Haha, What a Mess
Haha, what a mess.
I had stashed one spare clone far away and was about to crash the party from both sides when Cybers, his flashy gaming LED suit blazing, charged onto the scene ahead of me. I stopped short and watched from a distance.
The moment an A-class villain showed up, Valkyrie was guaranteed to come running.
Sure enough, the two of them locked eyes and went at it instantly. Surprisingly, Cybers was actually dominating her in close quarters—her specialty—and driving her back hard.
Considering Valkyrie’s monstrous physical power, especially her raw strength, she shouldn’t have been losing ground to an A-class villain at all. Yet Cybers was dodging her attacks with ridiculous ease.
She still didn’t know what his ability was. Even if she did, a celebrity hero like Valkyrie would have a nightmare of a time dealing with a guy like him.
I watched their scrap for a moment longer while sending one clone on a wide arc around the opposite side, prepping for my own entrance.
Damn it, hurry up already… I’m dying here.
The second I had three clones out, I was burning three times the energy of a normal person in every way, and the fatigue hit me fast. Just maintaining them cost triple; one of them was even sprinting full tilt right now…
The moment the clone reached the far side, I pulled the pistol from my pocket and fired at Cybers.
Bang—!
“Guhhek!!!”
The shot wrecked his rhythm for a split second, and Valkyrie didn’t miss it. She smashed him straight into the dirt.
“Guess that fancy internet data of yours didn’t have a chapter on dodging bullets? Then again, data you can’t act on is worthless anyway. Right?”
“Kid G!”
Valkyrie shouted the second she spotted me.
“Yes, I’m Kid G. It’s been ‘so long,’ hasn’t it?”
We’d literally been on the same campus earlier today.
She flared up at the mockery and charged straight at me.
“You bastard, this time I’m not letting you walk away!”
“Wooooooah! Kid G, you finally show yourself! All the fame and glory you stole from me—”
Cybers, who’d been planted in the ground, rocketed back up the instant he heard I was here—
Thwack—!
“Guhhk!!!”
The rock fragments that had sprayed everywhere when he hit the dirt suddenly reshaped into thick pillars and slammed into him mid-rise. He shot upward only to plummet again like a sparrow hit by a slingshot.
That wasn’t my power, and it wasn’t Valkyrie’s either.
“Th-this is…!”
Valkyrie recognized the ability at once and whipped her head toward the distant perimeter. Exactly as she feared, someone was charging straight through the police line.
Wavy brown hair streaming behind her, dressed in a high-end gown that looked wildly impractical for a fight…
It was Kim Sejin, self-proclaimed Friend of the Darkness—Black Friend herself.
“Kid G-nim! Kid G-nim! Over here, over here! Look at me! I just helped you!”
Valkyrie nearly had a stroke at the sight of her.
“That—that idiot, what the hell is she doing here…!”
“Hahah! What a circus. Fangirls are terrifying, don’t you think?”
Already stuck fighting Cybers and me at the same time, Valkyrie staggered for a second as if her brain were about to explode when this extra deadweight waltzed into the crime scene on her own. She recovered fast and lunged at me again.
“Shut up! I’ll just knock you out first and solve everything!”
Rumble—!
The moment she closed in, more of the scattered stones around us snapped into square pillars and shot up toward her. She pulverized them with a single punch and roared at Kim Sejin.
“Hey, are you insane?! Who the hell are you aiming at!”
“Don’t you dare touch Kid G-nim! He’s my partner for our two-person act!”
Nice troll, Kim Sejin.
“This isn’t a game! This is the real thing, so don’t cross the line!”
“Yeah, don’t cross the line! How dare two of you get in my way!? Judging Kid G is my job! I’m going to kill him with my own hands right here! And anyone who interferes!”
Cybers rocketed skyward again. I gave him a casual little wave.
“Always happy to meet another fan, but I don’t have a signing session scheduled. Crowd’s getting a bit thick, so I think I’ll be on my way.”
“Kid G, where do you think you’re running! Do you know how long I’ve waited for—”
Pop—
I waved goodbye from where I stood and teleported straight to the clone I’d sent the opposite direction.
Valkyrie! Opposite side! Southwest, unidentified individual… it’s Kid G! He’s right in front of the mansion now… Th-the front of the mansion?! When did he get there!? How did he slip past without—?!
Han Juyeon’s frantic operating made Valkyrie’s insides burn.
“Damn it, did he go underground? There’s no way he knew the radar was laid out…! Unni, any way to pin Cybers down?!”
