Damage Control
WHAM! The blast of noise hit with the sound of the explosion.
The ground shuddered briefly, and a dull impact climbed up through the soles of my feet.
Thick smoke was curling up between the windows at the back of the logistics center.
I quietly lowered the hand gripping the detonator switch and turned my head.
"A shame, really."
"....."
Valkyrie said nothing. She simply stood there, lips pressed into a hard line, staring in the direction the smoke was rising. The corner of her mouth trembled, ever so slightly.
She seemed to be feeling quite a storm of emotions, and the way she forced even those down was striking. I let out a light chuckle and took a moment to straighten my collar.
"Still, this couldn't be helped. Our side did have contingencies of its own, you see—"
The words were barely out of my mouth.
Valkyrie's silhouette shot forward in an instant. My hand moved on reflex. My eyes tracked her trajectory while my hand drew the pistol from my waistband, leveled it at the bridge of her nose, and pulled the trigger.
TWANG—!
She twisted her head aside at a speed you could honestly call instantaneous.
Huh... she's dodging bullets she can actually see.
When I raised my hand afterward to summon my psychokinesis, she reflexively put distance between us. Our eyes met. Cold, hard eyes.
"Contingencies? You detonated a bomb alongside civilians!"
"If you hadn't threatened us, we wouldn't have needed it. And there were no civilians, for the record. To be precise, you can assume they all ran for it."
A shootout had broken out directly overhead, after all. There was no way the workers would've just kept their heads down and gone about their jobs.
"You just said there were civilians inside..!!"
"Ah, that was a lie, of course. You actually believed that? They teach you at the ESP Training Institute never to trust a word a villain says... I suppose they've gotten lax these days?"
"....."
Her hands were shaking a little.
"And I think you're laboring under a misunderstanding. We came here to negotiate, not to slaughter civilians. Their absence would be a problem for us too, you see."
Why on earth would we kill the workers? They're the ones who do the labor and manufacture the goods that make their way into our supply lines.
"That said, the explosion itself did happen. A few of the production lines are probably scrap by now. Though that's an incident that would never have occurred if you hadn't pulled a reckless stunt."
To be precise, what we blew up were the old production lines. Productivity had already plummeted, and their maintenance was a complete mess.
I'd given the facility manager a heads-up in advance, too—told him to just let a few of the outdated units blow when the time came, since I'd set the stage in a way that made it easy to pass the blame to the hero and the Association.
With the board laid out this thoroughly, the rest should take care of itself.
[Closer.]
Shifty's voice crackled in my ear.
[Preparations for departure are complete.]
"Open a link."
The moment I spoke, a portal connected before us. Through the faintly rippling blue light, I could see the familiar route home.
I turned my head one last time to look at Valkyrie's face. Blue eyes glaring at me with open hostility, down to the grinding of her clenched teeth and her trembling shoulders.
...She's pretty furious. Understandable, I suppose. From where she stood, all of this had unfolded right in front of her.
"Don't go making more trouble out of nothing. It gives us both a headache."
"You... I will catch you. When I catch you, I swear—"
"Yes, yes. You can get to that later, at your leisure."
I cut her off mid-sentence. She would've rattled on with a pile of clichés next—about dragging me before the judgment of the law, about justice prevailing, something of the sort.
I didn't need to watch to know how it ended.
"Then, until next time. Take care, heroic sir."
We stepped through the portal and headed back to the organization.
"Whew..."
And with that, my first negotiation drew to a close.
"You handled that remarkably well."
When my report was finished, Lee Sejin unfolded her arms and nodded with evident satisfaction.
"All you were asked to secure was a supply line connection and priority access to equipment... I never expected you to come back with internal Association documents as well."
I shrugged.
"That was the original plan, but they came out swinging first. So I tacked on a few extras."
We had approached them in good faith—specified exactly when we'd call on them, promised confidentiality, the works. If their answer to all that was to hire mercenaries and point guns at us, then extracting at least that much in return was only fair.
"On a related note... did you find anything in the Association's files?"
"The tech team is going through them now. If something unusual turns up, I'll share it with you right away."
She nodded. Just as in the original story, the Association, despite appearing as an ally, offered only surface-level information while its inner workings stayed firmly hidden. The organization was simply enormous, and its administrative procedures were chopped into so many convoluted layers that nothing leaked out.
I had no idea what they might be hiding... but given that even the original story never painted them in a friendly light, it probably wasn't pleasant information.
"More importantly..."
Lee Sejin held out something she'd been carrying. It was a single internet newspaper.
A-Rank Hero Valkyrie Faces Growing Calls for Accountability
"You cooked this better than I expected. Where did you learn to do that?"
"You're familiar with the ESP Training Institute, yes?"
"The place you came from?"
The ESP Training Institute. The largest educational institution in this world, operating under the Association's watch. Its official name was something long and stiff—'School for ESP Utilization and National Strategic Agent Development'—but everyone just called it the ESP Training Institute.
