. What changed?”

Sonny rambled some incomprehensible nonsense about wanting to do good for humanity. In reality, Jacob had gotten Mr. Beau to agree to ply him with free booze indefinitely as long as he signed his name on some paperwork and pretended to be part of the business.

The rep was obviously not convinced by Sonny’s explanation, but took it down regardless. When she asked if he’d consider rejoining the Guild instead, he shook his head no. Jacob let his face back down onto the tabletop, and he suckled at his whiskey for a while before falling asleep.

“I trust you’ve had a look at my specs,” Jacob said. His User status had been verified at the medical camp, and they had done some basic tests on him. “And Bob here needs no introduction, of course.”

“Of course,” Fenway agreed with a businesslike smile. She looked at Becca and Mr. Beau in turn. “And these two?”

“Mr. Beau is our financier of sorts. He’ll also be providing us space to work out of. Rebecca is…”

“The assistant!” Becca filled in.

“That.”

Fenway cleared her throat. “Riiight. And the big idea is, what? The Guild will contract you as independents to perform certain jobs?”

“Or members of the public, but pretty much, yeah.”

“I see. Quite frankly, Mr. Sorenson, even if I was convinced, and I’m far from it, this idea would be hard to swing with my superiors. The Guild has a lot of red tape by necessity—we’re dealing with magic and super powers here, after all. It doesn’t just accommodate for oddities like this.”

Jacob shrugged. “I think you’ll be able to make an exception, given the circumstances. We’ll be here when you feel like dealing with us.”

“Right. Well, even if this were approved, you would still need to pass the Guild’s aptitude tests to gain your certification. I can guarantee there will be no budging on that.”

“Not a problem.”

Fenway was quiet for a long minute as she typed back and forth with someone. Then she cleared her throat and looked up.

“Well, I believe I’ve learned all I need to know for now. Your Blessings and build details are already on file. Out of sheer curiosity—what were you thinking for the name? Of the company, that is.”

“Hero for Hire,” Jacob answered with a polite smile.

*****

The notification came in three days later.

They had been accepted.