You can’t handle him alone! I already called the mansion security HQ and requested support that way! Wait—isn’t that Sejin? What the hell is she doing over there?!
“Aaaagh, that lunatic is driving me crazy! Unni, if I just leave right now Cybers might kill Sejin! I’ll hold him—get the backup here as fast as possible! Otherwise Kid G will…!”
I’m already running! 1.5 km left!
Even after Kid G teleported out, the battlefield around Valkyrie stayed pure chaos with Cybers and Kim Sejin tangled in the middle. Having a random troll dive in made her head throb, but Kim Sejin was the only person she could even half-call a friend, and she didn’t want a familiar face dead. So she left Kid G for now and fought Cybers alongside her.
They still bickered the entire time, of course.
“You idiot! Why the hell are you jumping into this when you’re not even registered with the Hero Union!”
“Hmph, none of your business! Someone like you who only sees Kid G-nim as pure evil to be purged could never understand!”
“Even without me, nobody would understand the crap you’re pulling right now!”
“What are you two yapping about! If you’re gonna fight, fight each other! I’m going after Kid G!”
“Catching Kid G is my job! You just sit there and get arrested quietly!”
“Nobody’s catching Kid G-nim!”
Total free-for-all.
In the middle of the brawl, Kim Sejin was somehow holding her own against Cybers. Valkyrie was more than a little shaken by that.
Her… since when could she fight like this?
Even granting that Cybers had zero useful data on her online, Kim Sejin was performing way above any reasonable expectation. As someone who actually knew her usual skill level, Valkyrie couldn’t make sense of it.
Was it pure fangirl power for Kid G, or had her strength skyrocketed without anyone noticing…
“There he is! Fire!”
“The flashy-colored one! Don’t miss!”
Tatatatang—!
While they were still trading blows with Cybers, dozens of Kim Kwanmo’s mansion security guards charged in and opened fire on him. Cybers didn’t have the speed to dodge that many bullets; he took the full barrage head-on, and the lights on his gaming LED suit strobed even faster.
“Tch, at this rate the suit’s gonna overload…! No choice!”
He rocketed up beyond bullet range and streaked toward the far side of the mansion where Kid G had gone.
“Where do you think you’re going!”
Valkyrie unfurled her angel wings and prepared to take off, only for stone pillars to shoot up and block her path.
“Where do you think you’re going? You’re chasing Kid G-nim! I won’t let you!”
“You moron, pick your fights!!”
“Huh? U-uwaaah!”
Valkyrie nearly lost it, slamming her fist into the ground around Kim Sejin. The massive shockwave knocked the girl off balance; she staggered and landed hard on her butt. In that opening Valkyrie shot after Cybers.
I teleported to the clone that had dug underground, then resummoned it and sent it into the mansion first.
The instant it stepped inside—
KABOOM—!
A bomb trap detonated and the clone vanished on the spot.
“Guhhk…!”
The catastrophic damage slammed into me as the original. My whole body felt like it was being shredded; I barely scraped enough strength together to spawn another clone.
“Hah… so they won’t fall for the same trick twice. Good thing I sent the clone in first.”
If they’d prepared something like this, it meant the Union had already finished analyzing my ability. Things were only going to get uglier from here.
Still, after all the hassle I was finally inside. Time to do what I came for…
How long is he going to take?
I didn’t steal a single thing. I just waited for Cybers.
There was nothing worth taking in this place anyway. Kim Kwanmo had watched countless other company presidents get cleaned out; the second he received my warning letter he’d cleared every valuable out of the mansion. I hadn’t planned on stealing anything in the first place.
I’d put people in the ground. A few trinkets weren’t going to balance that scale.
When Cybers still showed no sign of appearing, I sent the clone back outside under the pretense of standing watch—making sure he spotted it. Sure enough, less than a minute later he locked onto me from the air and crowed with confidence.
“Kid G! There you are! Finally found you!”
He dove straight down at me.
“Thought you could hide in a room and I wouldn’t find you! Ready to die? Today you die right here, and every scrap of that popularity and attention becomes mi—”
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM—!
Cybers smashed through the mansion roof. Every bomb planted throughout the building chain-detonated with him as the trigger; by the time he reached my first-floor room he’d eaten every single one of them.
“Pffhahahaha—”
He’d carved a straight collapse from the fifth-floor roof all the way down to the first-floor room. He staggered upright, suit in tatters, blood streaming down his forehead, yet never took his eyes off me.
“Hah… hah… scared of this destructive power of mine, Kid G? You’re definitely scared!”
