I'm Not a Villain, Though (6)
The silence was so thick it felt suffocating. It filled every corner of the shack like a heavy fog.
To break the awkwardness, I decided to start with introductions.
“Ahem. So… what was your name again?”
“Petison. Reina Petison.”
He was the last customer from yesterday—the tenth and final one. Petison had introduced himself as a retired soldier. Now this massive man, who looked like he once ruled battlefields, sat ramrod straight in the corner of the cramped shack. The sheer weight of his presence alone made even the creaking of the chair seem to hold its breath.
I cleared my throat, trying to shake off the awkwardness, and gave him the new alias I had prepared in advance.
“I’m Chris. Just call me that.”
“Understood, Chris-nim.”
Nim? The sudden honorific felt a bit ticklish, but I kept my composure and moved on to the main topic.
“Thank you for helping me earlier. But I still don’t understand why you suddenly stepped in.”
Customer and shopkeeper. As far as I knew, that was the extent of our relationship. At my slightly wary question, Petison slowly lifted his head and looked straight at me. What filled his sharp, steel-blue eyes wasn’t hostility, but an emotion so deep it was impossible to measure.
“It was to repay a debt of gratitude.”
“Gratitude…? To me?”
When I asked again with genuine confusion, Petison gave a bitter smile and gripped the hem of his worn military coat tightly. Then a heavy story, laced with the rasp of iron, flowed from his lips.
“After losing my wife, my life became nothing short of hell. Tormented by the guilt of failing to protect her, the only thing I could do was crawl along the slum floors every night, dependent on cheap drugs.”
The man’s thick voice was trembling faintly.
“But thanks to the moment you showed me, I was able to escape the hellish guilt that had bound me for so long. Instead of the wife who appeared in my dreams every night, resenting me and shedding tears, I saw her true self—smiling brightly at me.”
“……”
Petison placed a rough hand over his chest and slowly bowed his head toward me.
“Even if it was only a fleeting moment I could see when I closed my eyes, to me it was the salvation I had longed for my entire life.”
After hearing Petison’s entire story, I remained quietly silent.
This is heavy! The customer’s backstory was way too heavy! The weight of it pressed down on my chest so hard I was screaming internally.
I desperately tried to change the subject to lift the suffocating atmosphere.
“…Um, Mr. Petison. There’s no need to be so dramatically moved. I only showed you a dream.”
“A dream, you say.”
“Yes. To be blunt, a dream isn’t reality. I simply let you see the memory you wanted to see so badly. It’s a kind of hallucination.”
But Petison shook his head firmly. A resolute voice slipped out between his thick lips.
“Whether it was an illusion or a deception, it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that I was able to find meaning in life again. My wife… she would have wanted me to live with a clear mind rather than crawling through hell every night, drugged out of my senses.”
“……”
If that’s what he believes, then that’s how it is. Arguing further seemed pointless. Faced with the stubbornness typical of a soldier, I simply nodded and decided to accept his firm conviction.
This time, Petison glanced lightly around the room before asking me a question.
“By the way, Chris-nim, why have you returned to this dangerous edge of the slums?”
“Huh? Well… because this is my house.”
At my answer, Petison’s gaze froze. He slowly scanned the rat-gnawed pillars, the ceiling stained with rainwater leaks, and the dusty interior of the old shack. His eyes trembled noticeably.
“…Have you been living in a place like this all this time?”
“Well… I suppose so?”
I scratched the back of my head and gave a vague reply. Truthfully, this wasn’t even completely my house. It was just a place I had temporarily borrowed from the original owner in exchange for showing him a dream. A bright-eyed rookie homeless person on day one of living on the streets.
But most of the time I had spent in this world after possessing this body had been inside this shack. So strictly speaking, it wasn’t entirely wrong.
However, Petison, who knew none of my circumstances, looked at me with a strange gaze. He was probably thinking I must have a complicated story. After a heavy silence, he seemed to come to a decision and made a quiet suggestion.
“May I make one proposal?”
“A proposal? What…”
“How would you feel about staying at my house for the time being?”
“You’re saying you’ll let me stay at your house?”
