The Hero Everyone Wants to Cancel
In South Korea, a new era of stability had begun.
Founded sixty years ago, a beloved bungeoppang shop stood proudly in the city.
Before Mija’s Tteokbokki, a Calamity Class monster suddenly appeared.
The police tactical unit deployed with full force, unleashing everything they had.
But the result was a disaster.
Multiple casualties occurred, including the unit commander.
The shop was reduced to ash and rubble.
And in the center of it all, the man appeared.
Mask of Bones.
Once hailed across the world as the hero of justice, his appearance on camera that day was something else entirely.
He stood amid the wreckage of a smashed armored vehicle, surrounded by bloodied police officers, and casually hurled the monster’s corpse aside like it weighed nothing.
The media shouted the moment they saw the footage.
“He is not a hero!”
“All the videos claiming to have saved civilians are fake and edited!”
One year after its reappearance, the Calamity Class monster incident in Yongsan-gu, Seoul, dominated every headline.
That very evening, every major broadcast network delivered the same verdict.
Mask of Bones was not justice.
He was evil.
And social media flipped upside down in an instant.
“Of course it was all manipulated.”
“He played the hero until the very end.”
People poured out their rage, disappointment, and betrayal in waves.
At least—
The next morning.
Until the moment a video titled “Site Restoration Footage” pinned itself to the top of MyTube’s main page.
“You bastard! Delete the video right now!”
“Impossible! The server keeps crashing!”
“What?! We’re MyTube Korea! Why can’t we delete our own site’s content?!”
The world’s largest video platform.
Yet right now, the MyTube Korea server room was a living hell.
Screams echoed.
Keyboard clicks flew.
And on every monitor, the same video played on loop.
At dawn that day, a new channel had suddenly appeared.
Entitled HeroTV, the name itself was absurdly childish.
The video crossed 100,000 subscribers in just one hour.
And inside it lay the footage the government had desperately tried to bury.
CCTV restoration, complete with clear audio.
“If I had slowed down even a second, the monster would’ve grabbed me! Do you have any idea how much one armored vehicle costs?!”
“This is military-grade gear we borrowed! We’re all together, combined, and we’re still not worth one armored vehicle!”
“The country has already lost half its resources since the monster appeared—now the world values steel more than people!”
Police, once called the people’s staff, firing at civilians.
A child collapsing from the bullet.
And then—
Mask of Bones, the man the news called a terrorist, turning around to treat the wounded, tossing the dead monster to overturn the armored vehicle.
The hero’s actions in the video looked exactly like justice.
The clip spread like wildfire across the globe.
From “fake hero” to “real hero.”
Views exploded by the second.
Within minutes, it claimed the number one spot on MyTube’s real-time rankings.
“The server is down!”
“No! The delete button… it won’t let me click! It kicks me out the second I press it!”
“What the— who even uploaded this?!”
At that exact moment, the company’s main screen flickered.
A single line appeared across the entire system.
ㅋㅋㅋㅋ MyTube Korea hacked, nothing can be done now?
Every employee’s face drained of color.
***
“Seriously… Master! I almost got us all killed!”
Sora’s voice rang in my ears.
“Our scenario was about to turn into the ‘humans betray the hero’ route!”
“S-Sorry…”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that. Thanks to this ultra-high-performance super sexy android, we’re still alive, right?”
“…”
I was on my way back to the underground base after taking down the Calamity Class monster.
Touching a civilian police officer at this point could create a weird variable.
That’s why our plan was to stage a fake hero scene—someone unjustly accused of wrongdoing.
If police kicked in the door of Mija’s grandmother’s bungeoppang shop, we’d restore the place, showcase my abilities, then exterminate the monster and naturally expose the government’s incompetence.
That was the original script.
But I had deviated from it.
I had let the tactical unit commander who fired at civilians and the armored vehicle he was riding in look completely destroyed.
In that single moment, I had crossed a line that made me one step closer to becoming a dangerous variable that could shake the entire system, even if civilians saw me as a hero.
“Sigh…”
Sora let out a theatrical sigh.
“Thankfully, a faulty CCTV still existed, but the police were the ones who caused the first screw-up. Otherwise we would’ve been completely manipulated!”
I stared at the monitor and hung my head.
Just one day.
In such a short time, the world had almost painted me as the villain through manipulated edits and fake news.
If someone truly fought for humanity, they would have approached me and asked for help, risking their lives.
But this world was ruled by people who, no matter how much it collapsed, would never give up their own bowl of rice.
Politics, public order—everything had become uglier than the monsters themselves.
“No matter how incompetent the government is, Calamity Class monsters are the norm… but this is too much.”
“It’s just a trope! Don’t worry, Master! I’m here!”
Sora puffed out her chest confidently, her generous bust rising with every word.
Meanwhile, her cat tail wagged playfully as she gave me those pleading eyes that said “pet me.”
In the end, I sighed and stroked her head.
