It's Way Too Spicy!!
After Han Soyeon left, I headed straight home.
Beep! The front door opened with the chirp of the card key.
"Uuugh..."
Home. This was home. It wasn't familiar in the slightest—a place I was seeing for the first time today—and still, it felt unbearably comfortable.
The moment I got inside, I flopped flat on the floor.
"What is even happening..."
Sure, the world of Hero Record was a dumpster fire of a setting, but did it make any sense to run into a villain on a quick trip to the convenience store?
And the second I somehow survive that villain, the one who shows up is the protagonist—the villain shredder?
Tell me that works, statistically.
If I were the novel's protagonist and this story were running right now, the readers would be tearing me apart. An impossible plot, they'd say.
I'd be cursing it out myself, at least. Whoever forced a possession on me and then dumped me in a place like this—I'd curse them for the rest of their life.
"May you stub your pinky toe every single day..."
And may it hurt. Badly. Their whole life, every day—I hoped they lived in that kind of pain.
"I really... thought I was going to die..."
The spot on my chest that had been run through still ached. There was no direct pain, but the area throbbed like phantom pain.
...I survived because of Lee Yuhwa's ability, didn't I?
In the original work, Lee Yuhwa's abilities came to three in all.
The first was Severing, strong enough to butcher even an S-Rank. The second was Restoration, which could heal others as well as herself. The third was Transformation, which switched her body between child and adult.
In this world, most people possessed only a single ability.
Even most S-Ranks only have one. There were dual-ability users, but the story said that even if you scoured the entire world, you would find fewer than ten.
Lee Yuhwa, though—aside from the protagonist—was practically the only person who could use three abilities or more. Cheat-level specs, worthy of a Part Two main villain.
I rubbed at my chest. Not a single wound, and not even a hole left in my clothes. When I had shifted into the adult version of Lee Yuhwa, Restoration must have triggered on its own.
"So healing the clothes was canon, too..."
The comment sections had been full of people asking why a healing ability fixed clothing as well. Readers had even raised a ruckus, demanding the author hand over a fanservice scene. And here the power really did restore the clothes.
Growl—
Maybe because I was a villain now, a loud voice of want rose from somewhere inside me.
Food first. My absolute favorite. Spicy pork-belly triangle kimbap—a convenience-store rice triangle stuffed with fiery pork.
I didn't think they'd have it here. I'd eaten so many of them all through college and never once gotten sick of them.
Rustle— I got up, grabbed the triangle kimbap, and headed for the table. The chair was high enough that my feet didn't reach the floor.
...I'm short. I'd felt it when Han Soyeon held me, too. From what I vaguely remembered of her profile, she was about five foot nine... and she'd scooped me up like I weighed nothing...
"Eat first!"
No more stray thoughts. I'd had spicy pork belly for lunch before I came to this world, but it felt like it had been ages.
Rustle— I took out the drink and gave the plastic cap a small twist.
Hiss— The soda had been shaken hard earlier. Thankfully, it didn't erupt and spill everywhere.
"Whew..."
It was only a drink. Why did it feel this moving? Maybe because the road to actually eating it had been too long.
Gulp— The cool, sweet taste of carbonation slid down my throat.
Delicious! Buy-one-get-one stuff was usually bland, but every so often they sold something this good. Earth or here, that much seemed to be the same.
"Hehe..."
Soda for an appetizer. Now for the main event—I pulled out the triangle kimbap.
Riiip— I tugged the tab at the center, and the plastic split along its thin seam.
A spicy smell stabbed at my nose. Through the seaweed that didn't quite cover it, the red rice looked delicious.
Gulp— I swallowed, then bit straight into the spicy pork belly.
Crunch— Seaweed crumbled, and grains of rice and finely chopped pork filled my mouth.
As expected, no matter when you ate this—
"......, ...!!!"
I clamped my mouth shut and couldn't chew another bite.
Spiiiicy...!!!
A sharp rush of red spice flooded my mouth and stabbed my tongue. The pain was so bad that heat surged across my face. Sweat broke out in an instant and ran down my forehead. Tears beaded from the biting, sinus-stinging heat.
Chew— gulp— I forced the rice down.
"Aaaah...!"
A this is too spicy sensation I'd felt only a handful of times in my life. My tongue felt like it was on fire. My throat burned. My body started twitching on its own. I needed something to drink.
I grabbed the green drink beside me.
Hurry! Eyes swimming and head reeling from the heat, I dumped the soda straight in.
Hissss— The drink, exploding with bubbles, hit a tongue already seared by spicy food—
"Nnnnngh...!"
Inside my mouth the two of them landed a perfect combo and struck my tongue hard enough to tear it.
It hurts...!!
For a second I nearly spat the mouthful back out. When I finally, barely swallowed it, the inside of my mouth was a scorched wasteland.
