How Interesting
"Oh… ohh…!"
The first time I'd properly used an ability. I was still riding the rush of it, high on the moment, when—
"Eek—!"
A text alert shrieked out of nowhere. I jolted so hard my heart slammed against my ribs.
That scared me… And that noise I'd just made—that was weird. Really weird. Was it because this body was a girl's? One by one, I could feel things starting to change.
Nope. I'm still a guy. Changing? As if. My precious little friend might be gone now, but he lived on just fine in my head. I set that friend from a past I could never look at again behind me, and checked the message.
So there is someone who'd text me. It was none other than Hero Unnie. Han Soyeon.
She was asking after my condition.
…My body's fine, though. I couldn't make sense of what she was doing. The Han Soyeon I'd seen in the webtoon didn't act like someone who saved people. She moved with her sights set on killing Villains.
You had to get around the middle of the webtoon before any of that gap-moe charm started to show—little glimpses of her looking after her teammates, worrying over them. That was as far as it ever went.
"…I should reply, shouldn't I?"
If I hadn't seen it, maybe I could have let it sit. I'd seen it. I had to answer.
You needn't worry. Thank you for your concern. That was all I'd meant to send. Something short. Simple.
But what was this sentence.
…??? Fragile, delicate, dripping with little-girl sweetness—what was this sentence supposed to be?
Not just the way I talk. Even the way I act…? Speech, I could almost talk myself into. A habit worn into the body, leftover muscle memory, something like that. But the typing correcting itself too?
"My voice, and the way I talk… they're really soft, huh."
A thin, clear voice. A manner of speaking that belonged to a very delicate girl. The exact set of behaviors people point at and call cute.
…There's nothing I can do about this. At this rate, I was genuinely going to turn into a girl on the inside, too.
The moment I sent the reply, another message arrived.
…I can't leave the "unnie" out. I sent that reply too, and nothing else came.
"I should… practice the ability, right?"
The curtain hung in a small, clean cut.
A box cutter would've gone deeper than that. The slice itself couldn't have been even three centimeters, but what mattered to me was simpler. I'd used an ability for the first time.
I couldn't practice any further, though. For one thing, I couldn't go around damaging more of this house. For another—
"Haaahm…"
Was it the girl's body, or was it that everything crammed into a single day had been too much? Exhaustion came down on me all at once.
"…For tonight, I should just sleep."
Right. Sleep first. Who knew? Maybe this was all a dream, and I'd wake up with a major class to get to.
Clinging to that thin little hope, I headed off to shower before bed.
…Ah. A shower.
I didn't smell. I hadn't been working out, and I hadn't been rolling around anywhere. Still, skipping a shower wasn't an option. I'd already looked earlier, so what was the problem? Earlier I'd still been in underwear. And an adult man looking at a little girl's naked body…
But… this is my body. The body's owner existed separately, of course, but the only one controlling it now was me. If that owner's mind were still in here, this would be something I must not do. If it wasn't, then no one was being shamed, and nothing about it was a problem for anyone else.
Social morality and the simple desire to get clean crashed into each other for a long while. In the end—
"…Forget it. I'm going to be living in this body anyway. I can't keep this up forever."
I decided to wash. Back at the orphanage, bathing the kids in a group wasn't something I'd done once or twice. And the one being seen was me. The one doing the seeing was me.
Right. I'm not agonizing over this anymore. Decision made, I stripped everything off and stepped into the shower.
Shaaaa— Warm water poured over me and heated my body through, pleasant and easy.
"…It's so warm."
Before I knew it, the bathroom had gone hazy with heat and steam. I washed the long hair with lavender-scented shampoo, scrubbed myself clean with a lemon body wash, and brushed thoroughly with the only toothbrush there was.
And with that, the shower was over.
"I'm all sleepy…"
I dried off with a towel and put on the underwear I'd brought in, then pulled adult Yuhwa's white short-sleeved tee on over it, more or less. The shirt was so loose and so big that it covered me all the way down past where the pants should have been. I hadn't put any on.
