Regular Treatment
People often have no real idea what state they're in. I sincerely believe there are vanishingly few who can say, with genuine confidence, that they know exactly how they are—body and mind alike. Of course, I don't have an accurate read on myself either. That much goes without saying.
Most people wrap up their self-assessment at something like this: I'm tired because physical labor has worn me down, or I'm mentally exhausted from the same repetitive work day after day. Which meant the method for uncovering Saran's real problem wasn't anything special. It was just... talking. Persistently.
"First of all... you are a hero, right, Saran?"
"Yeah."
"It's just that I've never actually seen anyone like you, as far as I know. Would you mind telling me, even briefly, what kind of hero you are?"
I led with that question for a simple reason. I genuinely didn't know. With Batori, I'd already known she was a rookie—a complete unknown—so the conversation had come easily. But with Saran, I hadn't even been given a profile. All I'd heard was that she was having a hard time. I needed to start with who she actually was.
"A hero... I do work that's a little different from the usual kind."
"How so?"
"Ordinary heroes take reports that come into the Association, get a matching request, and deploy. I don't."
"...Then how do you work?"
I watched her as she spoke, sipping my warm coffee, and asked the question slowly.
"The shadows, I guess you'd call it. Yeah. The shadows. I handle criminal organizations that don't generally get publicized. The kind the Hero Association would have a hard time putting out in front of the public. Groups that traffic drugs, that kidnap people and harvest their organs. That sort of thing."
"...I see."
Right. That was a kind of story I could understand. On the surface, this was a world that looked stable thanks to its heroes. In practice, society was plenty chaotic. There was no way everything was being made public. The idea that there were heroes who worked like a kind of secret agent was a little surprising, but not enough to make me start carrying on about it.
"So is that work keeping you busy? Too busy to rest, even?"
"Mm... no. Not really."
"About how many times a month do you do that kind of work?"
"About once or twice a week. I'm not busy. Clearing out an organization does take a while, though, so I end up working the entire day when I do."
"Hmm..."
At least on the surface, it didn't feel like her hero work itself was the source of her troubles. While she talked about the job, there was no expression, no tone, that suggested she was truly struggling. She sounded like she was recounting something boring. And I didn't get the sense she'd burned out, either—mostly because it felt like she'd been working without any real drive from the start.
"I should probably be careful about prying into the details any further."
"Yeah. You should."
Ordinarily, when I counseled heroes, I asked a lot of questions about the difficulties of the work itself. But in Saran's case today, this didn't seem like the place to keep going down that road—not sitting in a department store café. And since the work itself didn't appear to be what was wearing her down, I let the conversation drift naturally toward the next question.
"What do you usually do with your time off?"
"...Time off?"
"The days you don't work. Tell me how you ordinarily spend them."
"......"
In the end, a person's day is one of two things, isn't it? Working hours, and leisure hours. If the hardship wasn't coming from her hero work, the questions were always going to turn in this direction.
"I just leave the TV on at home, or sit there on my phone."
"What about spending time with other people? Don't you go out and see friends?"
"No."
"......"
Well.
"Then do you go out to enjoy anything? Dining out, that sort of thing...?"
"Not really."
Hmm...
"...What kind of meals do you usually have?"
"Delivery."
Hmmm...
"...So on the days you don't work, you just stay home and do nothing, and whenever you need something you order it online, and you just... keep living at home like that?"
"Yeah."
Hmmmmm......
Right. This, too, was common enough. Plenty of people spent their off hours holed up at home. For a hero whose work was physically demanding, it might even be more common than not. ...Though when I considered that this was someone who only worked one day a week, it did give me a fair amount to think about.
If I boiled Saran's situation down briefly, it looked something like this.
Works in secret — about once or twice a week.
The work itself is pretty hard, though.
On her days off, she literally just stays home without seeing a soul.
That was the kind of three-line life she was living. Where, exactly, was there room in that for troubles to pile up? It was a fair question to have. But after hearing her out, I could more or less infer which part of it was wearing her down.
"Hmm."
"What."
"Ah—I think I have a fairly good idea how to help."
