The Hybrid Villain
Crunch!
"Aaaaargh!"
The sickening sound of twisting joints tore through the room, accompanied by Cheon Sang-myeong's piercing scream.
"I'm glad your place is soundproofed," I remarked smoothly. "Saves me the trouble of setting up a barrier."
"Urgh... hic... uuuugh..."
"What are you waiting for? You haven't snapped the rest."
He was clutching his broken finger, shivering uncontrollably on the floor. Pathetic as he looked, I wasn't about to cut him any slack. Compared to the railroad spike his hit piece had driven into Ariel's heart, this barely counted as a paper cut.
Snap!
"Guh..."
Cheon Sang-myeong bent the finger entirely backward. He collapsed in a heap, trembling violently against the linoleum.
"Come now, focus."
My hypnosis tended to unravel under sudden, severe shock.
"Wh-what do you want from me...?" he stammered, shuddering from head to toe as I shoved my smartphone back in front of his face to renew the suggestion.
"I want you to snap the rest of them."
"D-don't! Please, nooooo!"
Ignoring his frantic pleas, I whispered the command once more. A quiet smile touched my lips as his hand trembled violently, reaching for his right middle finger against his will.
Reason: Tortured a human, not a Kaijin!
"Hm?"
A sudden notification flashed before my eyes.
"What is this now?"
I blinked at the unfamiliar prompt. Just as had happened a few days ago, a helpful system guide materialized in midair.
When the system user commits an evil act, Villainization automatically progresses.
As Villainization advances, the user's level increases, but the Wickedness stat also rises.
In short: committing evil deeds made me stronger.
If paired with my combination of Physical Link and Tempering, it meant I would soon be able to wield Justia's max-level skills without putting undue strain on my body. I had been seriously contemplating whether I needed to subject myself to grueling, inhuman hell-training just to bulk up my vessel, so this was an undeniably welcome shortcut.
Still, I can't afford to ignore that warning about the Wickedness stat.
That explained why I had been feeling strange, aggressive impulses whenever I did something villainous lately, not to mention the subtle shifts in my speech and demeanor. If this kept progressing until my stats were high enough to sustain max-level skills, would I turn into a completely soulless piece of human trash?
I had no intention of letting that happen.
At the very least, not until Ariel matured into the greatest hero alive—and not until every last Kaijin responsible for butchering Justia was ground into dust. Once those goals were fulfilled, whether I died at Ariel's hands or her sister's wouldn't matter in the slightest.
Until that day came, I had to remain myself.
Crack!
"Spare meeeee!"
The question was how to keep my sanity intact. Relying solely on self-hypnosis wasn't going to cut it.
...Wait. Could it be?
Watching Cheon Sang-myeong squirm on the floor like an insect, an idea struck me. Conveniently enough, I had an ideal lab rat right in front of me.
"Excuse me. Are you all right?" I asked softly, stepping closer.
"Ugh... h-heee..."
His face was a grotesque smear of tears and snot. The moment I drew near, he began smacking his forehead against the floor in frantic bows.
"I-I was wrong! Please, I beg you, have mercy...!"
"What did you do wrong?"
He froze mid-bow, blinking dumbly.
"Don't tell me you don't know?"
"Th-that is..."
"If you don't even know what you did, why are you apologizing?"
"Aaaaargh!"
I gave his mangled hand a sharp kick. As he shrieked at the top of his lungs, he gasped out words through chattering teeth.
"F-for writing such aggressive, disgusting hit pieces... I am truly, deeply sorry!!"
"If you knew it was wrong, why did you write them?"
"What?"
He stared up at me with a hollow, dazed expression.
"Knowing it's wrong and doing it anyway makes you far worse, doesn't it?"
"Aaargh!"
This was the invincible, infinite-loop rhetoric Himari used to trap me in right before we broke up. Being on the receiving end had been pure agony, but using it on someone else? Pure, unadulterated bliss.
"P-please give me a chance to make it right!!"
"Oh?"
"The article I wrote about Trauma... I'll rewrite it right now!"
Wait, what was that?
Did this bastard write a smear piece about me too?
"Hmm..."
