David Matthews Alvarez, Dean of the Heroforge Program at Aurora University, had a million things to do in preparation for the first day of classes. He did none of them. He instead sat in numb silence, reading and rereading the report that had been, for some unfathomable reason, stuck two-thirds of the way down his priority stack.

It was a casualty report with eleven names. He read those names over, putting faces to them. Faces he had seen over and over for the last four years. The faces of his students.

According to the report in front of him, out of the twenty-eight graduates of last year's senior Heroforge class, eleven were already dead.

A thirty-nine percent mortality rate.

In a little less than three months.

It was catastrophic.

It was eviscerating.

It was only moderately worse than average.

He sat back in his leather office chair, feeling blank, staring at nothing. His office was richly but simply appointed, all pine shelving and warm forest colors, anchored in the center by his sturdy oak desk. On the desk was a small tray separating his inbox and his outbox, a picture of his late wife in a small golden frame, and a solid 1955 model Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter—an actual antique, not a reproduction. Everything in his office was genuine. And analogue, not digital, not computerized, which meant no ultratech. Even the cuckoo clock on the wall was almost a hundred years old, and still ticking by the seconds as he sat in silence.

He looked down at the report again.

No unifying event. No massive battle or disaster. Just a series of separate, normal incidents in which his former students sought to utilize the skills they had learned at his school, and those skills had failed them. He had the sudden and overwhelming urge for a drink, and he hadn’t had a sip of alcohol since his wedding night thirty—forty?—years ago.

Thirty-nine percent

Eleven students.

He had sent eleven brand new superheroes, his students, to die.

And the only rebuke he would get for it was the ringing in his ears.

There was a knock on his door. He shook his head once and called for them to enter.

His executive assistant, reliable, gray-haired Francine Katch, opened the door without entering. She looked harassed and bedraggled—she’d been working just as hard as he had for the last couple weeks. And something was clearly bothering her.

“Mr. Alvarez, Professor Styx is here to—”

“Professor Styx?” came a very snide, very drunk, very nasal Chicagoan voice from behind her. “Why’d you go and insult the esteemed institution of professorhood like that, toots?”

Fran squawked as a man shouldered her aside and shut the door in her face.

Professor Nicholas Styx was short, no more than five-two, but even though he was clearly stumbling drunk, he moved with the confidence of a giant. He was in what David thought of as his costume, a black leather trenchcoat, though he was missing his normal wide-brimmed hat, which was a shame. It would have hidden the grimace of ghastly humor on his otherwise handsome face.

He braced himself on the door a moment, shuddered, and then let out a long, resonant belch, nearly doubling over as if to puke right there on the floor.

Then he looked up at David and said, grinning, eyes flat and mirthless and shining with intoxication, “Paragon’s dead.”

The words didn't register at first, much like how gunshots don’t hurt at first. David began to stand, irritated. “Have a seat, Nicholas, and don’t harass my—”

“Paragon’s dead, Dave.”

A moment passed. The clock on the wall ticked out three seconds.

Then it hit, and David sat, hard.

Styx padded over, flopped into a chair in front of the dean's desk, and put his feet up on the sturdy oak. Everything about his posture said that he was a happy, relaxed drunk. Everything about his eyes said that he was unraveling on the inside.

They sat in silence for a prolonged moment.

"How?" David asked quietly.

“Apparently fighting Hyperion in the Skip,” Styx said. There was laughter bubbling in his voice. “Now why he was in the Skip, nobody seems to know, and how Hyperion managed to win, also nothing. He didn’t register his mission objectives before going into the Skip, which is against protocol, but no one questioned it because, you know, Paragon.”

“You don’t know?” David asked.

Styx scoffed. “Fuck off you dried-up never-hasbeen.”

David really, really wanted that drink now.

The old dean felt for a moment like he was standing on the edge of a cliff with a stiff breeze at his back. The universe itself seemed to be ushering him towards the abyss, and all he had to do was stop fighting it and let it take him.

There had been a time not too long ago when a single superhero dying, even a small-time one, would have made national headlines. There would have been memorials, a nationally broadcasted funeral, and a thousand thinkpieces on how the system had failed them.

And now eleven of his students were dead, fresh out of school. More would follow. The losses would slow when—God help him—the weakest and most reckless of them were picked off. Maybe a quarter of them would survive to retire, if current trends were to be believed, if these eleven were an outlier instead of a mark of acceleration. Maybe it was. Maybe none of them would make it that long.

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Paragon had made it eighty years.

"How's it being handled?" David asked finally.

Styx, in response, reached into his black trenchcoat pocket and pulled out a hip flask. He took a long, long pull from it before wiping his mouth and answering, "We were going to keep it quiet until we knew more details. It happened in the Skip, so there was a chance the info wouldn't get out for a while."

David repeated the most important words in that sentence. "'We were going to?'"

"Preston already has a press conference scheduled," Nick said, voice dripping and practically sober with venom. “Says it’s important to get ahead of it. Control the narrative. The stupid, smug, whimpering little shitcunt.”

David sympathized with the viciousness in Styx’s voice, and if he had been alone, he might have indulged in a stream of expletives himself. As dishonest as it was, the last thing the world needed right now was to know that one of their most respected heroes, a man for whom a Prestige was named at this very school, had been killed in a random skirmish. They needed time to spin it. Hell, they needed to see if he had any religious affiliations—if he was poking around in some afterlife, they could resurrect him.

Damn the man, he thought, in a shameful moment of selfish pique. He could have at least gone out in a blaze of glory against a kaiju. That they could spin.

