You're Not the Ones Who Should Face Me
After Eun Seol left, I spent the time thinking through the plans ahead.
The easiest route would have been to take the memory of Eve's past that we had just seen and blast it out over every television using her signal-hijacking ability, but…
"I refuse. Absolutely not."
"If you just put up with it once, it'll all be over. Can't you manage that?"
"I refuse completely. I never want to see that memory with my own eyes again. No matter what Master says, I will not obey on this one point."
Eve stubbornly insisted that the moment I started replaying the memory she would shut her own consciousness off, and if she closed herself down the signal hijack would cut out with her. In short, without her cooperation there was no way to play the memory and remotely seize every broadcast at the same time.
Physically occupying a television station and forcing the feed through was theoretically possible, but even with my powers, seizing a station and getting a clean transmission out without a single casualty was still beyond me.
If I couldn't play the media game the way the government did, the next best option was simply to prove I was still very much alive and kicking.
Once the government issued an extermination order, the fact would naturally be made public; every citizen would then be obligated to report me the moment they spotted me. If, under those conditions, I still slipped through their fingers and kept delivering the same public punishments to the same rotten corporations, the government's face would be left in tatters.
And starting the very next day, the weight of that extermination order became impossible to ignore.
On every television program and internet broadcast, panelists and hosts willing to defend Kid G had suddenly become almost impossible to find. Among ordinary people the tide of condemnation swelled with fresh momentum. Whenever someone tried to raise the obvious counter-arguments—that Kid G had never actually killed anyone, that he only ever hit the corrupt CEOs and never harmed the employees—they were immediately buried under a storm of abuse and forced to shut up.
But the biggest, most personal change was something else entirely.
"Kid G! You've got some nerve sticking that face out here! I'll kill you right where you stand!"
Valkyrie no longer came after me.
I still sent out the usual advance notice, still left a clone waiting at maximum safe distance in case Dimension Walker showed up, and still cleaned out the private residence of whatever corporate scumbag had been making the news. The only real difference was that the security level on the other side had skyrocketed. The moment I arrived on site, all the fun drained out of me.
The only one allowed to come stop me is my cute, adorable Valkyrie. Not you lot.
Since Eve and I had formed a proper two-person team, I tapped the earpiece mic and called her.
"Eve, did you scan the internal security?"
—Of course I did. I am, after all, a super-competent and extremely powerful superhuman.
"Location?"
—Basement level three, vault room. Behind the curtain on the left wall, three bricks up from the exact center. Press that brick and a door to another chamber opens. From there the path spirals even deeper underground, so if you try to force it open with your power alone you'll probably wander around inside the earth for a long time. Inside the secret room there are three high-powered booby traps that activate by laser detection of solid objects.
"…Give me the exact coordinates again once I get there."
—You can't even remember that much? Useless Master. If your strength is weak, at least your memory should be good.
"That tongue of yours, I swear… Anyway, don't do anything stupid. Stay on standby and fly in the second I give the signal. Keep jamming the Union headquarters operators the whole time."
—I was already doing that.
I cut the line and prepared to deal with the A-class hero charging straight at me—Iron Fist.
"Kid G! Your evil ends here! Die!"
"Sorry, but you're not Valkyrie, and someone of your level isn't going to catch me. Oh—watch your step."
"Wha—ugh?!"
I had already turned every surface in the area into doors beforehand, so when Iron Fist charged he stepped on a stretch of floor that had become a doorway and one leg plunged straight through.
"You think this is enough to stop me?!"
A veteran A-class, though. He slammed his famous fists into the ground, cratering the floor and destroying the "door" so he could yank his foot free and keep coming.
Unfortunately for him, the doors I had prepared were neither few nor all of one kind.
"You didn't think that was the end of it, did you?"
Whirrrrr—!
On his next step the ground itself spun like a revolving door and dragged his entire body down into the earth.
"Damn it, what now—"
"There are many kinds of doors. That one was a revolving door."
"This is ridiculous… ngh…!"
As the revolving door swallowed him, more revolving doors formed in a chain beneath him, sending him deeper and farther away under the ground. Trapped underground, Iron Fist roared and tried to force his way back out through whatever "door" was now above him. The earth that should have opened refused to budge.
"Wh-what is this?! Even my strength can't open it—"
"No matter how hard you push forward, you can't open a sliding door that way. Do you even know exactly where the sliding door is from inside there? Not that it'll matter—by the time you figure it out and crawl out, I'll already be gone."
With Iron Fist temporarily buried, I opened a path through the ground and dropped straight to basement level three of the mansion. I tossed a few sacrificial objects ahead of me to trigger the booby traps safely, then cracked the secret room and cleaned out every gold bar sitting in the vault.
"Wow, these trash bags really stockpiled a lot of gold. False advertising, franchise bullying, cooking with food waste—they sure saved diligently. Eve? Has Iron Fist come out yet?"
—Not yet. He must be as weak as Master and simply lacks the strength to escape.
"I doubt that's it… We're about to leave, so get ready. And can you carry the gold I grabbed? This stuff is heavy."
—You can't even handle the weight of the things you stole yourself? I've heard that a monkey will keep gripping a banana inside a hole even when it can't pull its hand free. Master is exactly like that monkey.
"Haa… Call me a monkey or whatever you want, just save the tongue-lashing until after we get out of here, okay?"
