SLAM
"Didn't think anyone would still be hanging around this long after we started. So there were still some pretty little things left, huh?"
"……."
"……."
Up until now, I had only ever run into a villain once. Maybe I'd just been lucky. Or maybe luck had nothing to do with it — maybe I'd simply been living carefully enough to stay out of trouble.
What I knew for certain was that the situation in front of me was, well, a bit of an emergency.
I'd been kidnapped before, sure, but I hadn't been the target then. Saran had been the one they were after from the start, so it hadn't been that big a problem, but…
"Who would've guessed pretty girls like you would be wandering around a place this scary. Hmm… did you run up here from downstairs?"
"……."
The woman standing in front of us said it with a greasy little grin, but there wasn't a shred of kindness in her. She just looked malicious.
Jewels sat piled on her throat, her hands, her fingers — every place she could hang them, all of it snatched from the display cases she'd smashed open moments ago. And nestled among all that glittering stone, a blade sat in plain view. It was a little hard to call it a dagger. If you had to classify it, it felt more like a kitchen knife.
Well. A simple kitchen knife it was not, because…
"That blood. Whose is it?"
"Hmm? This? Aah… um… hehe?"
"……."
Blood was dripping from the edge, drop by drop. That thing hadn't been used to cut food. It had been used to carve up a person.
Batori, who'd asked the question, and I, standing behind her, couldn't help looking at the villain with even more hostility than before.
"So what are our pretty little things doing here? Did you run away? Did you run from us working so hard downstairs? Ah, that must be it, right? Hehe."
"……."
Batori slowly pushed me back with one hand. Was she planning to fight?
I'd only seen her fight once before… was she going to be okay? Back then it had just been petty crooks hitting a convenience store, not a professional villain like this…
"Counselor. Please step back."
"…Okay."
"Heheh, gonna fight? Hmm? Trying to protect the little one behind you?"
"…Yes. I have to. I'm a hero, after all."
Batori, grown taller than me thanks to her ability — all the way to a hundred and sixty centimeters — said it like that. And she looked pretty reliable. No. She looked pretty damn cool.
That baby-faced rookie with the dinky horns had grown this magnificently… well, she really had grown taller, but anyway. She'd grown into a genuinely cool hero.
Of course, this was a fight against a real criminal. A real villain, far beyond the level of the small-time crooks I'd witnessed before. Naturally, the worry came first.
"…Surrender. If you refuse to surrender…"
"Hehe. And what are you going to do about it?"
"I will subdue you."
"Heheh…"
From behind Batori, all I could do was cheer her on. If hypnosis were something I could just throw out whenever I felt like it, maybe it would have been different — but it wasn't something I could use on the spot. I was nothing but a useless counselor who couldn't help at all. So I just stood quietly behind her and put my strength in her corner.
"Miss Batori, you can do this…!"
"Yes. I will."
She answered coolly, briefly, then pulled a small knuckle from her pocket and settled into a fighting stance.
In the end, there was only one thing that needed doing. That villain had to be dealt with. When a villain terrorist attack broke out, what you were supposed to do was run… but in a situation that was basically one-on-one, running wasn't easy either. We had no choice but to hope Batori would take her down. There was nothing else we could do.
"Hehe, looking at those horns. A cow, maybe…? Some kind of animal-type mutant? A deer? Which is it…"
"Enough talking. Come at me."
"Hehe, whatever you are, blood's still red!"
The villain, bloody kitchen knife in hand, and Batori charged each other at the same time.
The difference in height between them wasn't that big anymore. But unlike Batori, the other woman had a knife, so of course I was worried about the difference in reach… and I had no idea what kind of ability she even had. Naturally, I was worr—
"…Eh."
I was worried, and then—
"……Eh?"
"Good thing I knocked her out in one hit."
"………Huh."
I was worried, all right.
The villain had thrust the knife at Batori, trying to run her through — and Batori slipped the attack as lightly as if she were stepping around a puddle, caught that arm in both hands, and then…
Slammed her into the floor.
She grabbed the arm, swung, and with no resistance whatsoever drove a human body into the ground. A person's head was planted into the floor, just like that, and the floor…
"……Whoa."
"Sooo… shall we hurry and check if there are any other people left?"
"Th-that's… yes. Let's… do that…"
And Batori said it to me like what she'd just done was the most ordinary thing in the world. I was genuinely shocked. That completely unfazed reaction was actually scarier than the slam.
