Capable, But Slightly Unhinged
Capable, but slightly unhinged.
What exactly were artificial heroes?
They were artificial ability users born under the government's secret experiments — children with no family, no one who would ever come looking if they died, hauled in and remade from the ground up.
Under those experiments, ordinary people were turned into ability users by transplanting cells from existing ones. Countless orphans with no ties to anyone detonated inside the labs and died without even leaving a corpse behind. The finished products — the artificial heroes — were reborn as living weapons, their personalities scrubbed clean so they would obey only government orders.
That was what artificial heroes were.
A normal ability user could never hold more than two powers. Artificial heroes, though, could wield far more than that in a single body. The quality of each power and their ability to apply them lagged behind genuine ability users, but the advantage of one individual projecting multiple abilities at once was impossible to ignore. True to the government's boasts, within a few years artificial heroes had become the government's main force, and a fair number of them had even filtered into the Union.
In the original story, it had been Valkyrie who took charge of their education — teaching them how a hero was supposed to act and what a hero was supposed to believe — and raised them into the field. When she turned into a mass murderer who slaughtered anyone connected to the government without regard for age or gender, the ones who opposed her and finally killed her were those same artificial heroes.
And among every artificial hero ever made, she was the first.
I had succeeded in snatching JD Eve — the prototype, the very first successful product of Project JD — right out of a government public exhibition.
She was a rootless orphan put through inhumane experiments and remade from nothing, so I had felt a little guilt about using her…
But once I actually brought her home, her personality turned out to be nothing like the artificial heroes I knew, and I was stuck dealing with a headache I had never seen coming.
"Master, do you intend to lie in bed all day?"
"You cannot fight. You cannot run. You have to be carried around on my back — and you cannot even feed yourself. Exactly what can Master do?"
"Master is useless. You are the second most useless existence in the world, right after those scientists who used to experiment on me."
"H-hey, enough…"
Whether they had messed something up during the human experiments or this had simply been Eve's original personality, she was pure venom.
In the original story, Eve's past had only been sketched in the briefest flash — she had never actually woken up in the main plot — so I had no idea what her personality would be like…
"Hey, Eve. Even so, I was the one who woke you up and gave you a chance to get out of there. Treating me like dead weight is a little much, don't you think? If I hadn't pulled you out, you'd still be asleep."
"Which is precisely why I still call even a completely useless Master 'Master,' and do as I am told."
As if the venomous tongue were not enough, she never lost a single argument. She always had to win, point by point.
Does this girl even actually have a control code…?
No — from the way she had behaved at the exhibition, she was not completely ignoring commands… but maybe the effect did not last very long?
Knowing that, back when she was still a test subject, Eve had slaughtered every scientist in an entire building wing, blown up the lab itself, and been sealed in a stasis field for it, every little thing she did now sent a chill down my spine.
In the end, I let the unease show.
"Hey, Eve. You're not thinking about killing me, are you?"
I told myself she would never go that far — but the thought of her turning on me the way she had turned on those scientists made the anxiety spike hard.
Eve looked me up and down with an expression that said she could not believe anyone would ask something that stupid.
"Why would I?"
"Hm?"
"Why would I kill Master? Of course Master is weak, useless, and a pathetic human who cannot even run away alone — but that does not give me any motive to commit the act of murder against you."
Ah. So the reason Eve had killed the scientists was simply that the stress of endless human experimentation had finally snapped — not that she held indiscriminate hostility toward people in general.
Which meant that as long as I did not personally pile stress onto her, she might be rude as hell, but I could still treat her as a combat asset.
I let out a breath of relief and held out my hand, offering a partnership.
"Alright. Then I promise I won't put any stress on you either. In return, since I set you free, you help me out with what I'm doing — at least a little. That's fair, right?"
"Detection of a despicable attempt to exploit my previous position of powerlessness and captivity into an unfair bargain. However, for a period equal to the time I was imprisoned, complying with said unfair bargain is, in theory, a reasonable price for freedom. Conclusion reached."
"So… what's the answer?"
"Understood. If you require my power, speak at any time. If I feel like it, I will lend it to you."
"…Isn't it supposed to be 'I will lend you my power anytime' in situations like this?"
"If I feel like it."
"Haa… Fine. Anyway, from now on we're partners in the same boat."
"There is no boat here. And we are not boarding a boat — we are staying inside a residential building. Is Master an idiot, by any chance?"
This was starting to sound uncomfortably like the exact pattern I used when I messed with Valkyrie… Getting it turned back on me made me genuinely want to hit someone. I was going to have to reflect on my life choices.
I let out an awkward laugh — and a sharp, burning pain flared through the stab wound Dimension Walker had left in my abdomen. I clutched the bandages wrapped tightly around my stomach and collapsed back onto the bed.
"Ugh… my gut… Hey, Eve. What's your real name, anyway?"
"I do not remember. I have no name, so call me whatever is convenient."
"Got it. Then I'll just keep calling you Eve from now on. Eve, the painkillers on that shelf over there…"
"A distance like that, handle it yourself, you incompetent and completely useless Master."
