Day Three
Rumble…
The floor of the deep ocean shuddered with a violent tremor.
It was as if a submarine earthquake had torn through the seafloor; had any nation stood nearby, its people would have gone pale with terror. And little wonder—when the quake struck without warning, a colossal tsunami more than a hundred meters high went racing out for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.
At the quake’s epicenter, a peculiar formation etched into the abyss had thrust aside hundreds of millions of tons of seawater—and with it, pressure beyond imagination—carving out a hollow space. Within that space, a girl opened her eyes.
“I’m tired.”
Blink. Blink.
Still half-asleep, Cheon Seo-ah mumbled the words without strength. She had risen at the sound of her alarm, yet a few scant decades could hardly be called a proper rest. Back when she had dwelled in Daematcheon, her ordinary sleep had stretched across centuries.
Even so, she drove off the drowsiness washing over her and pushed herself upright. The alarm meant only one thing: the year on present-day Earth had reached 2024.
“When I get to Korea, what should I do first?”
In the space of a single blink she swept away the endless tide of sleep, and now her eyes shone bright and clear. Perhaps it was the long-awaited return to modern Earth. For the first time in tens of thousands of years, Cheon Seo-ah found herself swelling with something she had never felt—anticipation.
With a single flick of her hand she withdrew the Yin-Yang Five Elements Reverse Heaven Formation that had served as her bed. The seawater held at bay came roaring in like a mad thing. The space the formation had created measured only a few hundred meters—less than a drop beside the vast deep. The instant the array vanished, the ocean swallowed that hollow whole without giving so much as a heartbeat of grace.
But Cheon Seo-ah was already gone.
“What on earth is going on?”
Cheon Seo-ah tilted her head and murmured to herself. The place where she reappeared after vanishing from the ocean floor was her old homeland—Seoul, capital of the Republic of Korea. Yet the city that met her eyes was nothing like the Seoul sealed in her memory.
The skyline of towering buildings stood much as she remembered. The problem was the people walking its streets. Most looked ordinary enough, but some of their clothes were… peculiar. Figures in martial robes straight out of a wuxia novel strolled about with cold weapons—swords, spears, axes. Others wore the armor of knights or the robes of mages from fantasy novels. And even among those dressed like anyone else, she occasionally spotted people carrying an aura not unlike the spiritual energy that cultivators of the immortal realms accumulated.
No—every last person dressed like a character from a martial epic or a fantasy tale possessed some strange power. If they hadn’t, she might have assumed a cosplay convention had taken over the city today. Of course, such unusual folk numbered scarcely one in a thousand…
“Just what has happened here?”
Cheon Seo-ah stood dazed, staring at a Seoul—no, a modern world—so utterly transformed from the one she knew.
Boom!
Not far away, a building exploded outward, and a group spilled into the street. Each of them wore a wildly distinctive outfit; the only real common thread was the masks covering their faces—and the bags stuffed with fifty-thousand-won bills clenched in their hands.
“Kyaaaah!”
“V-Villains!”
“Run!”
People nearby screamed and scattered in every direction. Amid those cries, a strangely alien word slipped into Cheon Seo-ah’s ear.
“Villains?”
Villains? This wasn’t some shonen manga or ability-user web novel. Why were they shouting “villains” at what looked like a gang of bank robbers?
What followed was no easier for her to grasp.
“You dare run wild in my territory?!”
KRA-KOOM!
A bolt of lightning crashed down in front of the fleeing bank robbers—or “villains,” if one went by the bystanders’ words—and a man stepped out of the flash. A man emerging from a lightning strike was odd enough; his costume was odder still. A tight blue bodysuit, hair dyed bright yellow, a lightning emblem blazoned across his back, a spear gripped in one hand. Definitely not an ordinary person.
“A hero! A hero’s here!”
“I know that guy! That’s Thunderman!”
“Thunderman! Thunderman! Thunderman! Thunderman!”
A hero. And a rather childish name to go with it. Really…
“Why has everything changed so much?”
Cheon Seo-ah watched blankly as the lightning-born hero, Thunderman, threw himself into battle with the five villains. When she had first arrived on Earth and crossed countless eras and places, she had learned that the world hid a reverse side ordinary humans—her former self included—never saw. But those people had always concealed their existence, never once appearing before ordinary eyes. Even in the last age she had visited, when Korea still groaned under Japanese rule, it had been the same.
In the mere decades of her sleep—such a short span of time—what could have happened for them to step into the light as heroes and villains, and for ordinary people to accept it all as if it were the most natural thing in the world?
She was still watching the fight with a face of pure incomprehension when—
“Damn it—!”
One of the villains locked in combat with Thunderman—whose name might have been childish, but whose lightning combat power was anything but—spat a curse and suddenly charged straight at Cheon Seo-ah. Their own strength couldn’t beat Thunderman, and they couldn’t escape him either, so they meant to take her hostage.
“Th-This—stop right there!”
