Pearls Before Swine (3)
His older brother had been a good man.
The brilliant brother who led an ability-user organization dealing drugs across Korea had been a veritable angel, granting him anything he desired. If someone rubbed him the wrong way, the brother would order his men to beat the offender nearly to death right in front of him. Whenever he wanted something, money was never an obstacle. And when he first stepped into adolescence and discovered sex, the brother would even fetch any girl who caught his fancy.
…Yet one day that same brother suddenly lost every subordinate and every last coin, forced to flee for his life. The reason was simple. A bastard strutting around with the foul badge of “hero”—a nuisance who had always only gotten in their way—had wrecked everything the brother had so carefully cultivated. To a guy named Smile, only a few years older than fourteen-year-old him, his brother had been stripped of nearly everything he had built over a lifetime.
…Fortunately the clever brother had always pushed his men forward and never stepped out himself, buying just enough time for the two of them to escape abroad. In the years that followed, he tasted hunger and poverty for the first time in his life, along with the scorn and oppression reserved for the weak. Above all, he had to face his beloved brother’s angry face.
Having lost everything, the brother no longer treated him kindly. A man that good would never change so easily; the grief of what that damned hero had done must have been so vast that it chewed through his gentle brother’s mind like a worm.
…Then, without warning, rage beyond control flared inside him as well. Everyone does a little wrong to make money. Merchants inflate prices, corporations trick people with false ads. Office workers steal colleagues’ credit, sycophants flatter their way into better posts. Everyone lives that way as if it is only natural.
…But why—why on earth—because they had stepped a little outside the ridiculous legal fence erected by complete strangers who had nothing to do with them, did such a good man have to lose everything so emptily to a hypocritical hero? To a fame-hungry attention-seeker who only craved cheers and praise? Could those worthless fools who lacked his brother’s brains and scraped together money the hard way simply raise their voices with talk of “law” and “justice,” just because there were more of them, and torment the two brothers like this?
The instant his clenched fist dug into his own palm and blood dripped free, a truly bizarre ability awakened in him—far later than it did for most people. The power he named Paralysis, according to a back-alley doctor, stimulated the motor cortex in a mammal’s cerebrum, intercepting the brain’s movement commands so the target could not move for a time. An ability that freely interfered with another’s body rather than one’s own was rare even in an age when powers had become everyday things.
Of course he had no idea how it actually worked. Humanity had spent decades trying to unravel abilities and still understood almost nothing beyond the simplest cases. The power that had suddenly appeared decades earlier was like magic that had once existed only in human imagination… and so its restrictions were absurdly severe as well.
The price for freezing someone was a torment as if every inch of his body were being stabbed by needles. Yet the more evil the target, the more that pain rebounded onto the frozen person instead of him. Conversely, the more “good” someone was by ordinary standards, the more the agony fell solely on the user. He later learned that against serial killers who murdered for pure pleasure—people anyone would call evil—he could keep a body locked almost forever if he wished. Against newborns who had not even formed a concept of evil, the power simply refused to activate.
…It was grotesque. Did this not look exactly like an ability designed for the heroes he despised? If a god existed above, why bestow such a power on him of all people? Perhaps to that lofty someone in the sky, the laws and order crafted by mere insects—and the human good and evil divided by them—were nothing but a joke.
But when he lifted his gaze to the heavens with that question, his brother conjured black nails in midair and killed the doctor in an instant. Afterward the brother hid the ability so thoroughly no one would ever learn of it, then took the masked boy and utterly annihilated a gang nested in a New York back alley, seizing their territory for themselves.
…Ah, nothing could have made him happier. To be of such great help at last to the brother who had always only given—he was filled with so much joy that every complicated, meaningless worry about human good and evil simply blew away. From that time on, his beloved brother treated him even better. If he asked, girls were brought with leashes around their necks. If someone displeased him, they were no longer beaten half to death; they were killed outright, their heads carefully bottled, and presented with a bright smile alongside a box of his favorite snacks.
…Yet that dreamlike happiness did not last. Heroes existed everywhere, not only in Korea, and the laws of this country were far harsher toward the two brothers. His brother was butchered without mercy by a hero who believed himself justice. Until the boy somehow stole the body that was about to be cremated and clutched it to his chest, that cold floor held a lonely, forgotten corpse.
It was sad. So unbearably sad that the tears streaming down blurred even the face right in front of him. Yes, his brother had done many things others called evil—but why did that have to be reason enough to die so wretchedly? He could not understand. To him that man had been so kind; why, simply because he had stepped a little outside some line, was the brother’s death treated as empty waste while the hero’s murder was exalted? What essential difference existed between the “evildoers” the two of them had killed and the hero who had killed his brother?
