A Night in the City
Once I was sure Dorothy was sound asleep, I slipped quietly out of the hotel.
Blazing neon. Cars sliding past. Music leaking, now and then, from open shop doors. It looked like the modern world I knew, and yet not a single brand I recognized showed its face. Familiar and strange at the same time—an uncanny kind of scenery.
Tiss, you look like you're in a good mood.
"Yeah. The countryside isn't bad, but the city's still more my speed."
I couldn't deny it. Getting out of Area 7 and arriving here had me a little giddy. Maybe it was the aftertaste of surviving a crisis, but this quiet city night felt almost too good. The sky was ash-gray, with neither stars nor moon, and I didn't care. Even the people wandering around in masks and gas masks because their lungs were too sensitive struck me as just another part of the view.
It was the kind of night you wanted to spend in a decent pub with a pint of draft, or at a bar drinking whatever the bartender recommended. Of course, walking into a place like that in this tiny body would get me thrown out a hundred percent of the time. Best-case scenario, they'd pour me a glass of milk or orange juice.
I wasn't wandering without a destination. I already knew where I needed to end up. There was a special hidden piece you could only find before enrolling at the Academy. I just wasn't in any particular hurry. Enrollment was still two weeks away; as long as I found it before then, I figured I was fine.
"Resting at the hotel's nice, but a night walk like this isn't bad either, is it?"
Right now, I just wanted to enjoy the city after dark. Shan's eyes glittered under the streetlamps.
Yeah… a quiet street like this isn't bad. No people, and the l-lights are sparkling.
Shan seemed reasonably content too.
Sniff, sniff. Tiss, something smells good.
"You're right."
As we walked, a smell brushed the tip of my nose—spicy, sweet, and salty all at once, lighting up every hunger receptor I had. Wait. Was this…?
I knew I shouldn't get my hopes up, but my feet moved on their own, pulled along by a scent I knew too well.
"Want to check it out?"
Yes! Yes! N-new food is always welcome.
Shan flicked her tongue and smacked her lips. My heart was pounding just as hard as hers as I followed the smell—and then a little street stall unfolded in front of us.
Oh, wow. I never thought I'd see one of these here.
Tteokbokki. Soondae. Even oden. A pojangmacha exactly like the ones I remembered, sitting right there in the open. Under a red tent, office workers who'd finished their day sat on folding chairs at cheap tables, quietly talking over drinks.
Right. This existed. It was a Western fantasy setting, sure, but the developer had thrown in a gag lore bit about Korean food becoming trendy—and I had never been more grateful for a throwaway joke in my life. Everything I'd missed so badly it hurt was piled up right in front of me.
Tiss, what's that?
"It's a pojangmacha. Kind of a street food stall."
Heh…?
I swallowed. It wasn't Shan this time—I was the one drooling.
Tiss, can we… can we eat this before we go?
"Shan, let's grab what we came for first, then eat."
We c-came two whole weeks early just in case, didn't we? Stopping to eat for a bit should be fine, right?
Mmm. Shan's suggestion actually swayed me. Two years. It had been two full years since I'd smelled food from home, and that scent kept tugging at me.
Tiss~ You said to hold out thinking of a feast… forget that. Can't we just eat this?
Ugh. Shan turned those big, sparkling eyes on me, and my resolve started to crumble. Honestly, I was torn. After molting again and again under Shan's influence, my appetite for rest and food had gotten a lot greedier. Holding back the hunger was getting difficult even for me.
"What if we stuff ourselves, walk into the abandoned factory, and throw it all back up?"
Hehe. Th-that's why we absorbed the bio-filter essence, remember? We'll probably be fine.
True. Even if we ate, it would only take thirty minutes to an hour.
"Fine. Let's eat."
Yesss~
We ducked into the stall, found a decent seat, and pointed at the tteokbokki.
"Come on in, dear."
"One tteokbokki, and one soondae mixed with the organ meat, please. And, um—would it be all right if I had some of the oden broth?"
"Of course."
The stall owner smiled a warm, easy smile, scooped steaming oden broth into a cup, and held it out to me.
"Here you go."
"Thank you."
I took the cup, lifted it, and smiled.
Slurp.
The hot broth slid slowly over my tongue. A deep, clinging savoriness spread through my mouth, brightened by the clean heat and faint sweetness drawn out of radish and crab.
Haaah. A sigh escaped me before I could stop it. That electric hit of MSG. I had missed it so much. Every tangled thought, every secret I had to keep, seemed to blur and fade.
Hyaaah.
Tiss, this is amazing.
Shan, sharing my sense of taste, let out a sound of pure wonder. Her eyes had gone completely unfocused; she kept alternating between a gasp of delight and another sip of broth.
Factory-stamped bread. Genetically modified beans. Lab-grown meat. That was most of what trickled from the cities into Area 7. The game we'd hunted as poachers was good, sure—but it was a completely different register from this seasoning-drenched punch. Compared to Area 7's bland meals, this flavor slammed straight into the brain.
