The Masked Villain
When people talk about a dating sim window, you know the kind of thing that's supposed to pop up.
Favorite foods, hobbies, hidden inner thoughts.
Or something adorable like Affection: ♥♡♡♡♡.
Crank the rating a little higher and you get three sizes or "corruption level"—those 18+ details that just casually spill out.
As a user who's cleared everything from AAA titles down to indie adult games, I can say this with absolute certainty.
In all my years of living, this was the first fucking time I'd ever seen a heroine's death log written on a dating sim window.
Estimated Survival Period:
98.21% chance of death within 3 months
"...What the hell is this. This isn't affection—it's a death notice."
I checked the screen twice, then a third time.
No matter how I looked at it, it wasn't a bug.
Min-ah was one of this world's legendary survivors of the monster wars, the Goddess of the Dash who represented South Korea itself.
And the future scheduled for that hero was nothing more than "death within three months"?
"Haha... no way."
A dry laugh slipped out of me.
Ha Min-ah was smiling right in front of me, glass in hand, playfully gauging my reaction.
Yet directly beneath that smile, the window coldly replayed her past like subtitles scrolling across a screen.
Her mother's death. The sealed room. The diary left behind as a keepsake.
And then enlistment.
If this had been a normal affection window, hearts should have been filling up. Instead, black ashes were falling.
I glanced down at my drink for a moment.
It really wasn't the time to get drunk, yet my head felt strangely fuzzy.
That was when it happened.
"By the way... that guy's coming back tomorrow, right?"
"You mean Kim Pung?"
"Yeah, that kid. The day his suspension ends."
The lively tent cooled in an instant at those words.
Teachers who had been laughing and trading monster stories just moments earlier stiffened their faces all at once.
It was the first time I'd seen people who could still laugh heartily through monster PTSD sigh this deeply over talk of a "student."
"Oh right... he'll be returning to Class A under Min-ah..."
"That's the real problem. The class only has about ten left now, but originally it was twenty-one."
The gently clinking soju glasses went still.
I found myself turning my gaze that way without meaning to.
"Kim Pung? Was there a student like that in the class I took over?"
At Ha Min-ah's question the teachers eyed one another for a beat.
Then, as if deciding there was nothing left to hide, one of them finally spoke.
"There is... the only problem child of our SAHS."
"Problem child? In this era just attending school is hard enough—you left a student like that alone? SAHS isn't a simple educational institution; it's a quasi-military organization. Violating school rules is the same as disobeying orders, and that usually means not 'expulsion' but 'discharge,' doesn't it?"
"Normally, yes. But that guy..."
An old instructor emptied his glass and continued.
"He's not fully grown as a person, but his talent is far too outstanding. Combat simulation records are historic, and his actual combat sense is uncannily precise. Honestly, to kick him out of school... he's too precious a monster."
"A precious monster..."
Ha Min-ah murmured the words low.
Fatigue and fear mixed in the teachers' expressions.
These weren't the faces of people who fought monsters. These were the faces of people recalling a monster that happened to be human.
Listening to the story, I lightly swirled my glass.
Kim Pung.
A third-year at SAHS, an officer candidate with graduation right in front of him.
Both of his parents had served as non-commissioned officers, and both had fallen side by side to a Calamity-class monster ten years earlier.
The military acknowledged their service and handed the sole remaining family member a full scholarship exemption as a nominal "compensation."
On the surface he was just another child of victims in a world full of monsters—poor, bereaved, and with every reason to hate the world.
The problem came after that.
Kim Pung was the only student inside SAHS—the nation's highest-level military academy—who had put ten classmates in the hospital at the same time.
The official record called it a "provocation," but the testimony of those who had been there was a little different.
"It wasn't a fight. It was a massacre!"
Future officer candidates. Elites who were all learning Disaster-class response tactics. That day, ten of them were wrecked by a single person.
That single person was Kim Pung.
Ironically, SAHS still couldn't expel him.
Written exams, tactics, physical fitness, marksmanship, combat simulations—he ranked first in every category without exception.
His combat records had even surpassed the instructor simulations on occasion.
The mock-battle instructor AI cannot defeat him.
Because of that single line, military headquarters and division personnel departments were already competing to recruit him before he had even graduated.
"He's less a problem child and more a calamity."
One of the instructors was said to have put it that way.
A boy who lost his parents to monsters and then became a monster worse than any of them.
The nation lost ten promising seedlings and still refused to let that one go.
In the end SAHS sealed the incident under the name of a "disciplinary one-week suspension."
From that day on, Kim Pung became the school's forbidden zone.