I meant it. I could roughly see a way to fix this. Psychological counseling, unless you're dealing with a genuine psychiatric illness, often finds its answers in conversations this light. And the answers themselves tend to be simple.
"What kind of way?"
"It's simple."
"Then say it. Lately I've just been... stifled. Exhausted. And I have no idea why. What's the problem, and how do I fix it?"
"Okay, hold on a second... please, just take a breath. I'll walk you through it slowly."
"...Okay."
...The moment she heard I had a method, Saran started firing questions at me. It caught me a little off guard, but it wasn't a real problem. It just meant she'd been having that hard a time lately.
"You just... need to get out more. Talk with friends, spend time together, take it easy. That should do it."
"...What?"
"I'm serious."
"...That's a lie."
Right. I'd expected that reaction too. People generally assume their problems are more complicated, more difficult than they are. But human beings are social animals. We belong to a society, we interact with other people, and through that we feel things and think things.
Saran, in particular, would have had no one she could talk to about her work, or about her own condition. Isolation would have set in. Stuck in that isolation, she wouldn't have been able to bleed off any of the stress from the job, and as the same rigid daily structure repeated itself, the stifling feeling would only have gotten worse.
"Your daily life is monotonous, Saran. Fixed, even. On the days you don't work, you stay up late, get up whenever you feel like it, and order whatever delivery happens to be convenient. After that you just watch videos on your phone."
"Yeah."
"You spend a few days like that, then you do hero work, then you go right back to the same routine. It's a wheel. It just keeps turning."
"Yeah."
"Normally, in a situation like that, people blow off the stress and the restlessness through a hobby, or they get a sense of openness from talking with other people and spending time together. But the work you do is quite secretive. You wouldn't have been able to bring it up easily."
"...Yeah."
Saran started nodding along more and more as I spoke. Was it starting to make sense to her? In the end this might have been nothing more than my own opinion—but at least, as I assessed her, this was the state she was in.
"That's why I'd recommend you pick up a hobby, and share even the light, everyday parts of your life with the heroes around you. Build some connections."
"With who?"
"Well... what about asking a hero you see often for work out to dinner sometime? Or even just for a drink?"
People in the same line of work were always going to be the easiest to talk to. Being a hero wasn't an ordinary job to begin with. And among heroes, she was a fairly unusual case, so of course it would be awkward... which was why I'd recommended a hero acquaintance.
"There isn't anyone."
"...Come again?"
"There's no one among the heroes around me that I'd particularly want to meet. The Welfare Bureau Team Leader and I had a bit of a connection a long time ago—six years back, when I debuted. That's all."
"...You've been doing this for six years?"
I wasn't surprised that Saran didn't have anyone she socialized with. But the fact that six years had already passed since her hero debut—that, I genuinely hadn't seen coming. Looking at her, I'd had some sense she was older than me, but six years since debut...
"If I may ask... how old are you?"
Heroes couldn't debut before twenty at the earliest, which meant she was twenty-six at the absolute youngest. This was exactly why taking a job without a proper profile was such a headache. Situations like this were bound to happen.
"Twenty-six."
"Ah..."
...Which meant that for something like five or six years, she had spent every day in that same routine. No one to talk to. Just quietly handling the work, cycling through the same isolated life, for a minimum of five years. The way she'd latched on so suddenly when I first mentioned a solution. The way she kept reacting as if there was no one she could meet. It was all starting to make sense.
"Ahaha..."
...What was I supposed to do?
Saran was watching me steadily. I looked back at her and thought it through. For an ordinary hero, collaboration was common enough that this might not have been a problem. But Saran was a special case, and she barely had any heroes she interacted with on a regular basis. Asking her to unload her troubles on some random civilian was out of the question.
So who, then, was the right person for Saran to talk to?
At the end of that line of thought, there was only one conclusion.
"What?"
There wasn't any other real option besides treating her myself, on a regular basis. I meant that literally. I already knew a fair amount about heroes' secrets. I belonged to the Hero Association. And I'd already heard enough of Saran's story that I understood her circumstances reasonably well.
It was a little absurd that I'd taken a suddenly scheduled appointment and blown it up even bigger... but still.
How was I supposed to just ignore someone who was having a hard time?