It Seems I'm Already a Villain
ALIAS:Red Executioner
NAME:Han Baek-woo
RECORD:Serial murder — 17 victims. Arson — 6 counts. Kidnapping and rape — 11 counts.
RANK:A-Rank, as designated by the Hero Association.
"...Hah. Tsk. Sharp little brat."
Han Baek-woo looked down at the child run through on his weapon. A hat yanked low, a hood pulled over it, the small body bundled tight against the world.
"Why the hell are you wrapped up like that?"
"Ah... ugh..."
The kid was still breathing out thin, broken sounds. He ripped the hat and hood off by force.
"...Ah, shit. A pretty little thing like this, and I have to leave her?"
A face like that would sell well as a slave. Even dead, the Corpse Collector would pay handsomely for it. Pretty things were always in demand. Hell, with a face like this he could have kept her as his own. Children weren't his taste, but break her in, raise her right, and the future on that face was promising.
Tsk. What a fucking waste.
Shhk—!
He drew the blade free.
"......"
The child's body folded and dropped. Even a blade made of flame hadn't cauterized everything; blood leapt and spattered, a wet patter against the ground. She must have died before he pulled the knife, because she never even managed a death cry. She simply pitched forward and lay there.
Han Baek-woo finished the cigar clenched in his teeth and turned to go.
Nothing for it. I have to be gone before that crazy psycho bitch gets here—
The moment he meant to run—
Thud.
Something caught his shoulder.
No way. She's already—!
Cold shot through him. He spun and swung a weapon into being at whatever stood behind him.
"...The hell? There's nothing there?"
The blade he had thrown met no one at all.
"You're slow. Vermin."
A voice like frost. Cold enough that even the breath at his back seemed liable to freeze, and for an instant his whole body locked.
...Shit. What is this? An ability? It's not that crazy woman. Some other hero?
He was rattled. There weren't many strong enough to bind a person with a single sentence.
A Decree? Then that monster, Dragonic?
An anomaly outside every measure, said to crush a person to death by nothing more than speaking.
No. If it were her, I'd already be dead!
He had seen it himself. An S-Rank villain, designated as such, bursting apart at a single word from her. If that monster were here, his whole body would already have come undone.
"Damn it!"
He still didn't know who the enemy was, but whatever had bound him was a hero. A very strong one. His instincts told him a fight had no chance of ending in his favor. The instant the stiffness eased, he kicked off and searched for the fallen child.
Throw the brat and run, and I can get away!
Heroes were mostly like that. Saving the life in front of them mattered more than catching the villain. There were exceptions, of course, but for now the other kind were still the majority. Use the kid's corpse as bait, and he could live.
Where is she? She was right there—!
But the child he had killed was nowhere in his sight.
Shkk—
"What are you looking for? Don't tell me it's the corpse you made of me."
"G-gaaaaaah!!"
His leg came off.
"You're noisy."
Shkk—
His tongue came off.
"......!!!"
"Tsk. Thrashing around, and you only a maggot."
Arms and legs were taken. His insides were carved out in a ruin. It was very fast, and it was carefully not fatal.
"Kah... aaah..."
He couldn't even scream properly. The pain was enormous, and he couldn't pass out.
"...How ugly. Do die now."
Shkk—
A line opened across his neck.
That... hoodie and hat...
In the last of his sight, before the head came free, he caught the woman's clothes.
"Ah... the triangle gimbap I just bought..."
A hat pulled low. A hoodie. Hair spilling loose. There was no child's corpse. There was a woman dressed exactly as the child had been.
He had heard of her. A villain who wore a child's shape, crueler than anyone, who never forgave a failure.
I picked the wrong one.
The rumor had come from a colleague he himself had killed, long ago, so he had written it off as empty talk.
"Sh...it."
Only as he died did he learn the rumor was true.
Shhk—!
In a park with no one else in it, his head came off, clean and meaningless.
"Where did he go?"
Black jeans, a short-sleeved shirt fitted to the line of her body, a zip hoodie thrown on without care: a blonde woman with a sword in hand, standing on the open air and looking down at the ground. She was searching for someone, and she was in a hurry.
"...There can't be any more casualties."
The A-Rank she had lost. A serial killer who went around calling himself the Red Executioner. She had thought the brutal exchange was over and he was caught, and then he had fled behind the lives of his own people, and she had let him slip.
If I had Senior Pathfinder's ability.
The power to find a chosen person. Mark them even once, and you could find them even after they died.
