Villain Killer
Before we began our operations in earnest, we headed for the commercial district.
"But where are we going right now?"
"To get ourselves armed."
"Armed...?"
"We've got nothing but our bare hands. We can't do anything like this."
Before we took on New Order, I intended to arm ourselves first.
The door creaked open.
"Welcome to— wait. This isn't stuff for kids to play with. Get out while I'm still being nice."
"We've got plenty of money."
I answered calmly, locking eyes with the Weapon Shop Owner. I wasn't some helpless child anymore. Just holding his gaze was enough to apply silent pressure now.
"Ugh, why's a brat's stare this vicious? Fine, I'll sell to you. Quit glaring. Come on in."
Looking awkward, the Weapon Shop Owner scratched his head, stepped back, and let us inside.
"You're from the inner Areas, huh?"
"That's right. Does it show in how we're dressed?"
"It's not so much that... I mean, that flashy fur-trimmed coat of yours is a giveaway, sure, but locals around here don't usually come looking for weapons."
Anyone capable of fighting monsters already belonged to some faction, he explained, or else New Order had scouted them and supplied their gear. Private customers walking in off the street were rare.
"New Order has its hands in the weapons trade too?"
"Don't even get me started. There's barely a business they haven't sunk their claws into."
From construction to lodging, food production to hunter weapon manufacturing — they'd sprawled into every industry like an octopus, and he lamented that it was driving people around here into the ground.
"N-not the Lord of the Flies — more like the Octopus King... Why is a monster even r-running businesses like this?"
Shan grumbled, shaping her fur into octopus tentacles as she spoke. It was so cute I almost laughed out loud.
"By any chance, do you know anything about a villain who's been kidnapping children lately?"
"Know him? We put a bounty on that bastard ourselves. You watch yourself. Don't know how strong he is, but he's a nasty piece of work who targets kids just like you — the ones who look rich and pretty."
"Thank you for the warning."
After picking the Weapon Shop Owner's brain about the neighborhood, I bought wire and a dagger. He even knocked a little off the price for keeping him company.
Next we stopped at an apothecary for a few extra medicinal herbs, then left the shopping district and headed for the outskirts of the Area.
"Tiss, that villain you asked about... you weren't... talking about me, were you?"
"Shan, of course not. You're not a villain — you're a monster."
"That's not what I— I didn't mean it like that."
I explained to a flustered Shan just how vile this particular villain was. Unlike Shan, who'd fed the children and raised them well, this guy was genuine criminal scum.
That said, killing him was my personal call. Maybe I should ask Shan what she thought.
"Shan, what do you think is the most important thing for our survival — yours and mine?"
"U-uh? Asking me something like that out of nowhere..."
Caught off guard by the sudden question, Shan grew a little deflated. In moments like this, it was better to keep asking — even about small things — and keep the conversation going.
"Alright, let me rephrase. Shan, do you know what your greatest strength is?"
"My... strength? Eating well... and resting well?"
I couldn't help smiling at the way she tilted her head as she answered. I wished I could pet her right then.
"That's a strength too, I guess."
"I-is there something else?"
"The way I see it, your greatest strength is that you possess an intellect equal to mine. You think. You reason. Therefore you exist — just like any other human."
If I stopped thinking of us as host and parasite and instead saw her as a reliable partner... Shan's intelligence — the ability to call me out when I was wrong, to assess a fight from a third-party perspective — was a far greater asset than I'd expected.
"You must never forget what a blessing that is."
"Is... that so?"
"So tell me what you think, Shan. Whatever you have to say, I'll listen."
"Well... if Tiss is going to put it like that..."
Shan carefully opened up and began to share her thoughts.
"Th-then I think we should set our priorities and just... not forget them."
"Then what's the first thing we should put at the top of the list?"
Our own rules.
I proposed we establish inviolable laws and operate according to them.
"Not letting anyone discover who we are... safety. That's what matters."
"Safety first, then."
We'd absorbed a Disguiser's Essence and eaten our share of Lower-grade Hazards, but even now I couldn't guarantee a win if we had to fight one again. And hunters existed to hunt those very creatures.
"To keep from becoming prey... growing bigger, getting stronger, multiplying our numbers — I know where that leads. Better than anyone."
Abaddon, the strongest monster ever called a Calamity. It had led a swarm that filled the sky and earth, turning this world into a wasteland and annihilating half the planet — the worst monster of all. And even that thing had been hunted down in the end, not by another monster, but by human hands.
"All it led to was a hollow death. No matter how hard you try, if you get found out and hunted... if you d-die like that, I think it all becomes meaningless."
Shan, Abaddon's own daughter, feared that more than anything.
"Getting stronger is fine. Involving ourselves in human society is fine. But the top priority, no matter what, is n-never getting found out. If we make a perfect disguise our number one goal and m-move from there... wouldn't that work?"
"We did consume a powerful Essence for mimicry, but relying on that alone isn't quite enough."
If we wanted to punch through Areas 1, 2, and 3, improving our current mimicry was essential anyway. Safety first as our foundation. After that, set a goal — and if something came up along the way that we could handle, we'd actively reshuffle our priorities.
"D-did I... say that right? I-I don't even know."
It was the first time she'd ever spoken at length with anyone, she said, and she wasn't even sure what she'd just said. As she teared up again, I thanked her from the heart.