"The tteokbokki and soondae are up. Want another cup of broth?"
"Thank you."
We both swallowed hard at the sight of the tteokbokki and soondae piled on a green plastic plate sheathed in plastic wrap. I dunked a piece of soondae in the tteokbokki sauce and put it in my mouth.
How is it?
A little spicy, but it's so good! What's this marshmallow-y thing?
That's the rice cake.
A spicy, chewy heat bloomed across my tongue. Yeah. This was the taste.
Nom, nom.
I-it's delicious! Let's grab some for Dorothy on the way back.
Got it—just eat slowly. You'll get a stomachache.
By the time I came back to myself, we had ordered one of everything the stall sold and eaten it all.
While Tiss and Shan were enjoying their late-night snack, a sudden uproar broke out at the abandoned factory.
From the place where the homeless had been hiding, an explosion went off and black smoke boiled upward.
"Move! I said move!"
A villain slashed a knife through the air, and the homeless scattered screaming.
"Stop right there!"
Violet, an E-Rank villain, ran for her life, trying to shake the heroes on her tail.
"Damn it—why…!"
She'd just been unlucky. An ordinary city civilian, she'd been scammed, and then, to make it worse, she'd been fired. With her livelihood gone and nothing left she could do, she'd ended up stealing just to stay alive. She'd wanted to run to Area 7. The moment she could scrape together a ticket, she'd meant to leave everything behind and cross over.
"S-security got tighter?"
Two years of conflict between Beelzebuth and Tiss had sent a butterfly effect rolling out of Area 7 and across the city at large. Tiss trying to weaken New Order however she could, Beelzebuth trying to swallow Area 7 by recruiting talent—their feud had turned into a bidding war for people. New Order had offered outrageous terms and scooped up retired hunters, heroes, even villains. They'd succeeded in widening the talent pool, but in the process they'd taken in genuine scum as well. Types like Fedor, the kind Tiss had already beaten down and crushed, had slipped in among them.
Some of the villain packs that crossed into Area 7 never even cleared New Order's lowest bar, and were left to rot.
"I heard that orphanage is loaded with support."
"They've got to have money, right?"
"What, we just take the kids hostage and cut a deal."
The number of villains planning a raid on the orphanage had been growing one by one—until, one day, White Ghost appeared out of nowhere, slaughtered every last villain who'd attacked the place, and vanished. After that incident, the Management Bureau tightened inspections at the terminals leading out of the city, determined that petty villains would never get a foothold at an Area 7 orphanage connected to White Ghost, one of the heroes who had brought down Abaddon.
Under the heavier screening, countless non-citizens and small-time criminals were caught at the terminals and arrested. Violet, who in the original story would have fled to Area 7 and lived out her days as an ordinary villain, gave up on moving. Stranded, she slid into the life of a pickpocket villain, barely staying alive by lifting other people's wallets day after day.
That day was no different. She went out onto the street to pickpocket the way other people went to work. She was unlucky. All she'd meant to do was target a pedestrian too busy filming to pay attention. The misfortune was that a colleague nearby caught the theft on camera—and that the people shooting were the Rainbow Heroes.
"Hey. What do you think you're doing?"
The camera had her pickpocketing, clear as day.
"Ah…?"
A hero punishing a villain bold enough to steal on camera. The Rainbow Heroes decided the footage would look pretty good, and they wanted to show off their powers in front of the lens. Violet ran for her life. The Rainbow Heroes herded her along at their leisure, like hounds driving prey. She plunged into the abandoned factory without knowing its maze of corridors, and the Rainbow Heroes followed, hungry for something even more sensational to film.
When she reached a stretch where the railing had broken away, Violet hesitated for a second, then made up her mind.
"Screw it…!"
She jumped without knowing what was below.
"What—she actually jumped?"
The Rainbow Heroes froze, caught off guard by a choice they hadn't expected. In the instant they thought they could still make it across—
Splash!
Violet fell, and went under in a heap of contaminated waste. Green slime wrapped her body in seconds. Thick liquid began to pour into her lungs. She couldn't even swim. Even if she could have, crawling out of that clinging toxic sludge would have been nearly impossible.
"H-help…!"
A gurgling sound. Her body thrashed up and down, then gradually stilled, and went completely quiet.
The Rainbow Heroes peered down from the broken railing at Violet sinking below. They glanced at one another, and one of them spoke carefully.
"What do we do? Should we pull her out even now?"
One member hesitated over the words, but the leader grabbed the shoulder of the one who looked ready to go in, as if the idea were insane.
"What? You want to go in there? We don't even know what's inside."
Nobody had the courage to throw themselves in after seeing the biohazard marks and radiation signs plastered around. They weren't heroes who saved people. They were heroes who caught villains.
Tch.
"She jumped in on her own anyway. We didn't push her."