To think a civilian still hadn’t evacuated!
Thunderman’s face twisted with shock as he roared and gave chase, lightning wrapping his entire body. He never reached her. Two villains still on their feet latched onto him with desperate stubbornness, and in that opening the third seized Cheon Seo-ah.
“Get out of the way right now or I’ll blow this girl’s head open!”
He jammed a pistol—one of the few weapons that still felt properly modern—against her brow. Thunderman, who had just finished subduing the two clinging to his ankles, went rigid with dismay. Of course, the bulk of the fault lay with the civilian who had failed to evacuate and then become a hostage. But Thunderman was a hero. Protecting citizens from villains was his duty. Once a civilian had become a hostage, every failure became his failure—whether she had fled or not.
“Kh—.”
Caught between action and inaction, Thunderman ground out a stifled sound. With his power he could have turned the man into charcoal in the blink of an eye. He didn’t dare. He knew full well that the faintest hint of an ability would make that villain pull the trigger without hesitation.
“Damn it! Don’t you have any pride as a villain?!”
“Screw you! As if a villain would have something like that!”
Thunderman shouted in frustration; the villain only sneered back. All Thunderman could do was glare, sparks crackling uselessly around him.
And then—
“What exactly is going on right now?”
The girl who had become the hostage tilted her head with a thoroughly calm expression—almost innocent, even.
“I’m having a little trouble following. So you’re a villain, and that pervert in the tight suit over there is a hero?”
…?
Whether she understood her own predicament or not, the abrupt question left Thunderman and the villain both momentarily stunned.
“It doesn’t make sense. Ability-users who used to hide on the reverse side of the world are out in the open now as heroes and villains, fighting each other… Are there dungeons or gates or monsters, by any chance? Oh! What about status windows?”
“What the hell are you babbling about?! Just shut up!”
Click.
The villain barked and rested his finger on the trigger—a silent promise that one more word would end her. Thunderman’s face tightened with anxiety, but Cheon Seo-ah’s expression remained pure and guileless.
And why wouldn’t it?
“Wow, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a gun. As far as I knew, firearms were illegal in Korea. Just how much has this Earth changed from the one I remember? Don’t tell me all of this is a butterfly effect I caused?”
“I told you to shut up!”
She kept talking as if his threats meant nothing. In the end, the villain pulled the trigger.
Click.
Bang—!
The shot cracked through the air. Panicked, Thunderman swore—“Crazy bastard!”—and lunged. He never thought the man would actually fire. The villain was a villain, yes—someone who committed crimes even with powers—but Thunderman truly hadn’t believed he would pull the trigger. After all, the man he faced was Dark Wind: a mid-school-syndrome name, an ability limited to moving as fast as the wind, and nowhere near bold enough to kill. A D-rank small-time crook, nothing more.
And that crook had just tried to murder a hostage. A girl who still looked underage!
Fury twisted Thunderman’s face as he prepared to hurl lightning at Dark Wind—
“Does this count as self-defense?”
With a bullet lodged in her forehead, Cheon Seo-ah turned toward Dark Wind and smiled a smile so chilling it froze the blood.
Dark Wind took one look at the girl speaking to him with a bullet in her brow and that hair-raising smile, and shrieked, “Hyaaak!”
M-Monster! She’s a monster!
The startled villain screamed inside his head and bolted. In a world where ability-users were real, the reasonable conclusion would have been that the bullet failed because she, too, possessed some power. But Dark Wind, already driven to the psychological brink and now crushed under the guilt of having shot a girl, was in no state for reasonable thought.
So he fled without looking back, while Thunderman exhaled in pure relief that Cheon Seo-ah was alive. She glanced between the two of them, then spoke to Thunderman.
“You there, tight-suit pervert mister. This is definitely self-defense, right?”
Huh?
Tight-suit pervert mister? Was she talking about him?
While Thunderman’s expression twisted at the title, Cheon Seo-ah moved. One step, and she was standing in front of Dark Wind as if she had folded the earth itself. The villain, who had been sprinting for his life, blinked once—and she was simply there. He let out a bizarre scream.
In that same instant—
“Hmm. Well, she’ll do for a snack, at least.”
…Huh?
What?
What just happened?
Her voice drifted from behind him. Only then did Dark Wind realize that, in the space of another blink, Cheon Seo-ah had vanished from his front.
And at the same time—
“Ah…!”
A short death-cry, and Dark Wind went tumbling across the pavement. A hole gaped clean through his chest. Cheon Seo-ah, still holding the heart that throbbed in her palm, popped it into her mouth and swallowed it whole.
“Hmm. As expected. I’ve trained in the Heart-Devouring Soul-Seizing Great Power Art, but a heart this weak doesn’t even register. If only I had the heart of a cultivator who’d reached the Golden Core Realm…”
A chill ran down Thunderman’s spine.
As she chewed the heart without hesitation and complained about the taste in words he couldn’t begin to understand, pure terror flickered in the hero’s eyes.