A Sense of Measure, Objectivity, and a Meeting
"Saran!"
"Yeah."
Going two full weeks without seeing one of the heroes I was assigned to was unusual. When I was in charge of someone, there was always time to meet at least once or twice a week — even A-class Baekyeou was no exception. In all the time I'd spent counseling heroes, going two weeks without a single session was practically unheard of. But then, Saran herself had always been an exceptional case, so I wasn't overly worried.
"It feels like it's been ages. Have you been well? You didn't get hurt on the job, did you?"
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"Whew. That's a relief."
Even so, of course I was glad to see my snake again after so long. Today, though, Saran seemed even more low-energy than usual. She'd never been someone who showed much emotion or variation in her tone to begin with, but even accounting for that... today she felt rather listless. She must have been a little worn out from all the work she'd been doing.
Then again, the whole point of setting up these weekly meetings had been to get her out of the house more often — to give her a chance to refresh, to spend time talking with people. If she was truly exhausted, she could have just taken it easy and rested instead of pushing herself. But she hadn't canceled. She'd come all the way to my house again today just to spend time with me, and I was grateful for that.
"You must have been incredibly busy. Normally you reply the moment I message you, so it was strange seeing your responses come so late for a while."
"Work piled up a bit."
"So even that happens to you... I guess heroes have those seasons too, like office workers, when everything suddenly gets dumped on you at once?"
"A little, yeah. Starting with the Audit Bureau, the Association doesn't find and investigate every suspicious person one at a time. It's a huge organization, so things get handled in batches. Sometimes it all hits at once."
"Ohh..."
So that was how it was. Being a hero wasn't some completely different, insanely specialized occupation compared to a regular job. Saran was an even more special case among heroes, which was probably why that thought struck me so strongly.
"Where do you want to eat? You've probably built up a lot of fatigue... how about something hearty?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Heh, don't be like that. How about shabu-shabu? I thought about suggesting gukbap, but..."
It wasn't as though I were the one eating it, and recommending a humble bowl of gukbap to someone like Saran felt a little off. Just looking at her image — even setting aside the vertical pupils and forked tongue unique to snake beastfolk — she gave off the vibe of a cool, icy city woman. Suggesting a steaming bowl of rice soup to her was more mismatched than I could even imagine. So I'd gone with something more appropriate, like shabu-shabu. It was good for talking over a meal, warm, and you got meat, vegetables, and a hot broth all in one.
"Anyway, how about shabu-shabu?"
"Yeah. I like that."
"There's a place nearby I've been to a few times. Let's go there."
"......"
I liked to think of myself as something of a foodie — or at the very least, I could proudly say I never ate anything truly terrible. I knew all the good restaurants around the Association building and near my house, sorted by type. If I'd had a car, I could have explored even farther afield, but... I'd had to buy a house first. Unfortunately, purchasing a place right by work — a fifteen-minute walk — had taken priority over a car, and between the mortgage and various other reasons, buying a vehicle had to wait.
"Having a car really is convenient."
"Put it in the GPS."
"Ah, okay. We'll be there in about five minutes anyway, but... just a second?"
Saran had a car, though, and she'd brought it out today, so we could get around comfortably. It was dinnertime, so the shabu-shabu place was fairly crowded. A table for two was still available, of course, and Saran and I sat down and started discussing what to order. Unfortunately, it wasn't an all-you-can-eat place.
"We can pick the broth. Anchovy stock, chicken stock... and besides those, soybean paste, mala. Quite a variety. When I ate shabu-shabu as a kid, there was only ever one kind of broth."
"Yeah."
"Which one would you like, Saran? For the meat, there's beef belly and regular beef."
"Either meat is fine. The broth..."
"The broth?"
"We can just order it half and half."
"Ahh."
So these days you could even split shabu-shabu broth half and half, the way some places split jjambbong and jajangmyeon in the same bowl. We finished ordering — mala on one side, the standard anchovy broth on the other. There were plenty of side dishes available, but I figured we could order those as we went.
"By the way, what kind of work were you doing this time? Ah, or is that something you can't talk about...?"
"Hmm... I think it should be fine to tell you."
"Really?"
"It's all over anyway."
"Ohh..."
"It wasn't anything difficult. Just a company dealing in dangerous substances like drugs... more precisely, an organization."