…Then he wanted to hunt down every last one of those heroes who had made them so miserable and slaughter them all. But he could not. Without his clever brother he was nothing—only a coward hiding in the dark, relieved that his carefully concealed identity would keep heroes from ever finding him.
…So for a long while he lived like a rat, quietly selling the drugs his brother had left behind. Days when his soul felt as empty as a corpse, yet he still feared dying, so he simply endured each purposeless day.
—Uahahahaha—! Villains across the nation, let me tell you one amazing secret! If you kill a powerful ability user like a hero and devour the body, the potential of your own power “blooms” far stronger!
Not long ago he watched a video of the once-most-famous villain from his homeland dying while screaming those words. The moment he saw it he dug through the bottles of dried heads stacked in the corner of his room—the gifts his brother had once killed and presented to him—selected the ones that had possessed useful abilities, and ate them. And truly, he felt a change inside his body. After one, stopping a pickpocket no longer burdened him at all. After two, freezing ordinary people walking the street brought no pain. Exactly as that grateful villain had advised, he had found an easy way to grow his power.
After that he ate corpses in a frenzy. Even when his stomach swelled to the point of vomiting he kept going. If flesh and stomach acid came back up, he scraped the liquid from the floor with his bare hands and chewed it again. Not a single hair was left; everything went down his throat. When he had consumed roughly half of his brother’s gifts, his Paralysis could be used without restriction even against average heroes. The hero who had killed his brother offered neck and flesh so easily to the small blade in his hand.
Around that time, eavesdropping on back-alley villains who had begun trafficking human flesh at breakneck speed, he learned something crucial: the blooming of an ability through corpse consumption happened only for the first person to eat the body, no matter how much was consumed. Therefore the meat they had already eaten and stripped of value should be sold off quickly before anyone else noticed the truth.
…Once more he could only marvel at his brother’s cleverness. Even the brother could never have foreseen this, so it had not been deliberate. Yet because he had always been thorough, every body except the heads gifted to the boy had been disposed of without a trace. This power was now his alone; no one else could steal it.
Within a week he had finished every ability-user corpse in the room. His Paralysis could now freeze even newborns on whom it had once refused to activate at all—and even the bodies of rabbits, dogs, and other lowly mammals—without the slightest pain. So long as a living creature possessed even the faintest selfishness that every living thing must carry, the ability was all but invincible.
…Thus, after gaining complete confidence in his power, he finally dug up the brother’s corpse he had buried long ago and ate every remaining scrap of flesh. When he happened to absorb the brother’s ability as well, he felt something he could not ignore—a vast revelation from the heavens themselves: that he would take the nails of that pitifully sacrificed brother and impale every last hero who had oppressed them with their filthy justice.
.
.
“Kyaha-haha—! That’s right, so this isn’t some piddling ‘Paralysis’—it’s the power of Judgment heaven itself bestowed on me! Even Justice, the man America rates as its most virtuous, died without being able to lift a finger under my Judgment!”
This, then, was vengeance for the two brothers persecuted simply for being a little different. It was also condemnation of the hypocrites who carried the exact same evil in their hearts, differing only in degree.
…After pouring out that entire ugly past, the lunatic who had never learned the obvious truths others grasp in infancy—who had remained trapped for years in his own contradictions—felt the same searing agony that had hit him the first time a body froze. He could not fully halt autonomic reflexes such as breathing or heartbeat, so he strode across the floor where citizens writhed and vomited in pain, walking like a god through stopped time.
Only then did he notice the phone still open on Frost’s wrist, its call function left running from before the fight even began. The corners of his mouth curled upward as if the discovery pleased him. Before crushing the device he leaned toward the speaker.
“Keuheuheu! What’s this—everything I said was being relayed to someone else? Well, it doesn’t matter in the slightest. I only told the story because I’m confident I can escape no matter what happens.”
Twitch.
“My Judgment, which ate Justice’s head, can now sense even a vehicle that lacks a motor cortex the moment it enters this vast domain.”
Step. Step.
“If I so much as smell you launching military drones my ability can’t touch, every citizen here dies.”
Twitch!
“Keuheuheu… so drop the useless tricks and bring Smile here right now. Otherwise I’ll start stirring these people’s brains into pretty little messes.”
.
.
“…Hihi. But if that one just comes quietly and dies, I’ll let half of them live unharmed. If the justice you lot keep preaching is real, then sacrificing yourself for others—that’s what a ‘hero’ is supposed to do, isn’t it?”