A Difference in Perspective
“We've arrived.”
Shifty scanned her surroundings as she reached the target location: a control room where the surveillance systems and data streams converged. Perhaps it was because she'd moved without her suit, but she'd had the nagging sense of unfamiliar eyes trailing her at every turn along the way. None of that mattered now.
Securing the intel comes first.
Without hesitation, she approached the main console and raised her fingertips. A wave of electromagnetic energy rippled outward. Detection sensors stirred to life, and the monitors flickered awake one by one, like eyes blinking open.
- Establishing system connection...
- Verifying user authentication...
- Access permission requested...
“Biometric authentication too, is it?”
Shifty muttered quietly. An inconvenient setup, but not a difficult one to bypass.
- Connection complete. Limited administrator access granted.
“Good.”
The monitors unfolded before her: blueprints for the entire facility, feeds from the surrounding surveillance cameras, communication logs, and more.
“Now I just need to confirm—”
That was the exact moment it happened.
“What do you think you're doing in here?”
The voice was sharp in an oddly greasy sort of way. Shifty turned around.
What greeted her eyes was a man in a beige suit with a distinctly sleazy face.
“A Hero?”
“Ha! A beauty AND she knows quality when she sees it! That's right! I am Jade, B-Rank Hero!”
He proclaimed it with an extravagant flourish of pride and a little gesture to boot.
“.....”
“..........”
“Understood.”
Shifty lost interest on the spot and turned back toward the monitors. Jade blinked in open bewilderment.
“Wait, that's it? You just heard my introduction.”
“Yes. I heard the introduction. Is something more required?”
“Well—normally, when someone gives you their name, you'd say hello back, or mention you've heard of them... something along those lines?”
“I felt no need to greet you.”
“Wow, that is seriously cold. Miss, don't people tell you all the time that you've got a weird personality?”
“Occasionally.”
“And you never reflect on it?”
“I felt no need to.”
“…….”
Jade raised one eyebrow and let out a small, awkward laugh.
“And here I was thinking I'd grab a girl's number, seeing as you're pretty cute... Talking to you feels like talking to a wall.”
“If you have no business here, then leave.”
“Hold on, hold on. I've got business here too. I didn't just wander in on my way past.”
Shifty asked without taking her eyes off the monitor.
“Then what is your business?”
“There was an external breach at the lab.”
“....”
“So I come to the control room, and I find... this? Call me crazy, but doesn't that make you the villain here?”
“Are you saying you intend to stop me...?”
“Haha... now that would hurt my feelings.”
Jade's gaze slid slowly downward.
“I'm only here to clean up. The whole mess got a lot bigger than anyone expected.”
“Clean up?”
“Yeah. Deleting the records, and... silencing a few people who can't keep their mouths shut.”
“Then it is no different from stopping me. In that case, I have no choice but to repel you.”
“.....”
Jade flashed a toothy grin.
“Can a face like yours actually kill a man? You haven't changed expressions once, so I'm guessing you're not scared.”
He shrugged and cast a glance around the room.
“No cameras in here anyway. Whatever I do to you, none of it's making it outside. Understand?”
“Yes. I understand.”
Jade chuckled and took a step closer.
“Then be a good girl and—”
“Does that not mean that even if you vanished from this room, no one would ever know?”
Jade's smile froze.
“What?”
Shifty reached out and grasped at empty air.
“Deploy.”
A short mechanical chirp sounded, and a metal frame began unfolding across her forearms.
Then the shoulders. The chest. The legs.
White alloy quietly interlocked piece by piece, assembling itself into a single, imposing form.
Click.
The suit came alive, and twin golden lines ignited across the visor of her helmet.
“What the hell—!”
Execution protocol: ACTIVE
A blade of light formed along the line of her palm.
[Carve this into your memory, while you still have one.]
A slender green shimmer flashed through the air, hardening into a fixed line of energy until the outline of a sword took shape.
[Nightfall escorts you to your end.]
A brief silence settled over the corridor.
Something has seeped into the Association.
The words kept spinning around and around in my head.
A spy?
That was the first thought that came to mind. An internal mole siphoning off information, or a plant from some villain organization—things of that sort.
And honestly, if that were all it was, I could take it in stride. Every corner of the world had at least one of those crawling around in it.
But... the branch director's tone hadn't sounded like a story that ended there.
In the original story, the Association was set up as an unshakeable ally. The cause itself—shielding ordinary lives from the villains who threatened them—was something no one could deny, and in practice they had always given it their all.