They hadn't knocked her in by accident, and there was no reason to fish out a villain who was drowning herself of her own free will. All they'd wanted was some cool footage.
"What a jinx."
"Serves her right."
For heroes who'd wanted a flashy clip to put on the net, it was just a stroke of rotten luck.
"Piece-of-shit villain. Made us run our asses off and then died pretty. Good riddance."
Annoyance boiled up in the leader at the thought of all that chasing for nothing. He spat and jeered down at Violet.
"What are you standing around for? Let's just go."
In that moment, the shapeless matter filling the waste tank began to seep into the body of the villain who had fallen into the contaminated water.
Thump. Thump.
Her lungs were packed with formless slime instead of air, and still the heart that had stopped began to beat again. Green mucus ran through her veins in place of red blood, mutating her from the inside out.
A slow stir. Focus crept back into eyes that had gone white, and she opened them underwater in the filth. Fingertips and toes twitched, then moved.
Slaaash!
The body that had sunk all the way to the bottom convulsed—and in a single burst, the thing tore up through the waste and exploded into the open air.
"What? She's not dead?"
The heroes, already turning to leave, jolted to a halt. The villain they'd thought was dead was alive, and they were quietly pleased. Now they had a chance to finish her with their own hands. Whether she was poisoned or not didn't matter. What mattered was getting a beautiful takedown on camera. In a world where absurd powers existed, they could just call this one of them—a dangerous villain who'd been hiding her ability. Frame it that way, and if anything went wrong later, they could write it off as killing her in self-defense. Simple. As long as they wore the title of hero, everything they did was justice.
"Grrrk…"
But the heroes didn't see it. The shapeless slime clinging to her body was not ordinary contamination. The Violet standing in front of them was no longer the pickpocket villain they had been chasing.
A wet heave. The sticky liquid writhed, then snapped out like a whip, drawing a vicious arc.
The youngest hero, Green's, head came off in an instant.
Shhk.
Only after the neck was severed did the sound arrive, and the shockwave with it.
"G-Green!!!"
Not one of the Rainbow Heroes even managed to react.
"Gyaaaaah!!!"
The sound of butchery and a hideous scream rang through the abandoned factory.
And then silence settled again.
Tiss stepped into the abandoned factory after the Rainbow Heroes had all gone quiet.
"What… is this?"
"Oh, for fuck's sake."
T-Tiss. Language.
How was I supposed to not swear? The timing was the worst it could possibly be. I felt cheated. Judging by the state of the corpses and the look of that monster, this hadn't happened long ago. For all I knew, it had gone down while we were at the food stall.
"Grrlh?"
The thing looking this way with a human corpse for a vessel, its head cocked more than ninety degrees—that was the hidden piece I'd come to find. Ichor.
Crunch. Crunch. Amorphous slime tentacles kept shifting shape, slowly dissolving and eating the scraps of flesh scattered around them.
Tiss… I feel like I've seen that somewhere.
"The face looks familiar… ah. The commercials!"
The Rainbow Heroes. Those guys did ad campaigns, and they'd been wiped out? Just like that?
At the sight of the villain—scraps of meat tangled up with writhing, shapeless tentacles—Shan dry-heaved.
Y-you were going to eat that?
"I'm telling you, it's fine to eat it now."
True to the name God's Blood and the myth it was modeled on, that thing was a violently toxic substance in its own right. In a game where becoming a hero or a hunter was the default play, this hidden piece only unlocked if you skipped the Academy in the prologue, came straight to the abandoned factory, and threw yourself into the contamination. A player character mutated by the waste wasn't treated as a beast or a human. They were treated as a monster villain.
I'd come here certain that the high resistance I'd built over two years—starting with the Water Bear and every essence since—would let me absorb it and digest it slowly with no problem. I hadn't expected someone to beat me to it.
It was a hidden piece with matching upside: you didn't get to be a hero or a hunter. You started on hardcore mode as a monster villain instead. I'd been following the old logic—if you want to hide a tree, hide it in a forest. And now it had been stolen out from under me.
Tiss… i-it's coming this way.
Slaaash. The grotesque thing that had been a villain came closer, green slime dripping from every inch of it. Its back split open, and a bundle of tentacles burst out.
W-what do we do now?
"What do you think."
I dropped the mimicry and walked forward. Even in the dark of the abandoned factory, my white hair caught the light and shone.
Give it back. That's my hidden piece.
"Oppa, didn't you just hear something from over there?"
Sia tipped her head and whispered.
"Yeah. I heard it."
The siblings had just arrived in Area 3 under the Order's escort. Siwoo stopped too, listening. From the abandoned factory, where a raw wind was blowing, came a strange noise. Metal scrap colliding. Something being dragged, an ugly wet sound. Heavy impacts at irregular intervals.
"Should we go take a look? There might be someone who needs help."
Curiosity lit in Sia's eyes.
"Yeah. Let's go."
Siwoo hesitated for a moment, then nodded at the sight of Sia burning with eagerness.