"Haaah...!"
I shot up from the chair, went to the sink, and stuck my tongue out under the running water like a cat.
Shaaa— Cold water washing over my tongue eased the pain, if only a little.
...Why is it this spicy?! I was someone who could eat Buldak fire noodles without shedding a single drop of sweat. To me, spicy pork-belly kimbap had never been more than a lightly salty rice triangle...
I'm going to have to give up spicy food from now on.
"Hoo... heh... haa."
Tongue surrendered to the cold water, I shed tears as I mourned every spicy dish I would never eat again.
They were absolutely not tears from it being too spicy.
Brrring—
Around the time Yuhwa was suffering through her spicy food, a ringtone sounded from Han Soyeon's pocket.
Cleanup Team, Team 1 — Team Leader Chae Kang-won
"Yes. Speaking."
"What the hell is wrong with you? Villain or not, you can't carve somebody up like that, damn it! And where did you go? You're supposed to wait at the scene!"
An angry man's voice came through the phone.
"I get that you hate villains, but you wrecked him like this? In the park out front of an apartment complex?"
Every question of his was packed tight with rage.
"......"
"Hah. Still, we ran the on-site memory wipe, so unless somebody lived through it up close, most of them'll just end up with a fuzzy memory."
On-site memory erasure. A technique of the Cleanup Team that used Psychometry in reverse. If you weren't directly tied to the incident, it wiped the "memory" of the scene itself—and even the recollections of the people who had seen it turned vague.
"Hah. Our guys are puking their guts out right now. A written apology isn't gonna cover you on this."
"...I have something to report regarding that."
"What? A report? Report what, damn it! You're attached to special forces, and you—"
"No."
"Huh?"
"I am not the one who did it."
"What?"
The team leader's flustered voice came through.
"It was already in that condition when I arrived."
"Ha, shit... you should've damn well reported that first."
"I apologize."
"Every trace is gone, so it's too late to read it again with Psychometry... Any witnesses around?"
"......"
Han Soyeon paused at that.
The girl who had stared at her in shock and hiccuped. And yet the same girl who hadn't cried, even with a corpse right in front of her.
At first I wondered if that child might be the villain...
She hadn't felt any power from the girl. Even a child, once they awakened an ability, underwent some degree of bodily change—remade into a body fit to use that power. At the extreme, they could become something wholly inhuman. At the mild end, it stopped at stronger muscle. But the girl she had held was soft, without a scrap of muscle, and Soyeon hadn't been able to confirm any other mutation in her body either.
"Hey, why'd you go quiet. I asked if there were any witnesses."
A witness...
A girl whose feelings hadn't stirred at all, except when she looked at Soyeon herself. That girl, Yuhwa, had been far too calm. Someone dying in front of her, the sight of the corpse, saying she had no parents—none of it seemed to mean much to the child.
"...There were no witnesses. I have been searching the apartment complex for the perpetrator, but I have not found them yet."
Yuhwa, speaking of death with a face that gave nothing away. Han Soyeon chose to lie to him.
"Haa... shit. If the bastard didn't die sucked dry of blood and died chopped to pieces instead... then it's a completely different guy."
Cases like this turned up now and then. You chased a fleeing villain, only to find them discarded somewhere as a blood-drained mummy. Several Psychometry users from the Hero Association had tried to track it, but all they ever saw was a swarm of bats draining every drop of the villain's blood.
No one registered as a hero possessed an ability like that. Among ordinary civilians registered with the government through ability reports, a few had similar powers, but in most cases that power was very small. The most they could draw was less than a pint of blood. Enough to kill a person, yes—but turning someone into a complete mummy was impossible. And tamers who could control bats could only form a bond with them. They couldn't issue a command to kill someone that way.
A villain with a compound ability: extracting every drop of blood, and controlling bats.
So the heroes called that unidentified S-Rank villain the Vampire. Because that villain always drank the blood of villains on the run.
"Whoever sliced this guy up that cleanly has to be S-Rank at minimum too, goddamn it."
What was certain was that a completely different ability had been involved. This method was nothing like the Vampire's pattern so far.
"And the technique's vicious as hell... worse than that bastard's."
"First, I will return to the Association branch and submit my report."
"Yeah, you do that... ugh, shit, the section chief's gonna tear me a new one."
The call ended on the team leader's sigh.
Han Soyeon turned her gaze to the apartment Yuhwa had gone into.
...A child with no parents and no relatives. So she lives alone.
The convenience-store bag Yuhwa had been carrying. The triangle kimbap and the drink inside it. As a single meal for a child, it had looked terribly meager.
"Yuhwa... that was the name."
A cute girl with unusual white hair and golden eyes that sparkled like sunlight. Soyeon quietly curled the hand that had held her.
...I should patrol this way from now on, too.
With that thought, Han Soyeon turned and walked away.