Hair that refused to dry put me through it, but I had my orphanage chops. Drying a girl's hair was something I was more confident about than anyone. …Should I cut it? I'd overlooked, of course, the minor detail that the difficulty shot up when the hair was my own. Once it was finally dry, I threw myself onto the only bed in the place that was a mess.
It was nothing like the cheap, hard mattresses I'd slept on in the dorms, the orphanage, or the army. I couldn't even tell what was touching my back. All I knew was that something impossibly soft had wrapped itself around me.
…Sleep, and when I wake up… what do I do first… The thoughts snapped off, one after another. This devil of a mattress hadn't had me for more than a few seconds, and already it was trying to ship me off into a complete and total dream.
"Koo…"
And so, under the irresistible hand of sleep, I sank into a deep one.
My first day in this world. That was the end of it.
Seoul's neon burned through the night like a field of stars. The moon was hidden behind cloud, and the lights of the darkened city shone all the brighter for it.
A high-rise penthouse from which every one of those lights could be taken in at a glance. Inside the room with its beautiful view, the lights were off. Only the city shone in.
At the penthouse's wide window stood a woman, leaning against the glass—short, deep silver hair, and eyes red as blood.
A body as beautiful as a model's, proportioned to perfection. Had it not been for the suit jacket thrown on with so little care, the dress would have bared the valley of her chest outright, dizzying enough to stir the appetite of any number of men. The man kneeling before her, however, was shaking with fear.
"Hmm… Tell me. How shall I deal with you?"
At a single line from the silver-haired woman, his body flinched and trembled.
"I-I'm sorry!"
He threw himself flat, desperate.
"The task the Boss gave me was to dispose of failures. So. Are you a failure?"
"N-no! I'm not! I-I didn't fail!"
At that frantic denial, the silver-haired woman let out a soft little laugh. The sound of it filled him with a terror that ate through his whole body, until even breathing properly was difficult.
"H-Han Baek-woo— th-that bastard wasn't killed by a Hero's hand! Wh-when the Hero arrived, they say he was already dead!"
Even so, he clung on and kept talking, desperate to live.
"Oh? Not a Hero, you say… Then by whose hand did he die?"
"Th-that's… I can't say exactly, but he was dead with his whole body hacked to pieces! I-I believe he ran into a Villain who works alone!"
"Cruel, was it?"
"H-his limbs and his neck were severed completely, and it looked as if every organ had been cut shallow, thousands of times over! Th-the Field Cleanup Unit said they'd never seen anything like it!"
He was a Villain planted inside the Field Cleanup Unit, the team that supported the unofficial Heroes of the Special Forces, and so he knew the state of the scene better than anyone. Having said his piece, he stayed where he was, pressed flat to the floor. After that, nothing further followed.
Fear or not, curiosity made him lift his head, just barely.
"……!"
And he dropped it again at once.
Eyes alight, glittering like a child who had found a new amusement, and a smile drawn thin across her mouth. The smile was beautiful. He had seen her more than a few times, though, and he knew. That smile was no beautiful woman's smile. It was the smile of a hunter who had recognized her prey.
"You may go."
"Y-yes! Understood!"
A dismissal, handed down to a man who had been prostrate for a long while. At those words he fled the room without once looking back.
The man was gone, and the silver-haired woman was left alone.
So. The one who stole my prey… She had lived a long, idle stretch of years. A handful of conditions, promised to her when she entered the Villain Alliance. Fresh blood, one of those promises, was still nothing to complain about. The most important of them, though—interest—had been slipping away.
"How fortunate. I was just growing bored."
And then, for her, something appeared that drew that interest back. Losing her prey stirred nothing like anger in her. A Villain, by nature, could die at anyone's hand. The manner of the disposal, however, she found rather interesting. Limbs hacked apart, organs carved out, a killing done as if it were torture. She had seen that cruelty before.
A soft, sharp breath of a laugh. She bared needle-like fangs and smiled, faintly.
