Don't Call Me Hero
Hero-nim.
Once I had finished off every last homunculus and smashed the incubation tank holding Nephira, green fluid gushed out and swept across the laboratory floor in a flooding tide.
Nephira's body washed out with it like something floating on water, sliding to a stop at my feet.
Up close, she was unmistakably the Nephira I knew.
Save for the pair of horns that should have jutted from her brow, the bat-like wings, and the arrowhead-tipped tail, she was without question the Lust I remembered from before my regression… and yet, the moment I moved to deal with her, something about her state felt wrong.
"Ah… ah, Hero-nim… Hero-nim…"
"Hero-nim?"
Nephira was looking up at me through wretched tears, calling me Hero-nim, her eyes shining with the rapture of someone who had just witnessed a miracle.
What the hell was going on? Could she simply be someone who happened to share Nephira's face?
No. That's not it. My instincts are screaming that this is the Lust Nephira from before the regression.
More than that — the total volume of power she carried was far too much for an ordinary person, sitting right on the threshold of Upper rank. And the instant she left the tank, my heartbeat had started racing faster than usual.
It wasn't her ability taking hold of me.
Even before the regression, Five Colors had blocked Nephira's power — but Five Colors only protected against the part that made people fall for her on sight and become her thralls. It did nothing against the way she stirred a body into arousal. Physiological reactions had always been beyond its reach.
The one mercy was that it stopped at a slightly elevated pulse. That alone told me this woman was Nephira, but not a completed one.
In other words, far from the being who had once turned even Highest-rank fighters into her servants before the regression, the Nephira before me was little more than a somewhat strong person with a charm-type unique ability.
"Hero-nim… Hero-nim… thank you so much for coming to sa—"
But what did any of that matter? The fact that the thing in front of me was Nephira did not change. I had no idea why she wasn't hostile and was calling me a hero instead — but her essence was still Lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
I seized the throat of the Nephira thanking me for saving her and squeezed.
Crack!
A sickening sound, and Nephira's body went limp.
"So that's all she is."
Heart stopped. No breath.
For the death of a being who, before the regression, had held power enough to annihilate a nation, it was an absurdly hollow end.
Which made it a worthwhile death — one that lessened the threat to my people, even a little. No. It should have been a death.
I confirmed Nephira was dead and started to leave — and from behind me came a voice that should not have been possible.
"He… ro-nim… thank you so much… for coming to save me again."
"…What the hell are you…"
"Pardon…? What do you mean…?"
"Why are you still alive."
It was Nephira. The same Nephira whose neck bones I had crushed, whose breath I had watched stop — speaking to me as if nothing had happened.
Why was she alive? Nephira's ability was supposed to be nothing more than charming people into loyal thralls. So how was the Nephira I had just killed standing there talking like it was nothing?
I wondered if she had some hidden power I didn't know about — but before the regression, Nephira had definitely died.
My comrades and I had fought her. I had watched with my own two eyes as Seol Si-yun's blade took her head.
That Nephira had been incomparably stronger than this one, and even she had not come back from death. So how had this half-baked scrap of a Nephira returned?
"Hero-nim… I… I don't die."
"You don't die? What is that supposed to mean."
I was considering whether she needed to be cut rather than have her neck broken when Nephira began to explain herself.
"I don't remember my original name… but the people at this facility called me VC-347… My name now, though… is Nephira."
VC-347. So the three hundred forty-seventh, then.
She might have been lying, but it was information I didn't have, so I decided to hear her out in silence for now.
"I don't know exactly what this place is trying to achieve… but there is one thing I do know… One of their goals is immortality — and I am the only successful specimen."
Immortality. Literally, never dying — but her words carried an enormous contradiction.
Nephira claimed she was immortal, yet the Nephira from before the regression had unquestionably died. She had turned to ash without leaving so much as a corpse behind.
To call that some kind of trick was impossible. Everyone present at the time had been Upper rank or higher, and Seol Si-yun had stood at the very edge of Highest.
The Seol Si-yun of now was a monster in his own right — but the Seol Si-yun of then had been something beyond the heavens themselves.