And damn Preston Tomorrow. The stupid, smug, whimpering little shitcunt was the perfect picture of everything they had fought against superheroes becoming for decades, a corporate automaton with absolutely no goals beyond his next quarterly projection. Now, with his great-uncle’s death, he was in full control of the Tomorrow Squad’s financial empire, able to wield all the clout of the country’s second most prestigious supergroup with no checks on his profiteering—

David froze.

Styx smirked. “Just got there, did ya?”

David’s eyes flicked up to Nicholas’s. “You don’t think—”

“Hyperion took credit already,” the small man cut in. “Convincingly. He tossed the body at the SCAR outpost on the bridges. An autopsy indicated his insides had been burned out, hollowed, probably while he had been alive. I don't know many others who could do that.”

David felt sick. He had been only passingly acquainted with Paragon personally—the hero’s tenure as a professor at this very school had come and gone long before David’s time as Dean—but he had known him as a solid, respectable, and generally virtuous man, especially relative to the rest of his family. To hear of such a brutal end for such an upstanding, renowned superhero made his insides roil.

He let nothing show on his face. Not in front of Styx.

“There’s more bad news,” Styx said.

David couldn’t help but wince.

“There’ve been reports of Legionnaire activity,” the smaller man continued. “Blasphemy is poking around Iran. Laughing Jack Lazarus just ate a village in Serbia. We still don’t know if Chernobog is a Legionnaire or not, but his outbursts of random malice follow their patterns. Worst of all, Tom Wyrd’s name has been thrown around the Skip. ”

Tom Wyrd in the Skip. The oldest and least known of the Legionnaires in the world’s biggest pressure cooker. The old dean felt his blood running colder than it had been fifteen seconds ago, and it had nothing to do with his age.

“No sign of Revenant?” he asked quietly.

Nick shook his head. “Nope. Either Legion is under new management or he really is gone for good.”

“That’s a relief at least. Maybe we're in the clear,” David said, not believing it for a second.

“Yeah and maybe after I fuck a ten dollar hooker it won’t burn when I pee,” Nick countered. “Just maybe this one time.”

David frowned at him, but the little man in black was too drunk to care, and probably wouldn’t have if he were sober. Then again, nobody that he knew had a frame of reference for what a sober Nicholas Styx might think.

The Dean abruptly swiveled in his chair and stood, feeling suddenly as though he couldn't sit down for another second. He wanted to pace, but that might be a bit much for his present company. Instead, he looked out of the large, ornate picture window behind his desk, his mind racing.

Below, early-arriving students scampered across the campus as freshmen and their families desperately—fruitlessly—tried to figure out where they would be sleeping that night. There was an undercurrent of electric excitement, anticipation, obvious even from up here, high in his office. Only a few would be Heroforge students. The rest would just be normal metas and even plain humans, mundies, here to take advantage of the school's renowned—and safe—academic program.

And they were his, one and all. His students. His responsibility.

And he was failing them. Even the ones who wouldn't one day be superheroes would still expect to be protected by superheroes, once they left the aegis of Aurora University. And one by one, those superheroes were falling to an ever-rising tide of chaos, hatred, and violence.

Paragon was dead. God help them all.

Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.

He wondered if there was a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

“We need a miracle, Nick,” he finally said.

The little man patted his coat pockets. “Don’t got any on me.”

“Find one,” the dean said, blunt.

“You rush a miracle worker, you get lousy miracles,” Styx said, sounding tired. “Try Gravelle. You might even get what you want. Just don’t come crying to me when it bites you in the ass.”

“Victor is a valued—and tenured—professor at this school,” David said, disapproving. “He has shown nothing but utmost dedication to his students and their education.”

Styx snorted. “Is that why his students all graduate at the bottom of the class?”

David didn’t answer. There was a metric for this job that had nothing to do with grades or graduation rates that was rarely spoken of. Not even Nick wanted to bring it up, and he regularly gave lectures about things like how to visually detect dried semen on the skin of a corpse.

The report on his desk behind him seemed to burn, giving off a completely intangible heat that seared him nonetheless .

Eleven students.

“Are you going to be present for Orientation?” David asked, but he already knew the answer.

Nick belched, then said, “Probably not.”

“You have a duty to this school too.”

“Yeah, I’ve been looking for it, but so far it hasn’t been at the bottom of any of the bottles I’ve tried,” Nick said, voice bursting with mock outrage. “Hinky as all fuck. Guess I have to keep looking.”

David didn’t bother trying to argue any further. There was no point when he was like this, and he was legitimately too valuable to fire. In fact, he doubted if he’d even be allowed to fire Nicholas Styx. He was one of the original professors. Unofficially, he’d been here even longer than Gravelle had.

Instead, he quietly repeated, “We need a miracle.”

The cuckoo clock whirred, and the little bird shot out to chirp the top of the hour. Six in the afternoon. Nick swore and nearly toppled out of his seat.

There was another knock on the door, and David turned and called for them to enter.

Francine poked her head in again. “Dean, Professor Gravelle would like to speak with you. He says he has news about the Jones girl.”

Nick started chortling so hard he almost fell out of his chair. “Speak of the fuckin’ devil, huh? Isn’t that the saying?”

"Professor Styx, Heroforge Orientation is in one week," David said, cutting him off. "I expect you to fulfill your obligations."

The smaller man shrugged loosely. "You wouldn't be the first person who was disappointed in me. You should meet my dad." He continued to chortle.

“Tell him I’ll be with him shortly, Fran,” David said. “If you could escort Professor Styx to his apartment, I’d appreciate it.”

Francine smiled with malevolent glee, and cracked her knuckles.

Styx blinked, and his eyes widened in entirely sober terror.

And a man in white waited outside with news that would make David's day even worse.

END OF ACT ONE