Ominous Foreboding
Everyone has at least one painful memory they can never quite heal from.
Maybe it’s having your stomach split open without anesthesia so someone can check whether your internal organs have changed.
Or having a leg cut off to test your regeneration.
Or eating that severed leg for dinner, then waking the next morning to find it attached again and thinking it must have been a bad dream.
Only to realize later that it wasn’t a dream at all, but the result of high-grade regenerative treatment making the limb grow back.
Or watching a test subject you’d come to rely on explode right in front of you.
Or having toxic substances injected directly into your veins.
Things like that.
Lianhua was no different.
She hadn’t shown it in front of anyone else, but she was still having a hard time with the fact that the Suicides had been burned alive because of her.
Of course, she didn’t only come to me when she was struggling.
She would talk it out with Jinhyun or with her family first, and only then would she come looking for me.
I didn’t think it was because they weren’t supporting her properly.
Maybe Jinhyun aside, her family were wonderful people.
I couldn’t imagine they’d be incapable of comforting her.
And yet I guessed she came to me because there were some comforts only someone her own age could give.
I’d never asked why she came to me, so I didn’t know for sure—but that seemed likely enough.
Or maybe it was because, even though I’d gone through the same thing, I hadn’t been shaken by it the way she had.
Lianhua had once texted me and asked how I managed to stay so calm.
When I told her that if you thought of them not as people like us but as enemies you had to kill, it got easier, she’d said that wasn’t something she could do.
“…Honestly, you’re too nice for your own good. You could stand to be a little more selfish.”
With a cardboard box from the research institute still pulled over my head, I kept sending her messages of comfort.
It was ridiculous, really—being nice to someone I’d eventually betray—but Lianhua was just impossible to hate.
Among all the original characters in the game’s story, she was also the only one I genuinely liked.
I wasn’t especially gifted with words, whether written or spoken, so I couldn’t untangle the knots in her heart for her. Still, she seemed to get a little better simply from talking to me.
It was never going to be a wound that truly healed. Memories like that don’t dull so easily.
And if anything, that was even more true for Lianhua, who had grown up in a world overflowing with light.
For her, the most shocking things she’d experienced in life were probably her father’s retirement or a villain attack. The memory of killing would linger for a long, long time and keep tormenting her.
All I could do was help her rationalize it, if only a little.
If she couldn’t forget, then at least she could think of it as something unavoidable.
While I was in the middle of that, a text came in from Yustitia as well. I checked it, then double-checked it, but no matter how many times I reviewed it, the answer was the same.
There was practically no chance of an outside intrusion.
-Don’t be too disappointed, Blanca. The boss never had huge expectations for this anyway.
-Finding an external route in was only ever Plan B, more or less.
-Still, it’s a relief that there doesn’t seem to be any defense against spatial displacement. That means we should still be able to carry out the original plan.
That was Yustitia’s way of telling me not to be too discouraged.
I knew that already. As the world’s best, Heros Academy wasn’t something you could just brute-force your way into.
Still, I had expected at least a crack somewhere.
They’d built the outer defenses with the kind of obsessive care that left no room for doubt.
…If there was any good news, it was that the academy’s interior hadn’t been designed with intrusion in mind.
I had no intention of giving up on finding security vulnerabilities, of course, but for now, mapping out the Liberators’ movements seemed like the higher priority.
-Understood. Thank you for your hard work.
After sending Yustitia a brief reply, I slipped off the box and walked to the window, stretching hard.
I’d been huddled up like that for hours, and my body had gone stiff.
So when I happened to lock eyes with someone on the roof of the building across from me, someone who had been aiming a camera through my window, it was pure coincidence.
“…”
Probably because even the voyeur hadn’t expected to be caught, they just stared at me blankly.
After the most awkward staring contest in history ended, I found myself opening the window and leaping through it.
It was already too late to take the elevator down and go after them calmly. I’d lose them for sure.
If I wanted to catch them, this was the way.
With my instincts in complete agreement, I took the impact on both arms and rolled across the ground once.
Falling from the fourth floor hurt a bit, but adrenaline was already flooding my body, forcing my limbs to move.
I sprang back up, strengthened my body, wrapped myself in magic power, and climbed straight up the side of the building where the voyeur had been.
Because the alley was so narrow, I kicked off wall after wall, and when I couldn’t manage that, I even used streetlights as footholds, hauling myself toward the target by the shortest possible route.
The voyeur on the roof kept filming me the whole time.
Maybe they were too stunned to react, or maybe they’d already decided there was no way to run.
I didn’t know why they were standing there like an idiot, and I didn’t care.
I grabbed the iron bars, leaped with all my strength one last time, and landed on the opposite roof at last.