“Hehe… And to prevent this kind of manipulation from happening again, I’ve already created a MyTube channel modeled after you, Master!”
“…HeroTV?”
“Exactly! My calculated ad index is 99.9%, public friendliness 95%! Perfect, right?”
…Honestly, the name looked like something an elementary school kid would make and then abandon.
Of course, saying that out loud would trigger an error code on this android’s pride.
I struck a pose with my chest puffed out in a confident “humph”.
Well, a hero’s sidekick should never insult their master’s heart.
I simply clapped and praised her.
“Speaking of which, 110,000 subscribers in just one day? Impressive.”
“Because you’re the talk of the town right now, Master! Whether for good or bad.”
Sora proudly dragged me in front of the computer.
The monitor displayed the first video of HeroTV.
“Mija’s Bunshop Calamity Incident – The True Record” had 620,000 views.
Only eight hours since upload.
But what caught my eye even more were the comments.
“What is this… 7,000 likes and 120,000 dislikes?!”
“Plus the comments are all spam and manipulation from the opposing camp!”
Sora zoomed in on the screen and clicked her tongue.
“As if she were cursing her own channel into oblivion.”
“Even the most recommended comment says, ‘Don’t spread this kind of manipulation in a time like now,’ or ‘Honestly, the armored vehicle being more valuable than a person is a fact, right?’”
“It reeks of comment brigade.”
“Exactly! IP tracking showed that over half the commenters are from Chinese servers, not Korea.”
At Sora’s words, I stared blankly at the monitor.
We both knew.
How heavily these reactions had been manipulated.
But only we knew the truth.
In a world where monsters appeared every day, the average person lived from one crisis to the next.
The idea of a real hero was unrealistic to them.
In such a world, the sensational frame of “fake hero” spread far more easily than actual news of a real one.
The comment section had already become a battlefield.
Opinions clashed, colors mixed, and trolls flooded in.
There were even supportive posts.
Real eyewitness accounts from civilians who had been on site.
But every single one of them was buried under waves of dislike bombs.
“These kids… should I just delete everything?”
“No.”
Sora raised her hand firmly.
“If we do, it’ll backfire. They’ll just slap the ‘he’s deleting comments out of guilt’ frame on us.”
She tapped the keyboard for a moment, then curled her lips into a smile.
“Instead, we should just charge forward head-on, Master.”
“Charge forward?”
“Yes! Watch this.”
She snapped her fingers.
The comments at the top that had been pushing “Mask of Bones is evil” instantly pinned in place.
“See? We’re pinning the trolls who spam and stir things up.”
“Oh ho…”
“According to MyTube’s policy, pinned comments by the channel owner can’t be deleted even if the original author wants them gone. So these idiots will have to carry those words for the rest of their lives.”
“Hmph… suppressing evil with evil.”
“Exactly!”
Sora laughed brightly.
“And now we move straight to the next step—show the world proof that they’re spreading false manipulation!”
She closed the MyTube window and brought up another image.
“Ta-da! Mackerel, Master!”
“…”
On the screen lay a neatly arranged plate of raw mackerel slices.
Sora’s tail wagged rapidly as she swallowed hard.
“Hehe… it smells so good…”
“…Are you hungry because you were planning operations?”
“Of course not!”
Sora stuck out her tongue and immediately began typing at lightning speed.
The cursor blinked, and the screen changed.
“Master, you know Korea is surrounded by sea on three sides, so it has the highest seafood consumption in the world.”
“Yeah, it makes sense since we eat seaweed soup on our birthdays too.”
“That’s not all. In other countries they throw away seaweed or salt fish, but we turned it into delicious dishes. That’s how deeply the sea is woven into the Korean soul.”
“Wait… isn’t this the operation briefing?”
Sora grinned.
Her tail traced a playful rhythm in the air.
“It was the soul. Past tense now.”
“Past tense?”
“Yes. Now it’s all been eaten by monsters.”
The moment she finished speaking, the screen switched.
A live menu from a nearby seafood restaurant appeared, and several numbers jumped out at me.
[Mackerel sashimi portion— 530,000 won.]
“…”
[Yellowtail sashimi portion— 470,000 won.]
“What?”
I blinked and looked back at the monitor.
Fish prices were displayed like the market value of gold bars.
In a world where a single bowl of ramyeon cost 10,000 won because of monster outbreaks and food shortages, this was pure madness.
“Ten years ago, a Calamity Class monster appeared near Wando, which supplied thirty percent of Korea’s seafood.
After that incident, half the fishing grounds were closed, and prices skyrocketed.”
“In other words…”
Sora’s eyes sparkled as she crossed her arms.
“If we catch that monster—”
“No way.”
“We’ll restore the people’s rice bowl!”
She raised both hands triumphantly.
“Master will become the man who recovered the mackerel! Abgujjim, spicy soup, salted fish, grilled mackerel! A hero who brought those back to our tables?! That would make him the national hero, the national hero!”
…It’s not like you actually wanted to eat mackerel, right?