Preparations
I had a rough idea why Im Changwon kept pestering me.
The guy was the sort who pretended not to care about other people while being more interested in them than anyone else.
And whenever he did take an interest, it was because he’d decided someone had something he didn’t.
If he thought someone was better than him at anything, he’d walk right up to them and ask to be taught, learn everything he could, then toss them aside and ignore them all over again.
He liked to call that efficient, but really, it just meant he’d grown up in a home so messed up he’d never been taught how to behave like a human being.
So, to some extent, he was pitiable.
If you’d never been treated like a real person yourself, it probably wasn’t easy to treat other people that way either.
Which meant I had no choice but to grit my teeth and endure him with the patience of Buddha, tormented by Mara beneath the Bodhi tree.
The only thing I wanted was to pound his face in until my fingers broke.
Because nothing felt as satisfying as seeing the protagonist beat the crap out of someone like him.
“...Next time, I hope our meeting will be more useful than this one.”
He’d trailed me all the way to the road home, said whatever he wanted to say, and then bailed, just like the practically orphaned bastard he was.
No, worse than an orphan. At least orphans knew how to read a room.
That guy, though, probably never got so much as a warning from the people around him because of his background, so he’d grown up without manners and without any sense.
As I watched Changwon leave with obvious dissatisfaction, Lapis crept closer and stuck herself to my side.
...Academy life really was exhausting.
You couldn’t just get rid of the things you didn’t like.
“E-even so, he’s a weird, kid. He talks like he’s a grown-up even though he’s a student...”
If anything, Lapis was the one who didn’t need to worry about other people’s opinions.
The student leadership was a position that could be replaced at any time, full of people who were easy enough to swap out, but...
Lapis was family to a returned one, and a family member you couldn’t just replace.
She could afford to be a little more impudent, a little more lively. No, she should have been.
...I could understand why she kept her distance from people and was scared of them after what happened to her when she was young.
She’d been kidnapped.
“Nothing weird about him. He’s just rude. You shouldn’t grow up to be like that.”
As I tousled her hair and dragged the guy through the mud, Lapis swatted at my hand, complaining that I was messing up her hair, but she didn’t actually pull away.
Yeonhwa had gone to visit Jinhyun with Maria, whom she’d grown close to in that short time, so the road home was just me and Lapis.
I’d wanted to go alone, but she’d unusually insisted on coming with me, so I was humoring her.
I did have somewhere else to stop by today, so I couldn’t keep hanging around with her for long.
“Bl-Bla...Blanca. Um, if... if you’re free this weekend... w-would you come to our house?”
“Your house?”
“Y-yeah. My mom and dad said... th-that since you’re the one who saved me, they want to treat you to a meal...!”
That was a place the original protagonist only got to visit after winning Lapis’s heart.
And now she was inviting me there? Me? Right now?
A week after enrollment, before Minho had even made any contact with Lapis?
I should have said no.
But I couldn’t say no either.
If I did, she might close herself off completely.
Lapis was fragile enough as it was.
If her mental state shattered like sand and she started avoiding everyone, that would be a problem.
Even if she didn’t completely collapse under the strain, she already thought of me as a friend with the kind of stubborn certainty only a clingy little disaster could manage.
We had survived a dungeon together, after all.
Damn it. In that case, I should’ve stopped Yeonhwa from getting Lapis involved back then.
“...Sure, I don’t have anything else planned. But if it’s just me, that feels a little awkward, so could Yeonhwa and Jinhyun come too?”
The only thing I could do was drag Yeonhwa and Jinhyun into it as a desperate measure.
Spread the attention around so it wasn’t all on me, and use the chance to get closer to Jinhyun and Yeonhwa while I was at it.
It couldn’t be helped if Lapis grew closer to them and the loneliness inside her slowly faded away...
What choice did I have? I had to find some way to create a lane that connected Minho and Lapis.
It was pretty ridiculous, a guy trying to meddle with the protagonist while also trying to preserve the original story...
But what else could I do? I was his fan.
My goal was to interfere, sure, but only enough that he could still crawl his way back up afterward.
Sorry, Boss, but that wasn’t something I was ever going to change my mind about.
“Th-they can come too? G-great! I wanted to ask, but...!”
So she’d been planning to invite them all along.
After adding Lapis to the group chat I’d made with Jinhyun and Yeonhwa, I explained to the two of them, who’d raised questions, that she’d gone through the same ordeal and it should be fine to invite her.
Fortunately, they agreed without any fuss.
“Good. Now you can say what you wanted to say.”
“T-thank you...!”
After that, I traded a few more words with her at a comfortable pace, then waved goodbye as Lapis headed off in the other direction to catch a different train line.
