Day 4: Tartaros
The Hero Association Headquarters.
Every hero in the world belonged to it, and it was the body that governed them all. Right now, that place was drowning in shock and chaos.
The reason was simple.
A single incident that had taken place in a country called the Republic of Korea.
Korea itself might have been small in territory, but it was packed with powerful ability users—one of the nations the Association watched with particular care.
And the incident that had erupted there was nothing less than heart devouring.
Heart devouring.
If an ordinary human had simply torn out and eaten an ordinary human’s heart, it would have been written off as the work of a psychopath with a peculiar taste. But in this case, the victim had been a villain with actual powers—and the perpetrator who had killed that villain with absurd ease was an unregistered ability user.
The Association had no choice but to treat the matter with extreme sensitivity.
Because among the nine most famous—and most dangerous—villains on the planet, the ones who stood at the absolute peak of the villain organization known as the Illuminati, one of them was the Heart Devourer.
The age in which the Heart Devourer first revealed himself was late-nineteenth-century London. In that city of fog he had another name: Jack the Ripper.
His ability was simple and endless—he grew stronger by consuming the hearts of others, and specifically the hearts of ability users. No one knew how many hearts he had swallowed over the past few centuries. Only one thing was certain: the Heart Devourer’s power scaled without limit to the number of hearts he had eaten.
So what if the girl responsible for the Korean incident—that unregistered ability user—possessed a power of the same kind?
The moment that thought took hold, the Hero Association Headquarters moved with speed and finality.
They would lock her away in Tartaros—the prison that housed villains so vile the word “monstrous” barely covered them. Villains who had murdered more than a hundred people. Villains who had brought entire small nations to ruin.
Someone did float the possibility that Cheon Seo-ah had merely been imitating the Heart Devourer. The overwhelming majority still voted to throw her into Tartaros. Among villains themselves, heart devouring was an absolute taboo. There was no reason to do it unless your ability was the same as—or at least similar to—the Heart Devourer’s.
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
The girl being dragged along under a full load of ability-suppressing devices—Cheon Seo-ah—spoke with a face so serene it was almost unreal. Soldiers bristling with firearms flanked her, and heroes of at least Rank 4 or higher formed a tight escort.
The strange part was this: the girl they were treating as a criminal looked utterly at peace, while a faint but unmistakable fear glimmered in the eyes of the soldiers and heroes hauling her toward Tartaros.
It couldn’t be helped. Even if the devices clamped onto her body could suppress a Rank 2 ability user’s power, everything they knew said her ability matched the infamous Heart Devourer’s. Today might have been the first time she had eaten a heart in public—but what if she had already consumed countless hearts before this? What if her ability had already reached Rank 1, or higher? Then every suppressor currently on her was nothing more than jewelry.
And yet…
“This is so unfair.”
Cheon Seo-ah, treated like a monster, truly felt wronged. The other party had tried to kill her first; she had merely taken a modest defensive measure. Was that not textbook self-defense?
Ah—or maybe…
“Is it because I ate the heart? But isn’t that well within the range of a ‘peculiar taste’? I’m fairly certain there are criminals who’ve done things far more grotesque.”
She puffed out her cheeks as she said it. The heroes around her wore complicated expressions. Eating a piece of someone you had just killed was, among the truly heinous villains, not all that rare. Tartaros itself held a prisoner who had once stitched more than a hundred corpses together into a chimera. The problem was the specific organ she had chosen: the heart.
Does this girl not even know who the Heart Devourer is?
One of the nine worst villains alive. Any modern human—hero or civilian—had heard the name at least once.
So Cheon Seo-ah kept complaining, “Why do I have to go to prison?” while the heroes and soldiers listened with one ear and stayed on high alert with the other.
Then—
Gwoooong—
The transport ship that had been cutting across the sky touched down with a heavy, final sound. Only then did relief wash over the soldiers’ faces. They had spent the entire flight wondering whether she might go berserk, or whether the suppressors on her body would simply fail.
The hatch opened onto Tartaros. At a glance it looked like any other prison—except for the scale of the place, the materials so tough that even a Rank 1 ability user at full power could not tear them down, and the fact that every inmate inside had committed crimes that should have earned them the death penalty twice over.