“Yes. It will be far safer and cleaner than this rotting shack. Please give me the chance to repay my debt.”
I stroked my chin for a moment, thinking it over. There was no real reason to refuse. Staying at the home of someone whose background I didn’t know carried some risk, but at least Petison’s claim that he wanted to repay a favor didn’t seem like a lie. I had no safe place to spend the night anyway, and this seemed far safer than the dangerous back alleys. Besides, even if the man harbored ill intentions and things turned dangerous, I had a cheat-like ability. I was confident I could take control of the situation anytime.
“Alright. I’ll impose on you for a while, then.”
The moment I accepted, a look of relief flashed across Petison’s rigidly stiff face.
“My house isn’t far from here.”
According to him, Petison’s house was located in the BN-17 District, a short distance away. It was a middle-class area with decent security—not too far out on the outskirts. Just as I opened the shack’s creaky old door and stepped outside to head there—
“Finally crawled out, huh?”
What was waiting for us was none other than the gang of punks who had picked a fight with me earlier. There was, however, one crucial difference from before.
“…They multiplied.”
In just a few minutes, the group of three had swelled to dozens. I let out a dry laugh at the sight of the punks completely filling the narrow alley. It seemed the rumor that I had made money yesterday had spread. All the local gangs who had been lurking nearby, waiting for an easy score, had gathered.
“Fuck. If you’re doing business in our territory, shouldn’t you pay taxes?”
Emboldened by their numbers, one of the punks bared his teeth, knife glinting. We were completely surrounded.
I kept a deliberately calm expression while inwardly mocking them, and quickly scanned for any escape route. There wasn’t even a gap for a rat to slip through.
…Hmm. Is this manageable?
Surprisingly, I assessed the situation calmly. The pain in my eyes had faded considerably after the short rest. I lightly tugged at the hem of Petison’s worn military coat, who stood blocking the way in front of me.
“Step back, Mr. Petison.”
“…Chris-nim?”
Petison looked down at me with a puzzled face. I tilted my chin toward the punks and replied with a nonchalant tone.
“This much is a piece of cake.”
With that, I slowly walked forward. Then I stared directly at the boss and the three executives standing at the front of the crowd filling the alley. A tingling sensation rose from deep within my eyes as the ability activated.
“…Huh? H-huh…?”
The first to react was the cocky boss who had been laughing arrogantly. His pupils lost focus in an instant, growing hazy, then blood vessels surged violently across them.
“Y-you fucking bastard…! Why the hell are you here!!!”
“What? Boss? Suddenly what… Ack?!”
With a ferocious shout, the boss stabbed the knife in his hand into the shoulder of his second-in-command. Caught off guard by the sudden attack from an ally, the second-in-command screamed and fell backward.
“Are you crazy?! Did this old fart take the wrong drugs?!”
“Die! Die already, you Axe Gang bastards!!”
As the boss completely lost his mind and swung his knife wildly, the surrounding gang members began to murmur in confusion. I didn’t miss the timing and used my ability on someone else.
“Aaaagh! It’s a monster! A monster’s here!!”
Bang! Bang—!
One of the executives, in a panic, pulled out an old pistol and fired wildly in all directions. Amid the deafening gunshots, a couple of unfortunate punks clutched their chests and collapsed to the ground.
“It’s betrayal!! The boss has gone mad!!”
“Those bastards are trying to kill us! Kill them first!!”
Screams and shouts tangled together from every side. The narrow alley instantly turned into a bloody hellscape where everyone was stabbing and shooting at one another.
Watching the scene, I finally blinked and deactivated my ability. My head throbbed, but there was no need for me to do anything more. The punks, their eyes completely rolled back, were too busy tearing at each other’s flesh to stop.
I walked back with steady steps, passing by Petison, who still stood frozen like a statue. He stared blankly at the scene of madness for a long time without answering.
“Let’s go, Mr. Petison. The gunshots are too loud.”
“……”
When I spoke, Petison finally snapped out of it. Even a veteran soldier who had walked through countless battlefields seemed a little shocked by the sight. Of course, the same went for me. Unable to keep looking at the screams and blood, I quickly spoke to him so we could leave this place.