Instead of planting my foot on the ground, I drove it straight into the voyeur’s chest and took them down.
“Kgh—!”
After tumbling across the roof with the voyeur, pinning the bastard to the ground and choking them, I finally realized the person who’d been secretly filming me was a girl only a little younger than I was.
Not that it mattered.
I hauled her up by the collar and slammed her into the building wall, then began my interrogation.
“Who are you? Who sent you after me? How long have you been doing this? Answer me. If you don’t, I’ll melt your throat.”
I spoke calmly, softly, and clearly, while using my bare hand to sear the concrete wall beside her, showing her that I could kill her whenever I pleased.
And if she couldn’t even put up a fight after being caught like this, then she was probably a powerless ordinary.
Given that she wasn’t wearing Heros Academy’s uniform, she was probably different from the one who had tailed me during the first week.
“P-please, don’t kill me, please don’t kill me, please…”
“That depends on your answers. I’ll give you three chances. Think carefully. I don’t want to bury someone younger than me.”
I’d barely let water drip from the hand gripping her throat when the girl in front of me started shaking violently, even wetting herself.
“Who are you?”
“Y-Ye-sol Middle School, third year…”
“That’s not what I asked. I’m asking what group you belong to.”
“I-I really don’t know, there isn’t one…! I just, I just needed tuition money… u-ugh… there were people in black clothes who said if I did this, they’d pay me… sob…”
Black clothes.
With her neck on the verge of melting, she had no reason to lie, and she was just a middle schooler.
So she really was some nobody desperate for money who’d done this for cash.
“Who were those people in black clothes? They must have introduced themselves.”
“I-I don’t know, they never said that, please, please believe me… ngh, kehk, really, I-I don’t know…”
I tightened my grip, but all she gave me was the same answer: she really didn’t know.
Was she a disposable pawn? They must have given her absolutely no useful information at all, so cutting off her tail wouldn’t matter.
And I knew of one organization that loved doing exactly that.
The Evil Society.
It had to be those bastards.
“…You’ve got two chances left. When did you start filming me?”
“S-since yesterday. They said if I came around this area, I could find you…”
Since yesterday, on the orders of people in black clothes.
Had they dug up my identity?
No way. Did I somehow leave evidence behind when I raided that warehouse?
No, impossible. Even if the best forensic team in the world had come by, they would have found absolutely nothing. I had scrubbed away every trace with obsessive care.
I’d even wrapped myself up so thoroughly that not even retrocognition would be able to identify me.
Then why, of all people, was it me?
I couldn’t understand it. But did I really need to understand it?
They were already the kind of people whose motives were a mystery.
Besides, I was a student at Heros Academy.
Once I’d decided to live among the light, exposure was inevitable.
More than that, I needed to find out why the Evil Society was watching me.
Why they had singled me out as an individual.
“…Stay still.”
I threw the girl into a corner, then checked the camera she’d dropped.
If she really had been filming me since yesterday, the camera didn’t have any record left on it, and there weren’t that many pictures of me either.
“G-give it back…”
“Kid. If you want to live from this point on, listen carefully. Run straight to the police right now, confess everything you’ve done, and ask for protection.”
Then she might have even the slightest chance of surviving.
Maybe she really was just some throwaway kid, and I’d let her go.
If she was a disposable pawn, then they probably hadn’t planted a hidden camera or wiretap on her clothes.
The Evil Society was the kind of place packed with cowards who, despite their size, were more afraid than anything else of being traced through something like that.
“If you understood me, then get lost. Next time, it won’t be words coming at you, but my hands. Remember that.”
The girl clutched at her throat in a daze, then seemed to finally realize what she’d done. Tears spilling down her face, she stumbled toward the emergency stairs.
…Ha.
Was it really enough to bring disaster down on me just for thinking I wanted to kill Jinhyun?
Unbelievable.
I was past angry now; all I could do was laugh bitterly.
I didn’t know whether this was a disaster or not, but the timing was far too suspicious.
I stared blankly at the camera in my hand.
There was no way I could trace anything useful back from just this one item.
…Then maybe I should go after the executive ranks after all.
Next week, whether I wanted it or not, I’d be making contact with the Evil Society anyway.
When that happened, I’d have to smuggle out one of the executives and interrogate them myself.
With a stumbling step, I headed down the stairs.
Once the adrenaline wore off, the pain I’d been ignoring came rushing back.
Maybe I’d broken a bone. Or sprained something.
I’d have to go see Maria on Monday.
Exhaling a sigh at the mess of a situation, that was all I could think.
Only then did I realize I’d come out without even putting on my shoes.
“Shoes…”
The words barely even qualified as a curse before they scattered into the air.
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