The villains already locked in Tartaros watched with open curiosity. A new prisoner had not arrived in three years. Who was it this time? What crime? What ability, and how strong?
Their curiosity did not last long before it flipped into pure shock.
That little kid is the new inmate?
You’ve got to be kidding me.
What the hell did she do?
The villains murmured as Cheon Seo-ah stepped down under the escort of soldiers and heroes. Nothing about her looked like a monster fit for Tartaros. Common sense said a girl who had barely reached middle-school age had no business ending up in a place like this.
Past those stares of shock, horror, and curiosity she walked, until—skipping the usual intake physical—she was brought before the warden who ran the prison.
“This is the girl?”
The warden of Tartaros spoke. He had a frail appearance that made it hard to believe he commanded the worst prison on earth. Judging by his clothes, the book in one hand, and the décor of his office, he seemed a devout man of faith—though the faith in question looked far removed from any mainstream religion.
“Yes, sir.”
The hero at Cheon Seo-ah’s side nodded.
“Understood. The rest of you may leave.”
He waved them off. The dismissal was almost rude, yet the heroes filed out without a word. This was Tartaros—a place that answered to no one, a little world unto itself. Here the warden was absolute. Famous heroes or not, no one who had brought Cheon Seo-ah in could defy him.
“Hmm. She looks perfectly normal.”
Standing by the door and studying the girl who stared blankly back at him, the warden muttered to himself. Black hair and black eyes that fell to her waist, a neat black dress—from head to toe she was a study in black, and nothing about that exterior suggested she would commit a taboo like heart devouring.
But—
“Well, if she’s washed up here, we can’t judge by looks alone.”
He produced something from his coat.
“Let’s take a peek inside that mind of yours, shall we?”
Wooong—
The small glass orb in his hand flared with a gloomy light the moment the words left his mouth.
And then—
KRAK—!
“Huh…?”
The orb shattered into powder. A startled sound burst from the warden.
What just happened? Why did it break?
He could not understand it. The orb was called the Sage’s Eye. Despite a name that promised infinite knowledge, all it did was let the user peer into a chosen target’s mind—up to Rank 2 ability users. In other words, it could read the vast majority of heroes and villains currently walking the earth.
And that Sage’s Eye had not merely failed to read her. The moment it activated, it had been destroyed.
Even for a man who had ruled Tartaros for half a lifetime, this was a first.
What in the world…
His expression hardened in an instant. This was bad. Was the mental wall of the girl in front of him so solid that even the Sage’s Eye could not pierce it? No—not merely fail to pierce it, but shatter the Eye in reverse?
Then what rank of ability user was she?
Rank 1?
No. A Rank 1 might resist a reading, but the Eye itself would not explode.
Which meant—
At minimum… Zero Rank…!
A cold sweat slid down the warden’s temple as he forced the horrified thought under control. If the girl standing before him truly was a Zero-Rank ability user, then every suppressor clamped onto her body was doing nothing at all. The moment she decided she was finished playing along, he was already a dead man.
This… is dangerous.
“My, must be a defective unit.”
What came out of his mouth was nothing like what he was thinking. He was acting. If she so much as sensed that he was afraid, there was no telling what she might do. This was a girl who had committed heart devouring—the greatest taboo even among villains. Maybe she had done it out of worship or admiration for the Heart Devourer. Even so, doing it in a crowded downtown district with an active hero watching meant her mind was twisted in some fundamental way.
So the warden kept the performance going, as casually as he could manage.
“Still, a criminal is a criminal. Do you know where you’re headed from here? It’s the place people call the absolute worst and lowest hole even inside Tartaros.”
He forced a gentle smile. One thin thread of hope remained: that the suppressors on her body were somehow still working, and that was why she had stayed so quiet until now.
Smiling at Cheon Seo-ah, he pressed a small bell. The door opened and two guards strode in—both powerful enough to be classified as Rank 4 ability users.
“Take her there,” the warden said.
At the word there, both guards flinched. They said nothing, however, and simply led Cheon Seo-ah away.
Just before the door fully closed—
“There are a lot of useful materials here.”
A chill raced up the warden’s spine. The voice had been utterly indifferent, emptied of every human emotion, and the words themselves made no sense at all—yet for a single heartbeat pure terror climbed his back.