I Need to Change the Plan
“Hoo... haah...”
I had no idea how many hours I’d burned just to get through a single meal. When I checked the clock, a solid two hours had gone by. An hour per triangle kimbap—was that what I was doing?
More precisely, the eating itself hadn’t taken that long. Washing the heat out of my mouth had.
...Never again.
This damned spice-weak tongue had been born unable to accept anything hot. Spice was pain. Spice was suffering. Unless you were a pervert, nobody enjoyed a sensation like that.
Then why had I forced the whole thing down? Couldn’t I just go back out and buy something else?
“I don’t want to.”
The moment I’d stepped outside, something had punched straight through my chest. I hadn’t died, but it had hurt like hell, and I’d gone right up to the edge of dying. I had absolutely no desire to go out again.
Of course I still had to eat. I’d have to leave eventually. Just not now.
Still, lucky me—two triangle kimbaps and I’m full.
Was this the life of a small eater? Full off nothing but two convenience-store rice triangles. Only now did I understand the little sister from the orphanage, the one who used to claim she was stuffed after half a roll of kimbap.
Back when I looked after the kids in the director’s place, I’d forced a few extra bites into her mouth. Yeah. I finally got why she’d been so angry.
“I’ve eaten, so... I should take a look around.”
I surveyed the house. For a place where someone had supposedly lived, the interior had not a single trace of a life.
...What kind of life did she even live?
I got up and went into Lee Yuhwa’s room first. My room, in other words.
The inside was tidy overall. Set aside the blankets I’d rumpled getting up, and the room was clean to a skin-crawling degree. Most of the furniture was white. Bookshelf, desk, bed, lamp—white to the point of obsession. If not for the single chair in dark gray, the whole world in here would have been white.
“No textbooks or anything, either.”
Everything on the shelves was Introduction to Psychology, Demian, The Catcher in the Rye, and the like. Books you’d only see as university texts, or else recommended reading. The desk was spotless. No pens. No notebooks.
When I opened the closet, there were plenty of clothes besides the oversized ones I’d been wearing. A few were small enough that I could actually wear them, but only a few. The rest looked like adult sizes.
Before I possessed her, was Lee Yuhwa living in an adult body?
...So this child’s shape wasn’t the real one? Then why was I...
I kept wandering the room after that, digging through this and that, but nothing special turned up. And the impression I was left with was simple.
It’s too artificial.
It felt like looking at a drama set.
I left the room and checked the rest of the place.
The living room: a sofa set just so, a carpet without a wrinkle, a table with nothing on it, and the remote I’d flung down at random.
The bathroom: toilet paper that had never been used, a cup with only a skim of water left in it, shower products lined up in perfect order.
The kitchen: the remains of the triangle kimbap I’d eaten, a few cups and bowls sitting on the rack, side dishes in the fridge that I couldn’t bring myself to throw out, and the single bottle of drink I’d put in earlier.
The other room: a bed, a vanity filmed with pale dust, a chair.
......
It was strange. Strange enough that I couldn’t believe a person had lived here. Everything looked like a dressed set.
...Is my whole situation some kind of hidden-camera show?
A chill ran up my spine. What if all of this was fake, and I was the star of The Truman Show?
“I mean, it’s probably not that, but...”
The state of the house was grotesque enough to make the thought occur. I hadn’t thought much of it at first. Looking again, I couldn’t believe anyone had actually lived in a place like this.
This time, let’s check the phone.
I threw myself onto the plush sofa. Half-reclined, I pulled out the phone—diamond logo where an apple should have been—and turned it on. I didn’t know the password, but it opened with a fingerprint, so that didn’t matter.
Click.
The lock released with the sound. On the wallpaper, one cute cat lay sprawled.
Cute.
Had she kept a cat, once?
I set the cat photo aside and dug through the phone. There weren’t many apps. Most of them were the defaults, and it didn’t look like anything extra had been downloaded.
“Hmm... did you live without even playing games?”
At this point I was genuinely starting to suspect The Truman Show. Or else—she hadn’t known in advance that I was going to possess her, had she...?
Nah... no way.