Apparently I'd opened my eyes and found myself there, and in this world, the institute's name carried some real weight. The so-called elite course—from the fundamentals of psychokinesis to advanced physical control applications, psychological warfare theory, and techniques for maintaining your ability even under extreme conditions—most of the skills I use now were drilled into me back then.
Most graduates crossed over to the hero side; those who didn't could become military officers. Every so often, deviants like me drifted into the underworld instead.
"Yes, I learned it there. To be precise, it was a course on pinning unexpected civilian casualties on villains."
"They teach that?"
"It was discontinued in under a week. Word got around that it was deeply irresponsible."
What was it the instructor used to say...
The instructor bellowed that while running through a handful of examples: how to deflect a casualty on-site as collateral damage from a fleeing villain; how to wave off excessive intervention during an arrest as a judgment error caused by missing information; how to buy off the other party and shift the blame onto them.
I never imagined I'd be putting half-listened lectures from back then to use against a hero.
Hearing all this, Lee Sejin pressed a hand to her forehead for a moment.
"That place isn't normal either, is it."
"Neither are we, to begin with. Well."
"Still..."
She swiped the screen and glanced at the comment section below the article. The comments were bristling.
Roughly that tone. And beyond that, posts accusing her of abusing state power or alleging some kind of fabrication—honestly, every kind of nonsense you could imagine was mixed in there.
Watching it all, Lee Sejin grimaced like she'd just witnessed something she'd rather not have seen, then lifted her head again.
"It's working, though. Public opinion is tearing into them, if nothing else."
"How is the other side responding?"
"Valkyrie's side? Nothing beyond the official statement that she's entering a suspension. The Association seems too busy trying to contain the public backlash."
Suspension, hm...
I did feel a little sorry for the protagonist, but if Nightfall rode this wave of media coverage and surfaced into public view now, the situation would tangle up badly. Setting aside the Association's response entirely, the main currents of the original story itself could come apart.
That was a considerable risk for me too—because I couldn't guarantee which direction this world would roll in, or how far it would keep flowing in step with my memories.
As for the protagonist... she wasn't expelled outright, so she'll weather it somehow.
I meant that sincerely. Whatever anyone said, she was the protagonist of the game I'd played. The one who endured stubbornly through wave after wave of terrible odds and eventually rose to stand at the center of the world.
"Well... setting that aside."
Lee Sejin turned her head to the side.
"And who might this be?"
Shifty was sitting silently beside us. She was still wearing her suit, but the face portion was open—her silver hair and crimson eyes plainly visible.
"That's Shifty."
"Ah, I see. Shif... I'm sorry, what?"
Lee Sejin's eyes went wide.
"Shifty. Correct. She's only got the face portion off at the moment."
Lee Sejin spent a while glancing back and forth between Shifty's face and mine, then carefully lowered her voice.
"She was a woman?"
"Correct."
Shifty answered.
"Did you not know?"
"I... well, I'd heard as much from the Director a while ago, so I knew in principle, but I'd never actually seen... no, wait, you've never once taken your helmet off in front of me!"
"You never asked, either."
Shifty replied to Lee Sejin's question without a flicker of change in her expression.
"Then why are you taking it off now?"
"Battery depletion. Current output is restricted, making voice modulation impossible. Furthermore, I judged that there was no particular need to conceal it from fellow executives."
"I... see."
Lee Sejin let the words trail off and dropped her gaze to the documents. Her eyes, however, kept drifting back toward Shifty. However hard you tried not to be conscious of it, some things were impossible to ignore.
I'd reacted the exact same way when I first found out, after all.
A short while later, Lee Sejin raised her head and looked at the two of us.
"In any case... um, you both worked hard out there. I mean that, truly."
It was the kind of greeting that could pass for formality, but from her tone, guessing that she meant it wasn't difficult at all.
"Keep it up going forward, please. Even without the Director here... we are still Nightfall."
After wrapping up the report and trading a few odds and ends of small talk, we headed outside.
"Closer, then. I will return."
"Right. Thanks for the help."
"If you require assistance again, I will provide it."
With those parting words, Shifty strode off toward her room.
Without the voice modulation, she came across as oddly endearing.
I should be heading back too...
With one mission under my belt, I could rest easy for a while.
The very moment I thought that—
"Hellooo there... Closer."
A voice drifted in from behind me—familiar, and unhurried. After having just wrapped up a mission, this was not exactly a welcome development, whatever it turned out to be.
But I couldn't exactly ignore it, either. The other party was an executive of Nightfall, after all.
I turned around to face the owner of the voice. A woman with tousled, uncombed hair and a shirt half-slipped off one shoulder was looking at me, as if she'd only just dragged herself out of bed.
Selene, executive of Nightfall.
The one they used to call the Butcher of Man.