Petison, who had been staring at me with slightly trembling eyes, lowered his head and answered.
“…Yes. I will guide you.”
With the bloody screams and gunshots ringing out behind us as background music, I walked away leisurely.
After Chris had left the area.
Weee-ooo, weee-ooo—.
With a loud siren, the red and blue headlights of a security bureau vehicle swept across every dark corner of the alley. Detective Rachel, who had arrived late after receiving the report, stepped out of the car and frowned. The acrid smell of smoke stung her nose. No matter how many times she came here, she couldn’t get used to it. How on earth did people live in a place like this?
Feeling as if her body was deteriorating in real time, she looked down at the ground and narrowed her eyes. The scene was horrific. The gang of punks who had been unconscious just minutes ago were slowly regaining consciousness one by one. But every single one of them was in terrible shape. Some were rolling on the ground clutching broken limbs, others groaned loudly enough to shake the alley while pressing on bleeding wounds.
Rachel approached the one who looked the most intact among them.
“Tsk. Did you all pop some drugs and start a gang war?”
“Gang war my ass…! Ptoo!”
The man spat out the blood pooled in his mouth and shouted as if wronged. His whole body trembled with a mix of fear and rage.
“Looks like internal division, huh? Look at your wounds. They’re all from the cheap knives and old pistols you guys carry around.”
When Rachel pointed it out coldly, the man clutched his head in utter frustration.
“That’s why we’re losing our minds too! Something must’ve possessed us! Suddenly the boss’s eyes flipped and he stabbed the second-in-command with a knife! Then the others started screaming like they saw monsters and began choking each other and shooting!”
The terror in the man’s eyes was real. He didn’t seem smart or composed enough to lie. Rachel narrowed her brows. As a detective in the security bureau, she had seen all kinds of bizarre cases, but she had never heard of group madness like this.
“There must be a cause for everyone suddenly going crazy. Was there anyone else at the scene?”
“We don’t know the cause either! The whole alley just went insane in the blink of an eye! …Ah, but there is one strange thing.”
“Strange thing?”
“That shack stuck in the corner over there. There was this pretty-looking kid who’d been gathering crazy bastards since yesterday and doing weird stuff. We were closing in to rob him… but when we came to our senses, the alley had turned into a sea of blood and that kid had vanished without a trace.”
Kid. The word sliced sharply through Rachel’s mind. She strode briskly toward the old shack the punk had pointed at.
Creeeeak—.
The dusty wooden door opened with a rough sound. The narrow, shabby interior of the shack was completely empty. Rachel’s sharp gaze swept across the room, which felt chilly as if someone had left in a hurry. Then something in the corner caught her eye—a scrap of cloth tossed carelessly on the floor.
Rachel slowly approached and picked it up. It was a dirty, worn piece of paper-like clothing covered in dirt and grime. Stamped prominently on it was the mark of the Omega Research Institute.
“……!”
For a moment, Rachel’s breath caught in her throat. The image of a boy she had found beside a pile of slum trash just hours ago flashed through her mind like a panorama. The frail boy with an innocent, untainted face who had looked at her with eyes that triggered every protective instinct. Hadn’t she fallen for that pitiful appearance and even bought him food?
So why was the clothing that pitiful kid had been wearing here? And right after that boy disappeared, why had dozens of punks gone berserk like they were possessed and started slaughtering one another?
The screams of the punks rolling on the ground seeped in through the open door.
They went crazy like they were possessed and fought each other…
A sinister thought crossed her mind. A terrifying mental ability that could shake a person’s psyche from the very bottom and drive them to self-destruction. The veins on the back of Rachel’s hand, still gripping the patient gown, stood out prominently. A chill ran down her spine from the creeping goosebumps.
To think such a horrifying monster had been hiding behind that frail face.
“…Ha.”
Rachel let out a hollow laugh mixed with horror. Only now did she fully realize what she had done out of misguided sympathy.
“What the hell… have I unleashed?”
Rachel clutched the patient gown tightly, her face drained of all color.