—Understood. This super-competent and extremely powerful superhuman will once again come to Master's aid.
I had deliberately limited most of Eve's raw power so she wouldn't be a walking disaster in daily life, but the abilities she still had free access to were proving incredibly useful for "work." Even if I had to take her poisonous tongue every single day, I was still coming out ahead.
I exited basement three the same way I came in. A moment later Eve swooped down, scooped both me and the sack of gold into her arms, and shot into the sky. Right on cue, a furious Iron Fist finally located the sliding door and burst out of the ground—only to watch us leisurely cross the sky and vanish.
On paper Kid G was still only B-class, yet in pure name recognition and notoriety he no longer lagged behind most S-class villains.
Eun Seol flipped through the newspaper articles with a look of quiet resignation, heaved a long sigh, then slid the paper back into the rack in the hallway and turned away.
Ever since the government issued the extermination order on Kid G, Valkyrie no longer had any reason to face him. As a B-class hero she simply wasn't high enough on the roster for the kill operations anymore. That didn't mean she was idle; she still went out every day against B-class and lower villains, and she still crushed them in a single punch. In pure results she was actually performing better than when she used to brawl with Kid G. Yet inside she felt nothing but emptiness.
Even though she was barred from the scenes where Kid G appeared, she still downloaded every after-action report that came into the Union. Reading them, she finally realized just how thoroughly he had been toying with her all along. When he fought her he had simply opened walls, grabbed what he needed, and fled. The moment A-class heroes joined the hunts, Kid G began turning terrain and walls into automatic doors, revolving doors, sliding doors, hinged doors—mixing them endlessly, humiliating the heroes, and vanishing. Even the so-called elite A-classes couldn't handle his cunning; one of them had nearly been lost forever after being sucked into a multi-layered revolving-door ground.
Whenever things looked even slightly dangerous, Kid G simply rode Eve's firepower support and went wild. The corporations he hit were now suffering far greater losses than before the extermination order was ever issued. The CEOs who had been cleaned out started screaming, and public voices began asking what the government intended to do about Kid G. To Valkyrie, however, all of it might as well have been happening in another world.
Anger at her own powerlessness and fresh anger at the realization that Kid G had been playing with her left Eun Seol sunk in a heavy, gloomy mood.
He didn't come again today…
She glanced at the empty seat that belonged to the frequently absent Kid G—Lee Yechan—and felt the space beside her was especially hollow. He used to plant himself next to her the second their eyes met, spouting nonsense as if it were the most natural thing in the world. After the extermination order they no longer crossed paths as hero and villain, and his occasional school absences only made seeing him harder.
"Haa…"
Just as the inexplicable melancholy kept drawing more sighs from her—
"Hey, Seol!"
A voice far too bright and cheerful for her current mood called her name. She turned and saw a girl dressed in an expensive, high-class one-piece and dripping with luxurious accessories, her layered perm of rich brown hair bouncing as she walked. It was Kim Sejin—self-proclaimed partner of darkness, friend and rival of Eun Seol.
"What."
"You've got nothing to do these days, right?"
"Did you come just to mock me?"
"No. You used to drop everything and rush off the second Kid G-nim sent a notice. Now with the extermination order you can't go anymore. And B-class and lower villains? You flatten them in under five minutes, so the work's over instantly."
She was even attaching the honorific "nim" to Kid G's name.
"What are you trying to say?"
"You want to catch Kid G-nim, don't you?"
"That's obvious. Why even ask?"
Kim Sejin answered flatly, then her eyes suddenly sparkled. She grabbed both of Eun Seol's hands and shouted like a hot-blooded heroine.
"Then listen! Let's go meet—no, catch—Kid G-nim ourselves!"
"…What?"
"Let's go after Kid G-nim on our own! Separate from any official Union operation!"
"You want us to crash the scene?"
"Exactly! I have something I absolutely have to say to Kid G-nim, so I'm going no matter what!"
"You'll get grounded at home again."
"Hmph, I don't care. Sitting around stewing in silence without saying a word to Kid G-nim is worse. Actually, I already got hold of one of Kid G-nim's advance notices in advance."
Kim Sejin pulled a black card from her pocket, pinched it between her index and middle fingers, and flashed a triumphant smile.
"It even has the date, so I'll be waiting there that day. What about you? You used to sing every day about wanting to catch Kid G-nim, but ever since the extermination order you can't even deploy, can you?"
"I…"
Today Kim Sejin's reckless drive looked almost admirable. Was it really better to just sit here sucking her thumb while waiting for someone else to kill Kid G? After visiting his house and seeing Eve's memories, this endless powerlessness, depression, and gloom—if she just let time drag on without fixing it, would anything improve? What exactly was she doing with herself?
After a long moment of struggle, Eun Seol made her decision.
"…Fine. Let's go."
She, who had never once complained about a Union decision or even thought of refusing an order, chose for the first time in her life to do something impulsive. Kim Sejin looked genuinely surprised, then grinned and slung an arm around Eun Seol's shoulders.
"Hehehe, that makes you my accomplice. Now I'll show you the notice I secretly paid a fortune to get. The location and time are—"
"But that looks fake."
"…Huh?"
"Kid G only ever uses white cards. And he always prints the letters. That one's handwritten. Anyone can tell it's a fake. You said you paid a fortune? You got scammed."
"Ah."
Only then did Kim Sejin realize she had been conned; her face turned bright red.