The Hero of the Era
“Heh heh heh! So tomorrow that very Smile is coming to our school to deliver a speech in front of the students…!”
Jeong Hak-hyeon—fully retired from active duty and ranking somewhere in the middle of the first-generation veterans—could not keep his heart from fluttering like a child’s. This coming Monday, right after the weekend, Smile, whose face he had not seen in years, would visit the school and speak. Even though he was far senior to Smile, and even though he had once been the boy’s teacher for a mere single month, Jeong Hak-hyeon still held the man in the deepest respect, both as a fellow hero and as a human being.
“Heh heh. The only reason I can sit here in comfort like this is because Do Hyul is still out there on the front lines.”
He still remembered, with perfect clarity, the nightmare Korea had been when powers first began to awaken—back when he himself was still a grade-schooler. Thugs and con artists who had scraped by at the bottom of society suddenly gained abilities far beyond their station and decided they wanted to trample everyone else and live like kings. Ordinary people whose powers ran wild, turning them into rampaging monsters. Scum who had been locked away for life for serial murder, only to awaken some absurd ability, smash out of prison, and start slaughtering again. In a country that had once boasted such high public safety, even the military could not keep order, and people died like flies. To nineteen-year-old Jeong Hak-hyeon, newly embarked on his own hero career, that age had looked like a hell that would never end.
The atmosphere of violence ate away at people’s morals; more and more of them slipped into villainy in pursuit of their desires. Opportunists thrived. The few who still clung to upright justice and tried to protect the weak were a vanishing minority. First-generation heroes like himself had faced a manpower crisis so severe it was obvious to anyone watching. No matter how hard they searched for the talented and righteous, trained them as disciples, or founded academies out of the vigilante groups that operated across the country—no matter how much his own seniors, most of whom had already died young from the aftereffects of their injuries, poured their private fortunes into building the training center that was now a proper school with him as its principal—the endless tide of villains always outnumbered the heroes. In that chaotic era, when a single bad impulse could bring enormous profit, the common view was that hero work was a brutal, high-risk job: no amount of money could guarantee you would not be captured and killed by some monstrous villain.
And then a hero appeared like a comet.
In the training center his seniors had built—planning to give recruits a thorough five-year education before sending them into the field, precisely because villains tortured captured heroes for information—his very first student had blown past every senior trainee who had been studying for years. In a single month the boy displayed an overwhelming mastery of power control that could not be left to rot in a classroom, and he was dispatched to the front. That first disciple of Jeong Hak-hyeon’s possessed not only dazzling talent but a heroic spirit that shone even brighter, lighting up a world drowning in darkness. In just five years he brought the seemingly endless “Age of Chaos” to a close and ushered in the present era of stability.
Even in those desperate days when the government was talking about conscripting child soldiers, the thought of sending a fifteen-year-old boy into battle filled Jeong Hak-hyeon and every senior with guilt and dread. Yet the situation left them no choice. They trusted the boy’s talent, threw him into operations, and could only pray that the child would not meet an early end on a battlefield where even his elders were dying. Their prayers proved almost laughably unnecessary. Within a mere five years of activity the boy performed a miracle: he arrested ninety percent of the S-class villains in Seoul—the city that had hosted the densest concentration of them—and then across the entire nation.
Overwhelming combat power. A noble heart straight out of the hero cartoons Jeong Hak-hyeon had loved as a child. Standing before the miraculous path walked by young Smile—still a child who by rights should have been protected by someone else—every veteran hero present felt nothing but awe. Against the demons who had dragged humanity into this cruel hell, the boy looked like a single ray of salvation sent by the gods themselves.
And so the training center that had hosted the miracle hero Smile for only one month became what is now Seoul Hero Academy, the foremost hero-training institution in Korea. Every year it received massive government support and produced outstanding new-generation heroes who carried on his spirit.
“Heh heh. Seven years ago there was that terrifying incident when seven S-class villains and forty A-class villains who had been hiding all over the country targeted Smile’s alma mater and attacked this place.”
Of course Jeong Hak-hyeon could smile while recounting it, because every last one of those forty-seven villains had been captured alive by Smile, who happened to be nearby, and not a single casualty occurred on the school grounds. At the time Jeong Hak-hyeon was still the vice-principal; the memory of his first student arriving in an instant and fighting right before his eyes still sent a thrill through him. A man who had once fought on the front lines as a professional hero himself could not even track Smile’s movements with his eyes. The hero protected every student across the entire sprawling campus while systematically dismantling those high-threat villains. He took dozens of abilities that would have been lethal even to the world’s top-tier heroes head-on with his own body to shield the children… and never once lost his smile. That was the mettle of a true hero.
“…And even then he captured every single villain alive, because official kill orders had not yet been issued. He did it out of sheer stubborn conviction that a hero must fight while upholding the law, and must never do anything shameful.”
Jeong Hak-hyeon still remembered the words Smile had spoken while looking at the news drones the broadcasting stations had sent. When a reporter asked why he had clung so obstinately to principle even in that life-or-death moment, Smile had answered with the same upright bearing as always:
He was only a hero—not a judge who handed down sentences in a courtroom, nor the minister of the Ability Management Department who could temporarily grant heroes extralegal authority. If a hero who already possessed considerable on-site power began to abuse that authority, he would be no different from the villains who preached ability-user supremacy and committed terrorism. Anyone who held great power had to be constantly careful not to be ruled by it. Whether one was a legal professional, a hero, or a police officer, anyone charged with protecting the law and the safety of citizens must never cross the line that had been given to them.
That was the answer, pure Smile through and through, and he had finished it with a bright smile aimed straight at the cameras—true to his hero name.
Jeong Hak-hyeon still recited the next part under his breath: when the reporter suggested that, as the number-one S-class hero constantly targeted by countless villains, Smile deserved stronger on-site authority, Smile had looked into the lens and said,
“Khh! You are seriously cool, Do Hyul! I’m a man myself and even I’m about to fall for you!”
So this year Jeong Hak-hyeon had requested an entrance speech from Smile half because he personally wanted to see him and half for the sake of the growing students… and somehow the request had actually succeeded. He had managed to invite Smile to the school for a mere ten minutes. Now he opened the desk drawer, carefully took out the limited-edition Smile figure he kept there, and smiled at the thought of getting an autograph on it very soon. The figure’s value was only heightened by the fact that Smile, true to form, had donated even the ten percent royalty that should have gone to the model himself—every last won of it—to an orphanage fund. Jeong Hak-hyeon had paid twenty times the original price online to get it.
“Heh heh heh! Truly a man who is the very model of a hero! He started so young that he’s still young now, but I’m sure he has no intention of ever retiring. All he thinks about is protecting the citizens.”
Thus Jeong Hak-hyeon looked forward with enormous anticipation to whatever speech Smile would give the students next Monday, picturing his admirable junior whose mind was surely filled with nothing but lofty concerns like “world peace” and “the happiness of all humanity.”
…Well. The great junior whom Jeong Hak-hyeon respected so deeply was, at that very moment, standing in front of a snack shop he had finally managed to reach during a brief meal break. After ordering the absolute cheapest roll of kimbap that contained nothing but rice, his entire mind was occupied with the agonizing decision of whether or not to add a two-thousand-won Pikachu Tonkatsu. He had zero mental bandwidth left for any lofty concerns whatsoever.
“Guhhh…! No, wait—should I add oden instead? Yeah…! If I just order a single skewer of oden, I can drink the warm broth as much as I want!”
Gwaaaak—!
A hero does not engage in such cheapskate behavior as ordering a single oden skewer just to get unlimited broth refills.
“Ghk…! M-my heart…!”