Unique Ability User
Irritation flooded my head.
While wandering the streets to figure out where I was, I collided with some sleazy-looking man.
Like any decent citizen of South Korea, I apologized politely — but this guy clearly had no intention of accepting it.
"Sorry? So if I smash that pretty face of yours flat, I can just say sorry too, huh?"
What kind of bullshit was that?
Bumping into someone and pulverizing their face were not the same thing.
I wanted to say as much, but I held my tongue.
You dodge shit because it's filthy… I'll just endure this…
It absolutely was not because I was intimidated by the difference in size.
Really.
But the man showed no sign of letting me go. Worse, the look in his eyes was thick with a desire so repulsive it made my skin crawl.
My already foul mood turned utterly filthy.
Fighting in this fragile woman's body was not an option I could choose. So the moment he stood there staring blankly at my face, I bolted at a full sprint.
I'd rather bite my tongue and die than get pinned under some guy. Seriously.
I scanned my surroundings as I ran, but people only stared and looked away. Not a single person stepped forward to help.
I had taken off at full speed, yet my breathing grew ragged and my pace steadily slowed.
"Hah… hah… hah…"
I was too exhausted to run any farther. In the end, I had no choice but to stop.
"Haa… haa…"
While catching my breath, I looked around for even a rock I could smash down with — but what closed around my hand was not a stone. It was that man's disgusting grip.
Just being caught sent goosebumps racing over my entire body.
The male pride still lingering inside me seemed to scream.
You, a special forces veteran, are going to get used by this thug trash? You're going to whimper and thrash like some pathetic woman under a man who isn't even a woman?
Fine.
Better to fight to the death. Gouge his eyes, crush his balls — there were plenty of weak points. There was a chance.
The moment I steeled myself with that vicious resolve, my body suddenly felt hot.
Maybe my emotions surged with it. I screamed as I threw a punch at the man.
"You creepy son of a bitch!!"
He saw the fist coming and didn't even bother to dodge. He just smirked.
Yeah, that probably won't hurt much. Brace yourself. Next is your dick.
But that never happened.
Crunch.
"…Huh?"
What filled my vision was my own fist painted in blood — and a body with no head.
What…? What just…
Thud.
I turned my head and saw the corpse's head lying far off in the distance.
"Urgh…"
My body felt like it was rejecting everything.
"Bleeegh—"
Murder. A person's death. I had never experienced either, of course. I had never seen a corpse this grotesque either.
As my body convulsed in rejection, I collapsed to the ground and vomited.
But the world gave me no time to pull myself together.
"Kyaaaaaah!!"
"Aaaagh! A monster… it's a monster!!"
"What the fuck!! This place was supposed to be safe!!"
The people around me started screaming and fleeing.
Bastards. When I was being chased, they wouldn't even look my way. Now they ran like a terrorist attack had broken out.
…Urgh… I have to get out of here first…
Clapping a hand over my mouth, I bolted from the street as if fleeing for my life.
The place I returned to was the alley where I had first possessed this body.
I washed the blood from my hands in a puddle on the ground and leaned back against the wall.
About half an hour must have passed. With time, my pulse and my mind both settled somewhat.
I drew a breath and thought it through calmly.
He was a bastard who tried to rape me. He deserved to die.
I had already figured that killing people was something I would have to do eventually in this place.
I was just shocked from seeing a corpse, that's all.
I felt no guilt over the murder whatsoever. In a world like this, that kind of emotion was a luxury. These days, even in novels, truly virtuous people barely showed up anymore.
Robin, the righteous protagonist himself, was a character who killed "evil" people without the slightest hesitation.
Just as the memory of the killing was beginning to fade, I clenched my pale fist and dragged the moment back up again.
What was that power?
It was nowhere near the kind of force a slender woman like this should have been able to produce.
No sign she's ever learned mana either…
Could it be an ability?
A unique ability.
In the world of The Indomitable Hero, mana existed. Individuals converted mana into magical power to cast spells, strengthen their bodies, imbue weapons with attributes, and so on. But that required the ability to sense the surrounding mana, plus the technique to convert it into magical power.
That was why the academy in the novel screened for people who could sense ambient mana, then taught the selected students how to convert it.