“Uh… looking at the state of you, yeah, it’s a little scary.”
“A few minor injuries won’t stop me from finishing you! Now die by my ha—”
“Not happening. I still have unfinished business here. I’ll just head up to the fifth floor. Bye.”
I said it and vanished into the ground I’d opened beneath me.
The Union might have figured out my power, but the public still had no idea. Cybers swallowed the obvious bait whole.
“Running away?! Just because you said fifth floor doesn’t mean I can’t— Guhhk!!!”
He charged diagonally toward the center of the fifth floor and set off another wave of traps, getting blasted again. His stupidity at least came with impressive durability; he kept triggering every bomb in the place without going down, and Kim Kwanmo’s mansion began collapsing in earnest.
They’d prepared for the explosions, sure—that was why they green-lit the operation—but they clearly hadn’t planned on Cybers rampaging through the interior.
Then Valkyrie arrived and piled on. The free-for-all that had started on the lawn moved straight into the mansion itself.
“Th-the mansion… did every bomb in here just go off?”
“Yes, thanks to that brain-dead boar flying in on his own.”
“Kid G, you bastard…! Why are you doing this?! Stealing stuff and running was always your style!”
“Usually, yeah. But the SCP Group is a special kind of evil. How many times have they let people die and buried the cases? A few stolen trinkets were never going to cut it. Guys like Representative Kim Kwanmo, who fear payouts more than the lives of their own employees…”
I spread my arms wide against the backdrop of the crumbling mansion and grinned.
“They deserve to lose the only house they have, everything inside it… every last thing they own.”
“If you bring this place down, the things you came to steal get buried with it!”
“I never said a single word about stealing anything in the warning letter. I only said they would be punished.”
“…!”
While we talked, Cybers dragged himself upright again, even more shredded than before.
“Hah… hah… you son of a bitch… you thought these little traps would be enough to stop me! Kid G!”
“Gotta admit, the durability’s impressive.”
His body might have been steel, but the suit was hitting its limit—crackling and throwing sparks. He couldn’t keep fighting. He ground his teeth and glared at me.
“Damn it, the suit… this is getting dangerous. Regrettable, but I’ll be withdrawing for today, Kid G!”
The guy who had accidentally done half my work for me prepared to bail.
“That bastard…!”
Valkyrie wanted nothing more than to grab him, but she knew if she did I’d vanish again. She just kept glancing back and forth between the two of us on opposite sides, paralyzed.
I gave her a hand.
“Let’s make a deal, Valkyrie.”
“I don’t negotiate with villa—”
“Or you can lose both of us and look like a complete clown. Choose: lose both, or at least make sure you catch Cybers. Of course if you come for me first I’ll just run, so you don’t really have a choice.”
“Urgh…”
“From this moment I’ll pin Cybers down completely. You fly over, subdue him, and hand him to the Union. Meanwhile I disappear. Fair trade, right?”
“How the hell are you going to hold an A-class vill—”
“He’s A-class, but his actual combat power is nothing special. You saw it yourself—he couldn’t even properly handle Sejin earlier. You fought him; you know. His attack power’s garbage and his fighting skill is even worse.”
What made Cybers dangerous was his ability to read every scrap of data on the entire internet and feed it into his actions and thinking. His personal fighting ability was pretty pathetic. That was why, even after he’d landed multiple hits while Valkyrie couldn’t read him, she’d taken almost no real damage—and Kim Sejin was completely unscathed too. Without the ability and the suit propping him up, Cybers really couldn’t finish off even one Kim Sejin.
“I’m about to say something that will freeze him solid. After that, it’s up to you.”
“?”
I took a deep breath.
Cybers was basically the living incarnation of the entire internet. Everything floating around online became his actions and thoughts—which meant he was basically a community ghost. A strong one.
And community ghosts had a matching countermeasure. All that piled-up internet data was a strength… until it became a weakness.
I filled my lungs and bellowed at the Cybers streaking into the sky:
“RUNNING AWAY, CYBERS?! FILTHY!!! PATHETIC!!!”
Valkyrie stared at me like I’d lost my mind.
That’s his big move? Cheap trash talk? There’s no way anyone on earth would fall for—
But while she was looking at me with pure contempt, Cybers actually stopped dead in midair.
His suit creaked unnaturally, as if his mind was trying to leave the scene while his body refused to move. He slowly, jerkily turned his head back toward us like a lagging video.
The gaming LEDs on his frozen suit flashed wildly.
“You… you bastard… you… you just said… upvote…”
Thwack—!!!