No one spoke to him first. Even the teachers quietly avoided him.
But everyone remembered the look in his eyes that made your spine go cold if you met him at the end of a hallway.
That look didn't hold a monster. It held a monster made by people.
From the way the teachers talk, he sounds like a complete delinquent...
Today was the first day Kim Pung's suspension ended.
Maybe it was because I had accidentally seen Ha Min-ah's death cycle, but she kept lingering in my mind.
So under the pretense of patrol and cleaning, I casually swept the hallway in front of the Class A classroom she was in charge of.
Pretending to mop, I flicked my eyes up through the narrow glass window above the door and looked inside.
And—I saw him.
I didn't even need to be told who Kim Pung was.
Back row, farthest corner of the classroom.
A black-haired boy sprawled against the chair back with his feet up on the desk, tapping at his phone.
The air around him alone was different.
Students subtly averted their eyes. Even the teacher at the front carefully avoided looking that way.
Still quieter than I expected. It'd be nice if he just stayed still...
Honestly, that level of attitude was common enough for a delinquent.
As long as he didn't tank the quality of the class, most teachers decided "better to pretend not to notice" was the correct answer.
That is, if they were most teachers.
But the person in charge of Class A today was not that type.
The Goddess of the Dash, Captain Ha Min-ah.
Thud. Thud.
The sound of military boots cut through the classroom.
It was a sharper rhythm than chalk scraping a board.
"Kim Pung."
She called him head-on.
"We're in the middle of class. How about putting the phone away."
"...Haa."
The air inside the room twisted ever so slightly.
Kim Pung's sigh shook the classroom.
"No matter how much you're ranked first in the school, this is still a military academy. And I am your superior."
Min-ah's voice was firm, but not rigid.
It was precisely the tone of a commanding officer.
"That kind of attitude while receiving instruction from a superior doesn't look right no matter how you slice it, does it?"
She kept her smile and held out her hand.
The final offer: hand over the phone.
But Kim Pung slowly lifted his gaze, turned the screen off, and tossed the phone onto the desk like he was discarding it.
"Hmph."
A short snort of laughter.
"Superior or not... there's no guarantee you'll even be alive by the time I graduate."
The air in the classroom froze in an instant.
A few students swallowed hard.
Ha Min-ah's expression remained soft, but the temperature of that smile had clearly dropped.
"I know who you are."
Kim Pung's voice dropped low.
"The female soldier they used to call the Goddess of the Dash. The one who's already survived three years in a Decoy Unit where the one-year death rate is over ninety percent."
"My, you know all about me?"
Min-ah smiled brightly.
"Are you a fan? Want an autograph?"
"No. A fan? Please."
Kim Pung's eyes sharpened.
"I know because I feel sorry for you."
"...What did you just say?"
Her smile vanished.
The air twisted again. Students didn't even dare breathe.
Then Kim Pung stood from his seat and continued as if the whole thing were ridiculous.
"Did you just want to cosplay as a hero? All you ever do is run away from monsters."
"...That's true."
A short answer.
But there was no warmth left at the end of it.
"And they still call you a hero for that. Doesn't it make you feel pathetic? I don't understand how people can call someone who only knows how to run a hero. To me you just look like someone desperate to die."
The air stopped.
A single beat of silence.
Someone's sharp intake of breath could be heard.
Min-ah's head slowly lowered. Kim Pung's eyes grew even sharper.
This... went way too far.
Watching through the crack in the door, my hand clenched the mop so hard the cloth crumpled.
It might have been overstepping for a janitor, but this really needed to be stopped.
And yet.
A small smile.
When Min-ah raised her head again, a smile was already resting on her face.
"Kim Pung."
Her voice was surprisingly gentle.
"Mind if I ask you one thing too?"
"...?"
Slowly she lifted her hand and showed him something.
That something was none other than the phone Kim Pung had been holding just moments earlier.
Her fingertip lightly tapped the screen, and a video began to play.
"The hero you actually want... is this, right?"
"What...?"
On the screen, a man in a bone mask cutting through the sky.
The moment he pierced a Disaster-class monster bird that anti-air weapons couldn't even touch—with a single leap.
Every gaze in the classroom was sucked into that screen.
Kim Pung's face went white.
"Replay count: nine hundred twenty-eight times."
Min-ah raised an eyebrow and smiled.
"Too bad. Teacher already passed a thousand. So that means... Teacher wins?"
"H-how did you— Give it back right now!"
The boy shot to his feet and reached out.
But she didn't so much as twitch a wrist, quietly slipping the phone behind her back.
The smile was still soft, yet a cold, almost playful edge lived inside it.