Batori… was way, way stronger than I'd thought.
I'd already had the impression she was much stronger than a normal person, but Batori once she'd passed a hundred and sixty centimeters was even stronger than I'd expected…
Anyway. Batori and I kept moving, searching for more people. Even if it wasn't the child's mother, anyone we found, we were going to send straight to the shelter. A villain had already made it as high as the eighth floor, so the faster we found people, the better.
"Ah, are you the mother?"
"Uh… have you seen my kid……?"
"Yes. She's resting in the shelter right now. She kept asking for her mom… we finally found you."
"Ah, aah…"
That was how, when we reached the tenth floor, we found the child's mother inside the women's restroom. We'd been searching since the seventh and hadn't found anyone until then, so turning up even one person on the tenth was a relief.
Batori and I escorted the mother all the way down to the basement shelter together, and then…
"Haaah…"
"…Wouldn't it be better if I searched for the people in hiding by myself? You look like you're having a really hard time, Counselor."
"Hah…. I-I'm fine… I'm fine…"
"……."
We went back up.
Time to search the eleventh floor. Villains as dangerous as the one we'd run into could still be wandering around, and if they found the hidden people before we did… we had to go back up, if only to keep that from happening.
Honestly, Batori could have done it alone, just like she'd said. But this whole thing had started because I'd called her in the first place. I just figured I had to see my responsibility through.
"Let's search again."
"…Okay."
And so Batori and I kept at it, working our way through the building, and we did find a few more people. Sometimes several of them were crammed into a single bathroom stall. Sometimes they'd hidden themselves among piles of clothes. One by one, we walked them all down to the shelter, then came back up and searched some more.
My stamina had dropped to a critically low level along the way. But being able to save people, one after another, felt… really good. Good enough that I could almost understand, just a little, why people became heroes.
Not that I had any intention of becoming one. I just understood the sentiment, that was all. And setting sentiment aside, I was filthy exhausted, and the idea of doing this kind of thing on a regular basis was, by any reasonable standard, insane. My body was a perfectly average twenty-something office worker's body — a desk job, through and through. If this thing, which never exercised, tried to repeat a day like this over and over…
I would seriously collapse from overwork. That much was obvious.
"Hahh…. Let's rest for a bit."
"I think we should have done that from the start…"
"Ah……"
Anyway. A sixteen-story department store building. After coming back up to the thirteenth floor, I really felt like I couldn't move anymore, so I had no choice but to sit down, just for a moment. If I pushed any further, I was genuinely going to drop.
"I wonder if things are going well downstairs."
"I'll put on the news."
"Yes. There's still been no official all-clear on the broadcast. Nothing by text either. We should check."
So we sat still and tried to get a look at the situation. It didn't seem like things had been properly resolved yet. I couldn't even contact Baek Eun-hwa or Saran to do anything about it… so we turned on the news, and if we could just confirm what was going on…
"……."
"……."
"Counselor."
"…Miss Batori."
Yeah… this…
I think we're screwed.
Piecing together the news, Batori and I naturally started worrying about the villains coming up from below. Would they make it all the way to the thirteenth floor, where we were right now? They probably would. It would actually be weirder if they didn't.
They were fleeing from the heroes, so of course they'd keep climbing, fighting and fighting and fighting, and eventually they'd get here.
"…What do we do?"
"…We should head back, don't you think?"
"…I guess so."
What were we supposed to do?
Since going up from the seventh floor, Batori and I had found a little over ten people. Thinking per floor, that was about half a person on every level.
"…Miss Batori."
"Yes, Counselor."
"…All the way to the top floor. Let's find people as fast as we can. I think we have to."
It wasn't like I had some sense of duty or anything. But we'd already searched from the seventh floor to the thirteenth, working hard, and we'd actually found people doing it. From here, only about four floors were left until the sixteenth. Searching every other floor that thoroughly and then just… not checking the remaining four didn't sit right with me, so I said it. If I were one of the people hiding upstairs… I'd feel pretty damn wronged.
Even if the villains never made it this far, I felt like we still had to do it.
Maybe it was because I'd been seeing too much of that stupid fox lately. Maybe I'd been a little influenced by her.
"…Hahh."
Of course I'd said all that. But honestly, I couldn't help being worried.