Naturally, I had never learned any of that knowledge, and I couldn't feel the mana around me either.
I don't even know what kind of body this is. Mana? Please.
But even without sensing mana, even without the technique to convert it, there was a way to produce overwhelming power.
So-called unique abilities.
Innate talents carved into the body from birth. With a unique ability, you could wield power the way a mage used magical force — without any mana at all.
But only a tiny fraction of people possessed them.
Across roughly two hundred chapters of the novel, I only remembered about five characters who had unique abilities.
Robin, the protagonist, with Indomitable Will.
Iris the Saintess, with Healing Magic.
Helia, Queen of the Elves, with the Eye of Insight.
And beyond them, roughly the crown prince of the Karaz Empire and the Demon King.
Ah — and Athena must have a unique ability too.
I needed to revise that from five to six. There hadn't been a clear narrative about Athena yet, but with that overwhelming combat power, she definitely had one.
Of course, The Indomitable Hero focused mainly on academy content, so academy characters appeared far more often than outsiders. And since it was an ongoing novel, there were surely more unique ability users than the five officially written ones.
Even so, people with unique abilities were extremely rare.
Which is probably why most of them turned out to be anything but ordinary.
Unique abilities could be identified by a priest if you went to a temple. If I went, I could find out whether I had one — and what it was.
But I wasn't going.
Why?
Because the moment they confirmed I had a unique ability, all hell would break loose.
The Empire did not leave unique ability users alone. Adults were given ranks or conscripted into the military to serve the nation. Minors were enrolled in the academy and raised as national assets.
And once I entered the academy, the odds of getting tangled up with the protagonist would skyrocket.
I had absolutely no intention of getting involved with the protagonist.
The butterfly effect. Everyone had heard of it at least once. I had read countless novels where a transmigrator's tiniest action set off uncontrollable changes.
To keep that from happening, my goal was to stay far away and never cross paths with him at all.
Live quietly, watch the happy ending the protagonist creates, and go home.
And if it's a happy ending, then even if I can't go back for some reason, I can just live well here.
I knew most of this novel's content out to a fairly distant point. Once the ending arrived, that knowledge would become past events — but I could still use it to set myself up with a decent living.
I had gotten sidetracked, but the important point right now was that I seemed to have a unique ability.
If I could just learn to handle my unique ability, I could eat well and live well even without the original story's knowledge. To do that, I first needed to figure out what my ability was and how to use it.
Does a novel maniac like me not know something this obvious?
Honestly, I had already finished deducing my ability.
It had been strong enough to burst a person's head, so it was almost certainly something physical.
Super strength, huh. Might not be bad?
One of the protagonist's companions, a northern barbarian, had swept through enemies with raw power just like that, hadn't he?
Hah… alright…
After checking that no one was around, I stood up, rolled my wrists once, drew a deep breath, and — calling up the memory of that moment — drove my fist into the wall with everything I had.
Thud.
Huh?
"Hyaaaaaaak!!!!!!!!"
What broke was not the wall. It was my fist.
Unbearable pain flooded my hand, and tears started welling up.
"Ah… it hurts!!…!!!…hngk…"
Clutching my fist, I sank heavily to the ground.
"Boss. One of our men's corpses was found in the street."
Before the woman, a massive figure sat in a chair.
"Did you identify him?"
"The remains were hard to recognize, but based on our remaining personnel count, we believe it was Rick."
"Rick? That bastard got taken out?"
"Yes. His head was torn clean off. From the traces, it looks like a single blow."
"Heh heh… I always figured that punk would get his skull caved in someday, the way he kept waving his dick around…"
The woman remained silent, waiting for the massive man to issue his orders.
"Still. That guy wasn't the type to drop from one hit. Could be a heavy hitter sent from another district. Look into it more carefully."
The man waved her off with a gesture that said he was already bored.
"Yes, Boss."
Watching the woman vanish without a sound, the man spoke to the empty air.
"A challenge to me, is it… Heh heh…"
CRASH!!
"Looks like someone thinks the King of the West is a fucking joke."
He slammed his fist down on the armrest. A massive crack split through the chair and the floor beneath it.
Thud. Thud.
"Aaaagh!!!!!! Why won't it work like before!!"
This isn't right…