"And you took care of it?"
"Yeah."
As always... Saran really did take on the hard jobs. Even from the brief, very brief mention she'd given me last time, I'd known she handled some pretty difficult work. But a drug organization, of all things.
The hero dispatches I usually dealt with weren't on that kind of scale. Most of the time it was subduing Awakened who caused disturbances in the streets, like Batori used to, or punks who pulled off attacks with their powers or some weapon they'd gotten their hands on. Once you got to A-class like Baek Eun-hwa... sure, sometimes they faced people who could bring down an entire building. But generally speaking, petty criminals were more familiar territory for me.
The kind of people Saran was talking about — ones who manufactured or trafficked drugs and kept up all sorts of shady business — weren't something I was used to at all. Part of that was probably thanks to Under Heroes like Saran working so hard behind the scenes. Even accounting for that, though, it wasn't a common occurrence.
"You really only seem to take on the hardest jobs."
"That so."
"Yes — I don't mean your skills are lacking. I mean it's hard on you mentally. Getting used to it, going numb... that just means you've been through that much."
The more I listened to Saran, the more I understood why she'd spent so much time holed up at home, so utterly lifeless. At the same time, I realized I shouldn't have held back all those questions about the stories she was telling me now — about the kind of work she did as an Under Hero. I should have just asked, and listened to her answers.
I'd never taken a life myself... but even I knew that kind of act was harder than anyone could imagine. If killing were simple — easy, something you could do without a second thought — then no one would ever be driven to end their own life from the unbearable weight of it. Taking someone else's life was an act that inflicted pain on yourself as well.
No matter how vicious the people Saran killed were — irredeemable criminals, people who'd be worthless even locked away in a prison cell — doing it over and over would inevitably carve away at her mind. She was twenty-six. That meant she'd been at this for roughly five years... and in that time, how many things had she seen that no one should ever have to see? Countless criminals. Countless victims. And through it all, surely...
"...If anything, it's amazing. You are, Saran."
"That so?"
"Yes. I think you're incredible. If it were me, I would have just run away because it was too hard."
From the moment I'd first met her until now, I'd seen Saran constantly present that flat, affectless demeanor — and I felt like I finally understood it almost completely. I knew now that there were reasons for all of it. It wasn't just isolation that was the problem. Everything had happened in a continuous chain, each thing feeding into the next, carving away at Saran's heart until it had gone completely dull.
"Honestly... it's something I feel every time I'm assigned to heroes. None of you seem very good at looking at yourselves objectively. When things get hard, it would be perfectly fine to just take a vacation and rest easy... That goes for you, Saran, and for Eun-hwa as well."
"...Eun-hwa?"
"Ah, she's also someone who... really doesn't take care of herself."
"...Is that so?"
"Yes. If anything, I think she's even worse than you. I can't go into detail, but? I can't help but worry about her a lot."
"...I see."
Ordinarily I didn't talk about other heroes' problems. But a conversation at this level was fine. And so, if only briefly, I ended up bringing up Baek Eun-hwa and talking about her with Saran.
"You, Saran, actually seemed fortunate by comparison."
"Baekyeo... no, Baek Eun-hwa did?"
"Yes. I can't go into detail, but it's worse than you'd think. I had a lot to keep an eye on while I was assigned to her."
"...I see."
Maybe it was because we were talking about a fellow hero. Saran started looking at me with a slightly heavier gaze than usual — just a little heavier. They operated in different fields, but in a way, both Saran and Baek Eun-hwa were heroes in the upper ranks. Saran herself had mentioned before that she was roughly around B-class, and Baek Eun-hwa also seemed to hold Saran — Black Viper — in quite high regard.
"Hmm..."
She was probably worried because she thought of Baek Eun-hwa as something like a colleague. Saran might have been blunt and unreactive, but she was a kinder person than you'd expect. Yeah. That was probably it.
"Saran, would you like to meet Eun-hwa sometime? I think it would be nice if you saw each other now and then, the way you do with Batori for mentoring."
And so I decided to set up a chance for the two of them to get closer. They'd even eaten together last time. There was no reason they couldn't sit down for a cup of coffee at a café, right?
"Sure. That sounds fun."
"Oh."
The fact that Saran had gone so far as to use the word "fun" in her reply was unusual enough that... yeah, this would probably actually work out.