A Perfect Score for a Villain -3-
Kim Seokho was the only Enhanced Human among the staff at the restaurant Noir Blanche. It had already been a full year since he started working at this godforsaken place. He was pretty sure he’d been hired for the kitchen at first.
“One potato salad and one pasta, please.”
“Coming right up!”
Somehow, he’d been demoted to waiter and was now running around serving customers. No one would give him a straight answer about why he’d been shoved out of the kitchen. All he ever heard were snide comments from the other staff: “Enhanced Humans have crude palates anyway, so how could they cook properly?” or “Every customer who comes in is an Enhanced Human too. Who’s even going to notice if the food tastes different?”
Kim Seokho had been a veteran in the food service industry for over a decade before he became an Enhanced Human, so he couldn’t accept this kind of bullshit. But reality was harsh. Just like they said, even when the head chef changed, the restaurant’s popularity never dipped. Any complaints about the flavor vanishing were suspiciously quick, as if someone had scrubbed them from existence.
“See? What did I tell you, Mr. Seokho?”
“Maybe it’s because you’re an Enhanced Human, but you really don’t have an eye for these things.”
So Kim Seokho had no choice but to swallow the mockery from people he once considered colleagues. Even when they openly insulted him right to his face, as if daring him to hear it. Even when they canceled contracts with trusted suppliers and switched to cheaper ones just to increase portion sizes at the expense of quality. He had to endure it all.
The restaurant was doing incredibly well, after all. And in the grand current of society, he was nothing more than one tiny citizen at the bottom. No—something even less than that. A being below a citizen, his will to resist stripped away by the nanomachines planted in his brain. That was what it meant to be an Enhanced Human in this city.
“If it was that hard, didn’t you ever think about quitting?”
Kim Seokho opened his eyes. In front of him sat a beautiful woman in her late twenties, smiling softly as she sipped a highball with a faint blush on her cheeks. His mind felt hazy. He couldn’t remember why he was drinking and talking with her. The one thing he knew for certain was that this moment—clinking glasses with her—felt incredibly comfortable. Comfortable enough that he wanted to pour out every pent-up thought and complaint he’d been carrying for so long.
“I think about it all the time. That I want to quit.”
“But there must be a reason you can’t?”
“My little sister is sick.”
Kim Seokho tilted his glass. The alcohol burned like fire in his chest.
“We used to live in Unhwa, but we moved to Cheongang because of her. For treatment.”
With a heavy clunk, he set the empty glass down. As if to comfort him, the woman refilled it right away.
“Then the doctors told us the only way she could survive was to become an Enhanced Human.”
Like it was scripted, Kim Seokho drained the glass again. Maybe because a beautiful woman had poured it for him, this time it went down as smooth as water.
“At first, that was the goal. Yeah… it was the goal, but…”
The liquor poured again with a soft glug.
“I keep wondering if this is really the best thing for her. If she gets the procedure, will she have to live with the same kind of treatment I do?”
“What do you want to do, then?”
Kim Seokho stared at his glass for a moment, hesitating.
“I want people to recognize us. That we’re the same as them. That we’re not the kind of beings who deserve this treatment.”
“Then do it.”
The clear ring of glasses clinking echoed between them.
“You tell them yourself. That you—who used to be human—and your sister—who will one day stop being human—are both just people.”
“Will that actually work?”
Kim Seokho looked down at his own reflection rippling in the liquor.
“It’ll be fine.”
And then he swallowed the drink that would put an end to all his worries.
“Because you have the right to.”
What came next was peace. It felt like being freed from chains that had bound him for so long. Kim Seokho felt free. Like everything would work out now. Like he could smash the heads of every bastard who had ever looked down on him.
‘Don’t do it.’
A small hand tugged at Kim Seokho’s sleeve. It was his little sister’s. But he walked forward as if he couldn’t see that tiny hand, stepping onto the road bathed in red light.
*
Blood sprayed everywhere. Shrapnel flew through the air. If I had to describe the scene in front of me in one short phrase, that was it.
Han Cheolho was desperately trying to subdue the rampaging Enhanced Human, but he couldn’t completely contain the shockwaves spreading outward.
“Kyaaak!”
A partition ripped from the floor slammed into the ceiling, punching a hole through it. Chunks of debris began raining down toward the edge of the restaurant where people were huddled.
“Shit…!!”
At the same time, a glowing blue barrier appeared, shielding the civilians from the falling wreckage. Han Cheolho’s barrier ability. It seemed pretty useful. But it was still too early to relax. The situation hadn’t improved at all.