I could not imagine anyone faking a death under eyes like his.
Irritating as it was to admit, even the me from before the regression would not have been confident of slipping past that Seol Si-yun's gaze.
So Nephira's death back then was certain — and yet I could not dismiss her present claim as pure falsehood either, because the Nephira I had just killed had come back far too easily.
Even with her breath and heart stopped cold.
What the hell was this? And was immortality even possible in the first place?
Even those arrogance-soaked lizards wouldn't die from a broken neck, but that was only near-fatal injury — they still died if you took their heads or stopped their hearts.
Even they only possessed something close to immortality, not the real thing. So how had a human reached it?
To test whether she was lying, I drove through her heart and tore it out. I cut off her head. She did not die.
Far from dying — the heart wrenched free of my grip with tremendous force and returned to her body, and the severed neck sealed itself back on as cleanly as if drawn by a magnet.
Just as she said. True immortality.
What the hell is going on.
My head spun. A dull ache throbbed behind my eyes.
Nephira had died before the regression. Was the Nephira of now somehow immortal?
Did the immortality vanish only once she transformed into her pre-regression form? Or was there some specific trigger?
I didn't know. No matter how hard I thought, no method of breaking Nephira's immortality came to me.
"Hero-nim… do you want to kill me?"
"Yeah."
Of course I did. Even if her parents had sold her off, even if she had endured horrific experiments from a young age, even if she had lost a friend in the end to the method that created solitude — none of it was my concern.
The world was full of garbage, and the law of power said that if you weren't strong, you could never escape them.
So I was garbage too, and I was strong, and Nephira was weak — which meant she died the way I wanted. That was how it worked.
When she asked if I wanted to kill her, I answered honestly. Yes. I did.
"I don't die… After my friend died, I tried to die too… but I couldn't… Even if you're a hero, Hero-nim, killing me is impossible."
"I don't care about your sob story. What I care about is how to kill you. And stop calling me Hero. I'm no hero."
Me — with a mountain of corpses behind me and enough blood on my hands to fill a lake — a hero? Don't make me laugh.
"But… to me, Hero-nim is Hero-nim… Because you saved me."
I saved her? What kind of bullshit was that.
"I told you. I didn't come to save you. I came to kill you."
"But… I didn't die, did I? So… Hero-nim came here to save me."
Faint tears of joy gathered in Nephira's eyes as she looked up at me with a gaze of purest innocence.
It made my skin crawl.
Worse than crawl — it was repulsive.
It wasn't the malice-free purity of those eyes that was the problem.
It wasn't even that she was crying from happiness.
It was that those eyes overlapped with eyes I already knew.
The eyes of my beloved daughter Hana from earlier today, and Nephira's eyes, layered over each other in front of me — and the sight of it was so thoroughly disgusting I wanted to claw out my own filthy, contaminated eyes for daring to superimpose this whore over my Hana.
"…Fuck."
In the end, forced to see Nephira and Hana as one, I pulled one of my shirts from the small spatial-expansion pouch Beatrice had given me and threw it at her.
Whoosh—!
The pure white shirt arced through the air. I watched it rise and flicked my fingers lightly.
Snap.
"Hero-nim, this is…?"
I still couldn't manage a full change of clothes, but putting a single shirt on a naked body — that much I could do with teleportation now, no marking required.
"Stop calling me Hero-nim and just do as I say."
Whether Nephira was naked or not made no difference to me — anyone who wasn't Yuna or Beatrice was all the same — but the problem was that I kept seeing her and Hana as one.
It was deeply unpleasant. Her figure kept overlapping with Hana's, and I couldn't bring myself to leave her bare.
But no matter how much she looked like Hana, Nephira still needed a leash.
"Swear it. From this moment on, you will not harm me or my people by any means, and you will obey my commands. Swear it."
A Soul Oath might not bind Nephira — but among the restraints available to me, nothing was stronger, so I had no other option.
"If that is what Hero-nim wishes… then I swear."
A flare of blue fire — and with Nephira's vow, the Soul Oath was sealed…
…except it wasn't.
What the hell?
I felt none of the connective tether that formed when a Soul Oath took hold.
