Clown
Clown
Scores of people huddled together, frozen with fear.
So crowded, yet so silent it was eerie—like a tomb.
The trembling hostages, the gun-toting terrorists, even the figure standing proudly atop the tower of chairs.
At a moment when everyone had fallen silent,
a man rose from the crowd and began to clap.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
Not the feeble, hesitant noise of someone merely going through the motions.
This applause was crisp and resonant, as if he'd painstakingly researched how to generate the loudest possible sound.
Far too resonant for a single man to produce.
And far too effective at drawing the attention of every soul in the room.
The one watching the man clap in that silence was
Monkey Spanner, the mastermind behind the entire attack and an A-rank villain.
He spoke.
"Who the hell is that lunatic?"
Exactly as he said.
With armed terrorists glaring, ready to shoot at the slightest suspicious move,
who but a lunatic would suddenly stand, clap, and draw attention to himself?
One look at his bizarre face only reinforced that impression.
The man had appeared wearing a mask that covered his entire face.
It was bright yellow—slightly orange, perhaps? Either way, it was an oddly unbalanced yellow mask. Its eyes curved into a faint smile, and there was even a star beneath one eye, making it look like something a clown would wear.
The grotesque sight made even the terrorist grunts, even veteran villain Monkey Spanner, who'd seen it all, freeze in their tracks.
First, Monkey Spanner signaled the cameraman to cut the feed. Broadcasting an unexpected situation would do him no good.
Who was Monkey Spanner?
His ability itself was unremarkable. Minor super-strength. You could easily guess it from his bulging muscles, barely concealed by his clothes.
But unlike other villains with similar powers, Monkey Spanner had been classified as an A-rank villain by the Hero Association despite his weak ability.
Even considering the Association's tendency to over-rank villains compared to heroes, this was truly an exceptional case.
The reason for such a high rank was his extraordinary organizational skill.
No one knew exactly how he did it, but he commanded hundreds of underlings like his own limbs.
With the gang known as the Jumping Monkey Club, he operated in South Korea's underworld, robbing banks and selling drugs.
Until their boss Monkey Spanner suddenly decided to play in a bigger pond, leading his men to Mexico.
They'd swaggered off declaring that they would take over the Mexican drug cartels, only for the cartels to crush them instead.
The hundreds of followers he'd once commanded had dwindled to barely over a hundred.
The fortune he had amassed through attacks had vanished as well.
So he'd trudged back to his homeland.
Realizing he would be ruined at this rate, he devised a clever plan.
Pull off a truly massive terrorist attack in Korea, rake in the cash, then head back to Mexico for a second round!
He smuggled himself into Busan, biding his time, watching for an opening.
Originally, he'd planned a reckless blitz as soon as he arrived, but up in Seoul, some guy named Legostic or whatever had launched an attack first, putting his plans on hold.
Terrorism is a game of attention. Pull a job while someone else already has the spotlight, and the government pays you less mind. Less attention means less payout.
So he waited, and waited... and the wait paid off. The perfect opportunity had arrived.
Shadow Walker, the Lord of Darkness, had collapsed.
For the first time in history, a terrorist attack could happen at night.
And without missing a beat, quicker than anyone else, veteran Monkey Spanner had seized that chance and launched his attack first.
In short:
Though he'd botched things in Mexico, Monkey Spanner was fundamentally a sharp, capable villain who'd once commanded hundreds of followers.
And his instincts, honed over years, reached a single conclusion: this masked man was no ordinary person.
"You! Who the hell are you?!"
He was stalling for time.
In a world without superpowered individuals, he'd have simply shot the guy without a second thought.
But in this world, he didn't know what ability the man possessed. He had no choice but to be cautious.
'Dammit, why does a freak like this have to show up?'
Superpowered individuals were rarer than first-prize lottery winners.
At least someone won the lottery every week.
For one to emerge from a crowd this small was a rarity.
But who was Monkey Spanner?
He was a man who had kept his organization alive and survived tenaciously among countless superpowered heroes.