She was not the sort of character who would quietly let herself be possessed. This was someone who had defied even the mastermind’s orders because she hated being controlled by another person. If some stranger tried to take her body, she was the type to wreck it until she couldn’t use it herself. In the final battle, the moment the mastermind forcibly seized her arm, there was even a scene of her cursing and cutting the arm off on the spot.
Next I opened the gallery.
There weren’t many photos. Almost everything in it was of a single cat—white fur, tiny jelly-bean paw pads, ridiculously cute. There was even a shot of it sitting calmly while water hit it, as if the thing were some kind of water-type.
With this many cat photos, you’d expect cat supplies somewhere in the house.... I flicked through the gallery at random, then scrolled back up to the most recent shot.
It died.
The last photo was the cat, eyes barely open, lying in an adult woman’s hands. It was only a still image, and yet it looked so forlorn I could almost believe it had taken its last breath right there on my palm.
I kept scrolling down.
Did she only ever photograph the cat?
Photo after photo was nothing but the cat, and no matter how far I went, it was still only the cat. I must have scrolled for a long while before I finally hit pictures that weren’t.
Exactly two photos without the cat in them.
Is this... a family photo?
A young Lee Yuhwa, black-haired and blue-eyed; a mild-looking adult man with black hair; a gentle adult woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. Yuhwa was throwing a V-sign with one hand, striking a proud little pose like a rascal. As a child, she’d apparently had quite the mischievous streak.
And the next one... a hero?
Something was off. A red X had been marked over the hero’s face, the kind of scribble you get from opening a gallery’s edit button and attacking it with the pen tool. Because of that, it was hard to tell what the face looked like. Only the costume showed—an odd getup like a pro wrestler, baggy shorts, a robe, and a belt slung on.
...Judging by whatever’s written on the face, it does seem like a hero. I’ve never seen one like this, though.
I checked the timestamp. About a year before today’s date. The edit history was from a few months ago.
Don’t tell me—a hero Lee Yuhwa had already killed? It was possible. In the story, Yuhwa killed plenty of heroes, and she was shown assassinating them too.
Still, that’s a relief.
Lee Yuhwa’s real activity didn’t start until roughly three years after chapter one. Even if she had killed this hero, the odds were high she hadn’t been caught.
That was all the gallery had to offer. Time to dig through the other apps.
“Hero Sis”...?
One name among them didn’t fit, and it threw me for a second—but I realized almost at once that the number belonged to Han Soyeon. Recent calls were a dead end too, aside from a few to “Mom” several years back.
I went into most of the other apps as well, but the phone’s own records were remarkably clean, as if she hadn’t owned it for long. The gallery photos must have been backed up from an older phone.
The one meaningful thing I found while poking through the apps was the banking one.
A hundred million won...
At first I assumed it was dirty money from villain work. Checking the deposit history, that didn’t seem to be it. Judging by the sender’s name, it looked like it had come from an insurance company.
And with that, I had learned a few things about “Lee Yuhwa.”
1. I don’t know whether her father is alive. Her mother, at least, is dead.
2. I don’t know how long it’s been since she awakened, but she seems to have quietly taken out at least one hero.
3. ...Beyond that, I have no idea.
Why was there so little information? With clues this thin, even a great detective couldn’t reason any further.
“Haa... not completely useless, but I didn’t really learn much.”
Still—no parents, and she’d killed one hero. That much.
I twisted into a thoroughly improper sprawl and lay all the way down.
Outside the window, the sun had nearly set before I noticed. From out there came the voices of children laughing and running around. No park was visible from this house’s windows.
After what happened earlier, it’s quiet.
That park had been smashed to pieces and soaked in some villain’s blood. And yet the children’s laughter never stopped.
“Must be a scene-cleanup team.”
Not heroes who worked in public, but a team that supported the special unit whose only job was killing villains.
“I wonder if they already cleared the wreckage... and the bodies, too.”
What they actually did, roughly speaking, was restore the scene, dispose of corpses, run memory-erasure procedures, and...
...Wait. Don’t they have psychometry among their abilities?
“Eek?!”
I shot upright off the sofa.
Psychometry—the ability to read an object’s memories at a scene. In Hero Record, it was the technique the cleanup crew used most when tracking a villain’s escape route or fabricating a case.