"No — I understood you perfectly."
The course of our future had been set.
"S-so that's... what you picked?"
"Yeah."
"Y-you just said safety first, and now you want to go after a v-villain?"
At Shan's shriek, I waved it off like it was nothing.
"Shan, an ordinary villain is way easier to hunt than a Lower-grade Hazard. That's why I picked this."
"B-but... humans are dangerous."
"They are. And this one's the type who'll get even more dangerous if we leave him alone."
Just like the Silver Arrow we'd found at the orphanage, this place was scattered with what you could call fateful opportunities. The most famous and representative of the ones we could get here was a book left behind by an assassin known as White Ghost — one of the heroes who had brought down Abaddon.
And right now, there was a villain in this Area who had that book. The villain we were hunting: Fedor.
The epithet he would earn in the future was Hunter Killer. Exactly what it sounded like — a killer who hunted the hunters.
At this point in time, Fedor was nothing but a punk who'd lucked into a fateful opportunity and was showing off the power it gave him. If he'd been strong, he would have become a hunter or a hero. If he'd had any confidence in his skills, he wouldn't have fled all the way out to a backwater like Area 7.
In the original game, after time had passed, he'd grown into a major villain whose rumors spread all the way to the central Academy under the name White Ghost Reborn, leaving Area 7 far behind. The original scenario had the protagonist's party tracking him down, exposing him, and stopping him. That wasn't going to happen here.
Because I was going to deal with him myself, right here, right now.
"Hunting a villain... and stealing his power...! If we g-get found out, won't hunters or heroes c-come after us?"
"It's fine. The Management Bureau doesn't even budge when a hero candidate dies. They're never going to move over one dead villain."
Neo Sion treated criminals the same as monsters — they actively encouraged civilians to hunt villains. So even if I disposed of criminals or would-be criminals and ate them to claim their opportunities, there wouldn't be a problem, as long as no hero caught me doing it.
"You've... never even killed anyone."
I'd already put a round in Rox, though. Did that not count? Besides, I wouldn't feel a thing taking out human garbage like Fedor.
But I didn't bother saying so.
"..."
"Uh... what's with the s-silence?"
"Don't worry. I won't hesitate."
My plan was to hunt Fedor, take everything he had, extract his Essence, and absorb his fateful opportunity as my own. To that end, I'd spent the last few days tailing the Hunter Killer with our mimicry ability, watching him constantly.
Not only had we never been spotted — Fedor hadn't even noticed we existed. I was only moving now because I was certain his current skill couldn't detect us.
"So trust me. I can handle this without anyone getting hurt. And if anything feels off, the moment you say we should run, I won't hesitate — we'll run."
"Mmm... i-if you put it that way, okay. I'll trust Tiss this time too, and we'll give it a try."
Just as Shan had said, for a perfect disguise we started by mapping everything — beginning with the CCTV blind spots, then his movement routes, all the way to the location of his hideout. Worried he might have noticed we were watching, I even pretended to snipe him from a rooftop one day. He didn't notice a thing and went about his daily life as usual.
After all that careful work, Shan finally judged it was safe.
After several days of tailing him, I had a clear picture. His skills were only just starting to make a name — but he was still a villain who'd committed atrocities brutal enough for this Area's merchant association to post their own bounty on his head.
The ability to erase sound — later he would use it to kill hunters, but right now he was the worst kind of trash, kidnapping powerless children and torturing them. Citizens with the guts to wander Area 7's back alleys at midnight — a place that still hadn't fully driven out its monsters — were vanishingly rare. There was no one else around.
Villain Fedor never dreamed that the kind of child he usually preyed on might be the one tailing him. Humming a little tune, he stepped into the back alley.
This dead gray urban forest of unfinished abandoned buildings had once been developed as a massive residential district — a planned satellite city, before the Gate Incident. In the days of Abaddon's reign, those buildings had served as hives that spawned monsters. Now they were being used even more efficiently than originally intended — as hideouts where villains could lie low, out of sight of hunters and heroes.
Without a shred of suspicion, he made his way toward the abandoned building he used as his lair.
Arriving at his hideout, he dumped the bag he'd been carrying onto the floor with a clatter. Wallets and various valuables spilled out.
"Not a bad haul today."
Then he unwrapped a massive black cloth bundle that was thrashing about, revealing a small child bound from head to toe.
"Mmphhh!!!"
"I can't wait to see what face you make when you cry."
He stroked the cheek of the child, who was trembling in sheer terror, and smiled a vile smile. True to a villain who took pride in the size of the bounty on his own head, he felt not a shred of guilt.
So saying, he removed only the gag from the girl's mouth, and she began to wail. But not a sound could be heard.
Because of that supernatural ability to erase sound — learned from a book he'd obtained by chance — many children had ended their lives without even being able to scream properly. The dead already numbered more than ten, and most of them had been children around Tiss's age.
In Neo Sion, where the value of supernatural abilities mattered more than human lives, people killed by villains were dismissed as the weak who were going to die anyway. They weren't even investigated. Knowing that full well, he hummed to himself without a trace of guilt, imagining what torture he'd inflict next.
Never realizing that something he had dismissed as a mere shadow was slowly drawing closer.