He believed he could handle a hiccup like this with his own strength.
At least, that was what he believed for now.
*
"You! Who the hell are you?!"
The man standing on his tower of chairs, bellowing at me.
When someone asks your name, common decency says you answer.
I shrugged casually and spoke.
"My name is..."
I stopped mid-sentence.
Wait. I shouldn't say that I was Egostic here, should I?
It felt strange to say this about myself, but I was rather famous in South Korea.
My face had appeared on the news five or six times, after all.
...Though I supposed the news part was moot, since I was the one who had livestreamed my attacks in the first place.
Anyway, nothing good would come of revealing my name here.
The moment I did, they would realize I could use telekinesis and teleportation.
So I had no choice but to U-turn mid-sentence.
"You don't need to know my name. Let's just say I'm a passing civilian."
I answered with a sly grin.
His expression twisted. My relaxed manner and perfectly calm tone must have convinced him that I was stronger than he had expected.
Fair enough. If I were staging an attack and some man in a clown mask walked over and mocked me, I would be flustered too.
And that was exactly my scheme.
Make the enemy overestimate me!
A strong fighter lowered an opponent's guard and then struck at an opening, but the weak fought differently.
They had to inflate themselves and make themselves look far more impressive than their actual abilities.
That's how you make your opponent wary. And that wariness buys you time.
That was why I had drawn all the attention with my clapping at the start.
Honestly, I didn't really know who Monkey Spanner was or what he did. Hell, I only knew the enemies Stardus fought in Seoul. I had no idea what went down in Busan. The Northern Sea Ice Maiden probably handled all that.
What I meant was, I'd had to secretly look up his ability just moments earlier. Super-strength. Minor super-strength.
Super-strength was a problem. If he charged me and tried to fold my spine in half, I could teleport away. The issue was my offense.
Super-strength implied body reinforcement—regular guns or bombs wouldn't even scratch him. For someone like me, who lacked a specialized attack, that was a little troublesome. His internal organs were probably durable too; I wasn't even sure poison gas would work on him. Not that I could use poison gas here without committing mass murder.
So I would pick off whatever I could first.
Step. Step.
I moved forward through the crowd, farther and farther.
At last, I reached the foot of his mountain of chairs.
No one stopped me.
The masked goons who raised their guns at me were halted by a raised hand from Monkey Spanner himself, seated atop his throne of chairs.
He didn't know what would happen if they fired.
Eventually, I stood right beneath where he perched on his chairs. I tilted my head up at him and spoke. With a smirk.
"Well, well. I heard something amusing had started here, so I dragged my weary body all this way... only to find it's the prank of a nobody. Is planting your heavy backside on that chair the full extent of your talent? You bald bastard."
At my sudden insults and provocation, I saw genuine fury flare up in him.
"You—do you have any idea where you're?! I'll make you regret this!"
After watching the situation until the last moment, he leaped from the top of the chair tower and charged at me.
Besides being furious, he must have decided that letting me belittle him in front of so many subordinates and civilians would not look good.
But the instant he charged and trampled the place where I had stood,
I was already gone.
He probably didn't know it, but my ability was teleportation.
Before he could register it, I was already sitting at the very top of the same mountain of chairs he'd just been on, legs crossed and perfectly relaxed.
"Truly... pathetic."
As if I were bored, as if I were tired of this, I yawned. Looking down at him from above, I quietly snapped my fingers.
At the same moment, the guns the surrounding grunts were holding wrenched themselves from their grips and rose into the air.
In unison, they turned their muzzles the other way,
toward the people who had owned them only moments before and now stood suddenly disarmed,
and opened fire.
"Aaaaaaaaaah!!!"
Blood sprayed.
Dozens of terrorists, in an instant—so quickly that they had no time to notice what was happening—
all died on the spot.
"Phew..."
No one was filming this, right?
If the Hero Association saw it, they might promote me straight to S-rank...
Putting that aside, that single move had used all the telekinesis I had stored for months.
Ah, why was my ability so pathetic?