"……"
Valkyrie opened her eyes roughly a day after she had blacked out.
The moment she sat up in the hospital bed, every detail of what had happened at the exhibition came back with perfect clarity — and yet her body felt incredibly light and refreshed, as if she had simply enjoyed a deep, peaceful sleep.
She checked her arms. There was no torn wound, not even a light bruise. Looking at herself, she could almost have believed nothing had happened to her at all.
"I was in so much pain, though…?"
"Ah, Valkyrie. You're awake. You're not hurting anywhere, are you?"
The hospital room door opened, and a beautiful woman with her blonde hair coiled into a neat bun stepped inside wearing a bright, gentle smile.
Valkyrie recognized her at once. She shot up from the bed in pure shock and snapped to attention.
"N-Nightingale-nim!"
"Ah! Please lie back down at once! A patient must not jump up like that!"
Nightingale immediately pressed Valkyrie back down onto the bed and examined her condition as she spoke.
"I took every measure I could without putting any serious strain on your lifespan. I don't believe I missed anything, but if anything still hurts, please tell me now."
"You took measures… Nightingale-nim, were you the one who treated me?"
"Yes. When I heard our brave junior had been reduced to a wreck protecting the civilians, it broke my heart… I wasn't at the scene myself, so I at least wanted to help with the aftermath."
"N-N-Nightingale-nim treated me personally… I-I'm honored!"
Nightingale looked at Valkyrie with a fond expression and took her hand.
"I heard what happened. It was truly brave and noble. To throw your own body in the way and shield the civilians under those circumstances — rank aside, that was the kind of conduct every hero should take as an example. Thanks to you, not a single civilian died. Junior or not, I respect you."
When Nightingale dipped her head slightly, Valkyrie flailed her hands in a panic.
"N-no, not at all! I only did what I was supposed to do — and for Nightingale-nim to say she respects me, I'm not the kind of person who… and besides, I couldn't even see, so I didn't catch Kid G—"
Valkyrie cut herself off as the final moments of the exhibition flooded back. She sat bolt upright again in sudden alarm.
"K-Kid G! What happened to Kid G? I saw him escaping with the prototype Eve—"
"Please calm down. The government has issued a total annihilation order on Kid G and raised the alert to maximum level. There will be no more soft handling the way there was before. The moment anyone encounters him, the objective will be kill on sight — so the Kid G problem should be resolved soon enough."
"An annihilation order…? Kill… on sight?"
For a second Valkyrie was sure she had misheard. She doubted her own ears.
Of course Kid G was a villain, and she had sworn more than once that she would catch him and throw him in a cell — but killing him was a different matter entirely.
Killing a villain was only permitted when they had actually caused civilian casualties. In practice, most heroes aimed to capture rather than kill unless the villain had murdered civilians.
That was why, even when she had been startled after the Myeongdong terror incident when Skull Crusher had crushed the entire group of terrorists in a single blow, she had never really made an issue of the fact that he had killed them.
But had Kid G truly inflicted civilian casualties serious enough to deserve death?
As far as Valkyrie knew, Kid G might have stolen things, but he had never so much as lightly injured a civilian, let alone killed one. If anything, like during the Myeongdong terror, he had attacked the terrorists who were the ones actually killing and endangering people.
And if she set the villain Kid G aside and thought of him as the human Lee Yechan, he was strange, yes — but she had never once thought of him as truly evil.
"An annihilation order…? That kind of measure is only issued against pleasure-killer villains who commit serial murders or massive-scale terrorism. To put that on a petty thief like Kid G…"
"At the point he was already known as the backer of the Myeongdong terror, the justification itself is more than enough. On top of that, the moment he stole a prototype artificial hero — government military power — the government declared Kid G a force seeking to overthrow the state. They intend to make an example of him for the sake of maintaining the system. An annihilation order… may have been an inevitable outcome."
"I-I'm not trying to defend a villain, but isn't an annihilation order a completely different matter? I'll make him pay for what he's done with my own hands, I swear — but even so, that…"
"…Yes. Honestly, it doesn't make sense."
Nightingale chose not to mention that she had been forced to accept a partial compromise in order to stop the government from handing an even more absurd disciplinary action to the junior sitting in front of her.
If Valkyrie found out, she would only be sadder.
"But once an annihilation order has been issued, we have no choice but to follow it. Even if the Union refuses, the government's direct units will carry it out anyway — nothing would change, the two sides would only grow further apart, and the chaos would get worse. So from now on… if Kid G appears and I have the capacity, I may deploy as well. When that happens, I'll be counting on you as the senior with real field experience who has fought Kid G multiple times."
"M-m-me, a senior? How could you say something like that… No, wait, that isn't the issue — are we really just going to go along with this? With an annihilation order…"
Nightingale slowly nodded, her expression complicated and hard to read, and spoke quietly.
"I'm sorry."
Then she left the room.
For a long time after Nightingale was gone, Valkyrie stared blankly at the hospital room door. At last she pulled out her phone and sent a text to Kid G.