Even so, being an ally didn't mean everything about them was on the table. The administrative labyrinth had been tangled into such a knot that no one could say what was hidden, or how much of it—and some facilities had been designed so that even the faintest trace of their existence never surfaced at all.
Research installations like this one, for instance.
A corrupt Hero Association is the most obvious cliché in the genre, sure... but what was unfolding right now was not something I could just wave off as stale writing.
“What exactly does that mean...?”
At my question, the branch director drew a breath before speaking.
“At first, it was small things. Reports arriving late, experiments vanishing from the records one by one... It was strange, but the kind of strange you could write off as ordinary mistakes.”
She went on, her eyes fixed on the darkness at the far end of the corridor.
“The strange part was that no one ever raised the issue. Who was in charge, who signed off on it—nobody knew. And yet the experiments continued, and before long yet another one had taken the last one's place.”
“You're saying someone at the top was involved?”
“That... I honestly can't say. But I don't think so. Even an S-Rank Hero, even the Association Chairman—any of them would leave a paper trail.”
A moment of silence passed. Valkyrie spoke up slowly.
“So... it kept running on its own, even though no one ever gave the order?”
“That's right. Strange, isn't it?”
the branch director said quietly.
“But it's the truth. I assumed at first it was an internal problem too. It was only after the same pattern repeated again and again that I finally understood. That this was no coincidence.”
Her words cut off for a moment, then resumed in a lower register.
“Something is diverting a great river. I don't know what it is, but I doubt... it's anything ordinary.”
“Then... you've been investigating it yourself, Director?”
At that, she gave a small nod.
“I have. Which is why I'd like you to carry a message to Nightfall. For the time being... keep contact with the Association to an absolute minimum. Sooner or later we'll have no choice but to entangle with them, but that time is not now. And...”
The branch director turned her gaze on Valkyrie.
“And you, Hero, would do well to watch your back too. The Association is changing as we speak. No—it may already have changed. Into something completely unrecognizable from that ideal institution you were describing to me just now.”
“...Isn't that jumping the gun a little?”
“.....”
The branch director didn't answer. She simply looked at Valkyrie in silence.
“Everything you've told us is nothing but circumstance, isn't it? No hard evidence, and you'd condemn the entire Association on conjecture?”
“But there's no harm in being careful, is there? Don't you agree?”
“......”
Valkyrie said nothing.
Instead, she quietly thought of her superior.
The director of the A-Branch. The person who had first scouted her all those years ago. A teenager who had lost her family and was drifting through the world, when this man saw the power that had manifested in her by chance and reached out his hand without a moment's hesitation.
He was the one who had given her the name Valkyrie, too.
A retired Hero besides, he understood fieldwork better than anyone, and he knew exactly what kind of exhaustion wore down the people on the ground.
But even if the Association has changed, that doesn't mean everyone inside it has.
Valkyrie knew perfectly well that the upper echelons of the Association had lost their minds. The idiots upstairs who judged everything from reports alone and never once considered the fatigue of the field. The directives that only came down after disaster struck, couched as accountability but really just blame-shifting—and the memory of political calculations being forced even onto Heroes who had fought with their lives on the line.
She'd witnessed scenes like that and burned with silent rage more times than she could count.
And yet... even so, she didn't want to say that every last person inside those walls was rotten.
The rookie Hero who trembled with shaking hands before an operation but never once took off her gauntlets until the very end. The team captain who ignored orders and bolted out alone the moment word came that a teammate had gone down.
Some people might call that hypocrisy.
But so what if it was hypocrisy? Judged by results, it saved someone's life. If it meant even one more person came home at the end of the day, wasn't that enough?
“...You're right. I don't want to deny that either.”
The branch director slowly withdrew her gaze and looked down at the corridor floor.
“There are still good people in the Association. People who do their damnedest day after day to save someone, just like you said.”
Then she lifted her eyes again and met Valkyrie's.
“But Valkyrie—when a great organization starts to groan at its joints, it is never simply because all the people inside it are bad.”
the branch director continued.
“Most people never notice that anything has changed. They just live as they always have. They write their reports, follow their orders, scrape through another day, and get ready for the next one.”
“......”
“And only after the tipping point has been crossed do they realize it. That at some moment, somewhere, things became different. And by then, it is already far too late.”
Valkyrie had no reply.
Only the fingertips curling faintly into her palm spoke for her.
And that was the moment it happened.
The familiar, low-pitched voice came through the earpiece. It was Shifty.
“What is it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What?”