“W-wait... they didn’t catch me, did they...?”
Cold sweat ran down my spine. When I killed the Red Executioner, I had been the adult version. Right before that, and right after, I had been this same little girl.
If they read the scene’s memories...
What would play back was a silver-haired, gold-eyed brat getting run through on a blade, turning in an instant into an adult woman, carving an A-Rank villain into pieces, then becoming a child again and clutching the triangle-kimbap wrappers to her chest. In other words, my transformation would be exposed at the same time as my trail.
“No... not that...!”
The moment it got out that I was a villain, the gentle attitude she’d shown me this afternoon would vanish without a trace. What would be left was an emotionless blade coming to butcher me.
With trembling hands I turned the phone back on and stared at the contact saved for Han Soyeon.
Nothing had come from her yet. No texts. No calls.
I jumped onto the internet and started through the news.
...A-Rank villain captured, B-Rank hero controversy, why is an S-Rank hero drinking coffee...
I checked several community sites on top of that. Fortunately, nothing seemed to match my incident.
No articles... but I still can’t relax.
She and the cleanup crew were people who operated without ever showing themselves to the press. If I’d been found out, they could slip in and finish me while I slept.
And right now, the Doctor is still alive...!
If my identity came out now, I might not even die—I might be dragged off as one of the Doctor’s test subjects. He belonged to the Hero Association, and he was a mad scientist more villainous than the villains. To him, villains were nothing but convenient material for experiments.
“...I can’t just sit here.”
Originally, I’d meant to drift along doing absolutely nothing and live holed up in the house. That was what I’d thought when I first entered this world. But the plan had been completely ruined on a short walk to the convenience store.
Since my plan to do nothing and stay quiet had fallen apart, I needed a response that matched. A new plan, by the name of I Can’t Die Like This. The name felt a little cheap, but it only existed inside my head, so who cared. I liked it.
I at least need enough power to protect myself...!
The plan itself was simple. Wake the power I already had as fast as I could, and live by dealing only with the villains who came to me. Heroes, I would run from as hard as I could.
I’d meant to live without running into them at all... but that had already failed, starting the day I possessed this body.
“All right. Then, quickly, my power...”
But how was I supposed to use it?
They said that once you awakened an ability, you instinctively knew how to use it. The body changed to fit the power it had woken, reshaping itself into something suited to that ability. And the nature of what you’d gained rose in your head on instinct.
“...I don’t know anything.”
Same as when I’d first possessed her—nothing came to me at all. Even so, this world was too dangerous to answer that by doing nothing.
They said what matters most when using an ability is imagination, right?
More important, supposedly, than sitting in lotus position and meditating your way through ether.
The image of becoming an adult... adult... adult...!
I squeezed my eyes shut and kept repeating it inwardly. I imagined becoming an adult with everything I had. I pictured myself turning into the adult version.
“...It’s not working.”
The result was exactly what I expected.
This time, to use Restoration, I fetched a fruit knife from the kitchen and pricked the back of my hand, just barely.
“Ow ow ow...”
A stinging pain, and blood beaded up on the back of my hand. I chanted it again in my head, but all the hand did was bleed a little more.
“All I did was hurt my hand...”
I sucked at the bleeding spot and pressed hard with my tongue to stop it. The blood in my mouth, and the tip of my tongue where it met the cut, tasted of flat iron.
Last is Severance...
No matter how I thought about it, this body didn’t seem able to use an ability. Unless I transformed into the adult version—and if not that, then...
Even if I know it won’t work, I should try once.
With Transformation, I’d been stabbed and couldn’t feel the sensation. With Restoration, I hadn’t even registered it. But the feeling of when I’d used Severance still lingered, faintly.
“It was like something welled up all at once, and then sliced through—shwk.”
If I had to name it, the feeling of air leaving my hand. Holding on to that sensation, I flicked my fingers and imagined the curtain being cut.
Shhk—
The curtain right beside me split, just a little.
I looked at my hand. I looked at the curtain. I went back and forth between them for about five seconds.
“I-it actually cut!”
This worked?! I shouted, startled.