Scratching the back of my head at the unexpected revelation, I reached out a hand toward him. Cheon Sang-myeong squeezed his eyes shut, trembling like a leaf awaiting execution.
Shwaaaa...
"...Huh?"
A soft luminescence washed over his hand, and the throbbing agony began to melt away. He opened his eyes, utterly bewildered.
Recovery
This was the skill I had plundered from Resurrection during the Academy terror incident. Because of the theft penalties, its level had been stripped and I couldn't cast it on myself, turning it into a strictly inferior imitation. But even a degraded skill was better than nothing, and it worked wonders on others' injuries.
Why heal him now?
Reason: Healed an injured human!
Precisely for this.
"Do a good deed, and Villainization automatically pauses or decreases," I murmured to myself.
What a relief. If I could regulate the rate of Villainization, then combined with self-hypnosis, preserving my humanity wouldn't be an impossible task. For a system so eager to corrupt me into a full-blown villain, pausing the corruption whenever I did something good rather than penalizing me was surprisingly generous. I really couldn't bring myself to hate this setup.
"Th-thank you...?"
"Oh, don't mention it." I offered him a warm, friendly smile.
Cheon Sang-myeong blinked up at me, clearly stunned by the sudden show of mercy.
"I just refilled you," I added cheerfully.
"...Pardon?"
"Now that your fingers are fully healed, I can break them all over again."
Commit an evil deed, immediately follow it with a good one. Repeat until the scales balance out.
Snap! Crunch!
"Aaaaauuuugh!"
A true hybrid villain. What an absolute stroke of genius.
"Please, please spare my life just this once... I'm begging you..." Cheon Sang-myeong dissolved into ragged sobs, clutching his freshly shattered hand. "I only wrote sensational articles to make money! But I had no choice, it was all for my family!"
"........."
"I have a work permit so I can stay here, but my family back in Korea hasn't even been granted entry to the Artificial Island yet...!" he wailed, sounding genuinely desperate. "I needed the money to buy entry permits for my children...!"
"Is that so?"
"Whenever an unintended victim got hurt by my articles, I always made sure to wire them compensation money...! I'm a conscientious reporter, I swear...!"
"Put that way, it almost sounds reasonable."
I nodded thoughtfully as if persuaded by his heartfelt defense—and then cleanly snapped his forearm backward at a ninety-degree angle.
"—Khk! Uh... uuuugh..."
Unable to even draw breath for a scream, Cheon Sang-myeong collapsed forward, convulsing in agony on the floor. I knelt down beside him, wearing a gentle smile as I whispered into his ear.
Shwaaaa...
"I just healed your arm, so that makes me a conscientious villain too, right?"
"You... crazy bastard..."
Tsk. I followed his own logic to the letter, and he had the nerve to curse at me.
Unfortunately, reason never worked on people like him. If someone was unaware that their actions made them a villain in another person's story, you could simply tell them the truth. But someone who clung to personal excuses had already completed their rationalization long before the conversation started.
"Mr. Cheon Sang-myeong, everyone has a story."
Whenever I crossed paths with people of his ilk, I always told them the exact same thing.
"Your hero might be someone else's villain, just as your villain might be someone else's hero."
"What are you... talking about..."
"To your family, you're a hero. But to your victims, you are nothing more than a villain."
In all my years, I had never once seen anyone successfully refute that statement.
"It's the exact same principle."
".........."
"To you, I'm simply a villain."
Counter rationalization with rationalization. Meet sophistry with sophistry. I was merely paying them back in the exact currency they traded in.
"Ugh... hic..."
Whether the realization had finally sunk in or not, Cheon Sang-myeong looked up at me with eyes hollowed out by pure terror. Yes, that was it. That completely broken gaze of someone who had abandoned all will to resist—that was the look I needed.
"Mr. Cheon Sang-myeong."
His mind was now in the ideal state to receive my specialty: Altering Common Sense.
"Let's do an interview, shall we?"
People often said you couldn't fix a broken human being. I disagreed.
"And inside that interview, you are going to include every single detail you 'intentionally' omitted."
"Ah... uuuuugh..."
After all, with a little work, they could be recycled quite splendidly.
"No negative spin this time. Only positive. Understood?"