She didn't have an ability like that. Not yet. She still hadn't properly grasped Senior Pathfinder's power.
Focus everything I have...
All she could do was search with her senses. He used fire, so there would be the smell of scorching. She dragged her hearing and her sight up as far as they would go. If he wasn't using his ability, he couldn't have gotten far. She had to take him as fast as she could.
"Aaaaaagh—!!"
Then, from the left, a man's scream.
A scream? Don't tell me—!
She kicked off the empty air at once, toward the sound.
It had come from a park in front of an apartment block.
No. No! Because of me...!
She drove herself faster.
This was her mistake. If she hadn't lost him, that scream would never have sounded.
The color drained from her face. More than anything, she wanted the person who had just screamed to still be alive.
Whether her body could bear the speed didn't matter. She dropped toward the sound as fast as she was able.
Boom—!
She came down too hard. The leg that struck the ground throbbed.
There was no time to stand around. Right now, the one who had screamed, and that bastard—
"Hic—!"
But the scene in front of her was impossible to believe. A man's corpse, butchered with a cruelty that was hard to look at with open eyes. A red mohawk, severed and rolled aside, told her the grotesque body belonged to the Red Executioner.
...Don't tell me this child.
Beside the corpse, clutching a convenience-store bag, a hooded child had collapsed to the ground and was hiccuping up at her.
Shhk—
The head of the Villain Alliance executive known as the Red Executioner came off.
By my hand.
"...Did I do this?"
I couldn't make sense of the situation I was in.
When his blade went into me, the pain had been enormous. I still didn't understand how a sword made of nothing but flame could cut, but it had run me through without question. My chest had burned with a pain past bearing. And the instant the blade came out, my body changed on its own.
Somehow was the only word I had for it. Was the condition for using the ability death? Or was there some other condition, and I had simply met it...?
Setting that aside... using the ability felt far too natural.
I was small again. But a moment ago, this had definitely been Lee Yuhwa's body. That Lee Yuhwa: the main villain of Part Two, who could carve S-Rank heroes apart with a flick of the hand and do the same to any villain who refused to follow.
It felt... like something else was steering my mind.
Changed, I had toyed with him and killed him. The way I spoke had been Lee Yuhwa to the letter, and so had everything I did. Maybe even the thoughts I'd had in the moment.
But all of it had been me. No one had crushed my will and piloted the body. I had said those things and done those things because I chose to.
Otherwise... there's no way I would have picked this bag up.
No matter how I turned it over, that Lee Yuhwa would never have grumbled while making sure to keep a bag with a triangle gimbap in it.
Which meant...
Don't tell me... I'm already past the point of awakening as a villain?
Killing a person had felt completely natural. I had taken a body apart without a second thought, torn it to pieces in a torture that lasted only moments, and then finished him.
Cruel. Lawless. Before I possessed this body, the slightest grotesque scene had been enough to make me retch. And now, even after I'd turned back into a child, looking at that corpse didn't stir anything in me at all.
They said that once the seed blooms and the heart corrupts into a villain, killing other people stops meaning anything...
The way the story described it, becoming a villain meant the greed inside you whispered, and so on.
"I can't tell if anything's whispering..."
Fortunately, I wasn't hearing any voice egging on my desires. The only sound coming from inside me was my stomach, still growling because I hadn't managed to eat a single triangle gimbap. If that counted as a sound that stirred the appetite, then maybe the description wasn't entirely wrong.
Even so... isn't this exactly the situation of me being a full villain?
An empty park. A butchered corpse, and the murder suspect sitting right beside it.
A child's body might soften the suspicion a little...
No. In this world, plenty of villains kill children too.
Even the Twin Reapers, Europe's youngest S-Rank villains, had died with every limb cut away and their bodies burst open.
There were already enough child villains here that the comfortable assumption—a child, so they can't be a villain—didn't exist.
I have to get out of here. Now.
"If another hero catches me like this—"
Boom—!
A tremendous crash, and dirt blasted outward in a cloud. A woman came out of the dust, and all I could do was drop where I sat.
Radiant, shining blonde hair. Amethyst eyes that looked as if they saw through everything. Unlike the other heroes, each of them wrapped in a suit loud with its own personality, she preferred to dress for comfort alone: black jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, easy to move in.
How could I fail to know her? I could forget every other face in this world and still be unable to forget the woman in front of me.
Why... why now, of all times...
"Hic—!"
She was the protagonist of Hero Record, the world I had possessed.
Han Soyeon.