For a moment I wondered if Soul Oaths truly didn't work on her — but the blue flames of the contract were still hovering in a state of incomplete progress.
Still in progress means it isn't that the oath can't bind her… Wait. Don't tell me.
Thinking through why the Soul Oath wouldn't seal, one possibility surfaced.
"Tell me what you want from me."
"Pardon…? No. I couldn't possibly ask Hero-nim for anything."
"…Don't piss me off. Spit it out."
"Ah… th-then…"
I scowled as I spoke, and Nephira hemmed and hawed before carefully opening her mouth.
"Die—!"
Cheon Seong was still killing the remaining homunculi, reading their memories as he went, making his way toward the chairman of VC Pharmaceuticals.
Without a word, slaughtering homunculi as he advanced, someone approached carefully from behind him.
"H-Hero-nim… will this really be all right…?"
A pink-haired woman drowning in Cheon Seong's oversized white shirt, the hem barely covering what needed covering — Nephira.
Cheon Seong ignored her question and kept killing, casting his mind back a few minutes.
— Please… don't abandon me… That's what I want from you, Hero-nim.
The Soul Oath had failed to progress because causality refused to recognize a contract whose conditions bound only Nephira.
Only when she asked him not to abandon her did the Soul Oath finally seal.
Which was why Cheon Seong's mood right now was foul beyond measure.
"Don't talk to me. And don't call me Hero-nim either. That's an order."
This is fucked. Why the hell does that whore keep overlapping with Hana.
"Don't abandon me" was something Hana had said to Cheon Seong long before Nephira ever spoke those words.
Because of that phrase, the Nephira who had already been blurring into Hana now overlapped with her more vividly than ever.
"…Yes. I understand."
Crunch.
At his words, Nephira drooped like a scolded puppy with its tail between its legs. Even without looking at her, his senses still caught her, and the constant Hana-overlap stoked his temper until he wrapped his fist in a dense shroud of demonic energy and unleashed Black Night at full power toward the ones charging from far ahead.
Under Cheon Seong's fully deployed Black Night, the homunculi were crushed into the devouring dark without so much as a short death cry.
"…Fuck it. Fine. Call me whatever you want. But you — remember what I told you earlier."
"Ah… yes! I will. Hero-nim! I'll do exactly as Hero-nim says!"
Right before the Soul Oath sealed, I had added three clauses.
"You will not remove the collar."
First: she would not take off the collar packed full of demonic energy that drastically suppressed her unique ability's effectiveness.
"Once a month, you will have Hero-nim recharge the collar."
Second: the day before the collar's demonic energy ran dry, she would have it filled again. And the third was the one that mattered most to me.
"Outside, you will not call Hero-nim 'Hero-nim,' and you will not act as if you know him…"
I had zero desire to be associated with Nephira out in the world — not now, not later.
"And in return, Hero-nim will provide me with a new identity and take responsibility for my food, clothing, and shelter… right?"
"…Yeah."
Me, providing a new identity and livelihood for Nephira of Lust, my enemy… If she hadn't kept overlapping with Hana, it was a condition I would have died before accepting.
I've gotten weak. Too weak.
Not in terms of force.
In pure combat power he was growing stronger by the day — but emotionally, Cheon Seong was getting softer with every passing hour.
If this had been before the regression, even if he couldn't kill Nephira, he would have been devising ways to keep killing her over and over. The thought of his own weakness flooded him with irritation.
"Stay back."
"Yes, Hero-nim."
And so, arriving at the door that connected the laboratory to the office of VC Pharmaceuticals' chairman, Cheon Seong told Nephira to keep her distance. As she retreated far behind him —
BOOM—!!
— his fist drove forward with crushing force.
Right now, Cheon Seong's concern was neither Nephira nor Nephira's death.
I'll kill him as painfully as possible.
Only a single, iron resolve burned in him: to make the chairman of VC Pharmaceuticals — the man who had created Nephira and rendered her undying so she could not even be killed — suffer every agony imaginable before he died.
Toward the door already warped into the shape of his fist, Cheon Seong drove another blow.
BOOM!!!