...Haa.
For some reason, it felt like everything I touched ended up going wrong one piece at a time.
At this rate, I was starting to wonder if having every screw in my life loosen one by one was just my fate.
Me and Aegaeha in the same department, huh. Somehow, that made me feel a little depressed.
Come to think of it, Aegaeha was a problem too.
In the original story, she was supposed to pick a fight with Minho and then fall for him. But instead, I’d been the one getting her attention.
Ah, my head.
The moment I got on the subway, I felt utterly dizzy.
I couldn’t tell whether it was because of the people who recognized me as that schoolgirl from the news, or because my relationships were already starting to tangle themselves into a mess from the very beginning.
Late at night, close to midnight, in a deserted alley.
From farther away came the vulgar music of the red-light district and the sounds of rowdy thugs forming gangs just to brawl with each other.
And a little closer than that, I could hear the bargaining voices of nameless sewer rats haggling over whether to trade knives or goods.
As usual, this filthy air felt more comfortable to me.
With my gloved hands made just a little clumsier, I finally managed to press the button on the door lock and open the sealed entrance, slipping into the barren warehouse.
The moment I peeled off the hood I’d worn under another layer of clothing, my flattened cat ears sprang upright.
I’d thought I was going to suffocate.
I wanted to rip off the mask too, if I was being honest, but I couldn’t leave even the slightest trace of myself behind.
It wasn’t that I was trying to avoid the heroes or the police.
I was plenty used to fooling those guys.
But villains were such bizarre bastards that you never knew.
If there was even a chance, then I didn’t really want to do it either, but it seemed like now was the only time I’d have to get it done.
“So... where was it again? It should’ve been around here.”
As I felt along the bricks set into the wall, one of them gave under my touch, pressing in like a button.
With a click, the floor split apart and a hidden door revealed itself.
No matter how many times I saw it, I still found that satisfying.
If you asked where I was, this was my hideout.
Strictly speaking, it was less a place I hid than a place where I stashed all sorts of things.
I couldn’t exactly keep sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and other toxic substances inside the house.
So I’d spent a fair bit of money to make my own personal warehouse.
I didn’t need to be here, really, but it was cool, wasn’t it?
Any man worth the name wanted a secret base of some kind.
When I flipped on the lights and drove the darkness away, a fairly large underground space came into view, along with several drums filled with various liquids.
They were all things I’d made whenever I happened to have extra time and materials on hand.
Once I had them ready, I always found some use for them.
I’d have one of Hancho-ajusshi’s underlings sell them for me, or use them when I needed to interrogate someone...
But the biggest reason was that I wanted to hide my ability.
Back when I wandered around in the shadows of society, it hadn’t mattered much if I used my power now and then.
But now I’d gone out into the light, and I couldn’t afford to do that anymore.
If somebody died from poison gas somewhere, I’d be the first person suspected.
Still, if I used something I’d already prepared in advance, the odds of getting caught dropped dramatically.
And even if they did suspect me, at worst they’d only start looking at whoever had recently bought or sold this kind of thing.
Today... one concentrated batch of sulfuric acid should be enough.
I picked up the drum containing the slightly sticky liquid and the hatchet hanging on the wall, pulled my hood back up, and left the hideout.
The place I was going wasn’t far, so even looking this suspicious, I didn’t need to head out onto the main road.
Without encountering a single soul, I reached my destination.
As expected for the early part of the story, there was only one guard posted there.
And that one was sleeping carelessly, too.
Silencing my footsteps, I crept forward and swung the hatchet, infused with mana through my enhanced body, clean through the guard’s neck in one stroke.
I caught the body as it fell to keep the noise down, then poured a little sulfuric acid over the cut surface to stop the blood from dripping everywhere.
Once the body was dealt with, I lifted the severed head and pressed it against the biometric scanner mounted by the tightly shut warehouse entrance.
The heavy iron door opened with a deep, grinding groan.
Dragging the body and head along, I stepped inside—and was met with a sight that was hard to believe belonged in a warehouse in the middle of the city.
Huge culture tanks, the kind you’d expect in some industrial lab, packed the interior wall to wall.
Every single one of them held the modified humans Class A was about to run into.
It was also the catalyst for Minho’s first cornered awakening.
There were a lot of them. Seriously.
How on earth had they managed to kidnap so many people without being exposed?
It was hard to believe they’d sourced them all from the back alleys, because some of them had clearly been ordinary working adults snatched up too.
I pushed the question aside. For now, I had work to do.
I tossed the guard’s body and head into the nearest tank, then slowly poured the concentrated sulfuric acid into it.
It was time to reduce the numbers a little.