There was an Enhanced Human who had sealed every emergency exit and shutter so no one could escape, then continued his mindless rampage. Kim Seokho. The guy who had worked here for nearly a year, apparently. He was putting up a surprisingly clever fight against an A-rank hero. After all, people with something to protect always end up weaker—it was the opposite of that famous slogan.
“Guh…!!”
But that didn’t last long. Kim Seokho took a hit from Han Cheolho’s massive fist and went flying into a glass wall. He had fought hard. Still, even a strong shark is just a fish—A-rank was too much for him after all.
“Y-yeah…!! Beat the shit out of him!!”
One civilian shouted. That was all it took for the dam to break. The civilians’ screams rained down like hail.
“Make sure he can never get up again!! Turn him into dust!!”
“What are you waiting for?! He’s catching his breath!!”
I saw Han Cheolho’s fist tremble. He clearly hated this situation. He knew that as long as people’s perception of Enhanced Humans didn’t change, incidents like this would keep happening.
Looking around, the other Enhanced Humans who had been in the restaurant were mixed in with the civilians, simply watching the chaos unfold. I understood. Enhanced Humans weren’t allowed to harm civilians, but they had no obligation to protect them either. And they certainly didn’t want to side with Kim Seokho. They didn’t want to be ostracized by society.
A perfect deadlock. At first glance, it looked like Han Cheolho had the upper hand in suppressing Kim Seokho. But from a distance, it was obvious—no civilian, no Enhanced Human, no one here actually wanted to resolve the situation.
In that sense, Han Cheolho barely scraped a passing grade on my internal hero radar.
“Stop it. Don’t get up again. Why the hell are you doing this?”
“Cough…!! Haa… You’re seriously asking that? After the way those bastards have treated us all this time, you’re really asking?!”
Talking calmly to a villain full of malice and trying to find a peaceful solution wasn’t a bad approach. However—
“Let me ask you something instead. Why are you stopping me? Does getting a hero rank come with nanomachines in your head that brainwash you into protecting worthless people?”
“That’s…”
Getting logically pushed back by a villain was an automatic hero disqualification. Even I could see that justice in this land lay with the other guy, but a real hero had to stick to their beliefs without wavering until the end. Heroes were supposed to be performers who lived off their mouths, after all.
Sure enough, while Han Cheolho hesitated, Kim Seokho pulled something from his pocket and jammed it into the back of his neck.
‘That’s… Winterdead?’
Winterdead. A specially formulated stimulant for Enhanced Humans. There were four types—Springhand, Summerwork, Falldown, and this one. It was the strongest and had the worst side effects. A dangerous drug that could kill a normal person with even a tiny dose. You couldn’t get it anywhere legal. So the bastard had a shady side too.
“Want to go another round, hero boy?”
Kim Seokho’s veins bulged grotesquely across his entire body as he snarled. Han Cheolho tensed, wary of the man who now seemed like a completely different person. But he couldn’t keep up with Kim Seokho’s speed, which had multiplied several times over, and took a direct hit.
“Oppa!!”
It was the reverse of before. This time Han Cheolho was the one sent flying into the glass wall. Yeah, that one looked bad. Even from here, I could see his right chest core was badly crushed. Still, for someone with no special ability relying purely on physical strength, he’d fought well. If he hadn’t had people to protect, this would’ve ended in Han Cheolho’s victory long ago.
—Srrrk.
The barrier dissolved, and Han Yujin caught her brother with both hands. A black liquid—blood or oil, I couldn’t tell—poured from Han Cheolho’s mouth. Not a pretty sight.
“H-he’s coming…!! That guy’s coming!!”
With the barrier gone, Kim Seokho had nothing holding him back anymore. He stomped heavily toward the civilians.
—Thud.
But Han Cheolho, barely clinging to life, poured everything he had into one last barrier that wrapped around the civilians.
“Goddammit, open this right now!!”
—Bam! Bam!! Bam!!!
Kim Seokho began hammering on the barrier relentlessly. The entire building shook like it was in the middle of an earthquake.
“Kyaaak!!”
“Uwaaah!!!”
The civilians’ screams grew louder and louder.
“………”
For some reason, I was getting pissed off. The idiot who let his guard down in front of evil. The bitch who had power but only stood by and watched. The mob who had no strength to fix anything but the loudest damn voices. Everything irritated me to the point of insanity.
Where the hell is Last? He should’ve been here by now.
“Excuse me.”
I leaned over and whispered to the middle-aged woman sitting beside me. This wasn’t going to work. Maybe it was time to throw a little more fuel on the fire.