With an influential journalist like Cheon Sang-myeong firmly under my thumb, the stage was finally set. It was time to begin my ultimate, most critical objective.
Revenge against Lumia and her cabal.
A few hours later, at Ariel's residence.
"Ngh..."
Tossing and turning in bed, Ariel snapped awake in a cold sweat. She reached out with a trembling hand and grabbed her smartphone from the nightstand.
"Three in the morning..."
Her mind was still haunted by the vivid image of her older sister, drenched in blood, crawling toward her across a ruined floor. It was the same nightmare that had plagued her every single night lately.
"...Haah."
She stared blankly at the lock screen for a moment before unlocking it. Sleep was out of the question now anyway. Sighing softly, she began mindlessly scrolling through her apps.
"......."
Just as she did every night, she opened the community forums and typed her own name into the search bar.
Whether by luck or misfortune, there were no new posts. Only a long list of previously clicked links glowing a dull, faded blue met her gaze. Ariel quickly hit the back button, her chest tightening.
Forcing a bitter smile, she navigated over to Hero Network and searched her name there instead. Deep down, she knew it was pointless. If the forums were dead quiet, there was no way any new articles about her would have dropped at this ungodly hour. She was simply trying to distract herself before the vile comments she had read earlier could creep back into her thoughts.
"...Huh?"
Her thumb paused mid-scroll. Her eyes went wide.
"They say a superhero always meets an arch-nemesis worthy of them. If that is true, perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new hero worthy of a supervillain."
The piece had been uploaded barely an hour ago. With a hammering heart, Ariel tapped the screen.
".........."
Silence hung heavy in the dimly lit bedroom as she read through the text.
"Because of me... someone actually survived."
The premise was simple. An eyewitness account detailed how the villain Trauma had seized full motor control of a hostage while leaving their consciousness intact—and how, thanks to a brave young girl stepping in, that survivor had barely clung to life.
Right below the testimony was a crisp, high-resolution photograph. It captured Ariel standing with her back to the boulevard, resolute and fierce as she squared off against Trauma.
Her trembling eyes lingered on the photo before she scrolled all the way to the end, where the closing remarks caught her breath.
'If that is true, perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new hero worthy of a supervillain.'
Ariel stared at that final sentence for a long, quiet while. Slowly, an unvarnished, genuine smile spread across her face.
"...Ehehe."
She buried her face in her pillow, rolling across the mattress with a giddy giggle. Composing herself, she quickly took a screenshot of the article.
She used the scrolling capture feature to save every single one of the dozens of comments that had already piled up.
Unnie, I'll do my best.
Rereading the article several times over with a foolish grin plastered across her face, Ariel finally closed her eyes with an expression of pure tranquility.
I'll definitely become the greatest hero.
Then, a flicker of fierce determination hardened her features.
And I will avenge you no matter what...
Her teeth ground together for a fleeting second at the thought of Trauma, but exhaustion soon overtook her. Sleep claimed her before the anger could fester.
"Mmh..."
Fortunately, the last thoughts drifting through her mind were the survivor's gratitude and the kind words left beneath the article.
"Hehe..."
For the first time in a very long time, Ariel fell into a deep, peaceful slumber.
".........."
Watching her sleep peacefully through the lens of Pandora's drone from a distant rooftop, I finally let out a quiet sigh.
"Pandora, thanks for your help tonight."
A faint smile tugged at my lips as I turned to leave the edge of the roof.
"Ah."
A shiver ran down my spine as I realized the hour to fulfill my contract with Pandora had officially arrived.
Meanwhile, at that exact same hour.
"What on earth happened...?"
Deep into the night, Lee Se-ah sat alone in her office, clutching her throbbing temples.
"...I have never once foreseen a future where Lumia was a woman."
Her eyes narrowed, a sharp glint flickering within them as she rose from her desk.
"Could the future have... changed?"
She stepped into the center of the spacious room, her breath catching in her throat.
"...No. That's impossible."
The true bearer of Foresight, the one who had temporarily loaned her moniker to Lumia.
Lee Se-ah's pupils ignited with a deep, radiant azure.
"........."
A few minutes passed in stifling silence.
"...Huh?"
A drop of cold sweat broke out on Lee Se-ah's forehead.