A-Class Hero Valkyrie (3)
Some time had passed since the massive exposé known as the Kid G Scandal.
More than ten days had gone by since that dawn when the whole world seemed ready to catch fire and turn itself inside out. And yet, astonishingly, nothing much seemed to have changed.
Well—not nothing, exactly.
For one, an entertainer who had been present at the Freezing Moon Club incident was finally facing delayed arrest and investigation. In the process, every filthy sexual crime he and his circle had committed floated up into the light of day.
They had roofied women, assaulted them, filmed it all on hidden cameras, and then passed the footage around their group chat for kicks. Once those disgusting truths came out, the full weight of public condemnation slammed onto that celebrity alone.
Naturally, the Freezing Moon Club’s own operator had also been a member of that chat. But the man was already serving a mere one-year sentence, and because the sexual crimes had been factored into that original trial, double jeopardy prevented any extra time from being piled on. People should have risen up in fury. Instead they fixated entirely on the celebrity who had shared the hidden-camera clips, tossing a few half-hearted curses at the club operator already sitting in a cell and then moving on.
And then there was the police chief whose phone I had stolen.
Ever since that night, baseless rumors had swirled that he had been suspended or outright dismissed…
I had considered the possibility, but actually seeing that he had “committed suicide” still dragged a dry laugh out of me.
The news cited the lack of foul-play evidence and a will typed on his laptop as reasons to call it suicide. Or maybe the order to report it that way had simply come down from above.
Whether it was genuine suicide or murder was something even a cursory investigation could have settled, but of course they would never let the public see any of that.
An inconvenient man had died at an inconvenient time under inconvenient circumstances, so the internet muttered “he was suicided” and left it there. No one seriously questioned the government over the chief’s death. Public attention had already locked exclusively onto the celebrity and hangers-on entangled in the Freezing Moon Club sex crimes. The moment anyone tried to talk about the filthy connections among the upper echelons of society, people called it exhausting or brain-rot and the conversation cooled off just that fast.
I had never expected a single incident to spark a real popular uprising. People were pot-lids by nature—quick to boil, quicker to go cold. Most of them had never been directly harmed, so their default stance was “not my problem.”
“If once isn’t enough, you just keep going until it is.”
Even if the citizens stayed huddled like a flock of terrified sheep right up to the very end… the moment I touched KU Bio, Yuseong Pharmaceuticals, or Korea Union Severance, the government would no longer be able to smother it even if they wanted to. That would stop being a domestic matter.
For now those places were still near-certain death traps, so I couldn’t hit them yet.
“Hoo… hahh…”
I was grinding myself into shape so that when the day came I could hit them and still walk out alive.
At home I had summoned two completely unnecessary clones and was making all three of us sweat buckets while lifting absurdly heavy dumbbells. Just working out alone drained me dry; absorbing the energy cost and fatigue of three bodies left me a limp rag in under an hour.
“Hah… heh… heh…”
“Master, you smell of sweat. Please go wash.”
“Heh… that damn tongue of yours. Of course I sweat when I exercise. Just hold on. I’ll wash soon.”
Physical training alone would never let me go toe-to-toe with someone like Valkyrie who possessed body-enhancement powers, but it still beat doing nothing.
“Master, will any of this actually change anything? Even if your arms get stronger, an ability user will still drop you in one hit. Are there heroes or villains who don’t have abilities?”
“There aren’t. But keeping clones out and stable requires stamina that can endure extreme conditions. Being prepared never hurts.”
“Incomprehensible. You already possess an ability. Why waste effort on unnecessary physical training? Does physical training somehow strengthen abilities as well?”
“No, the two are separate… You still don’t know that? Hasn’t your data learning covered it? Ah—right. No one currently knows the exact conditions.”
Eve tilted her head, clearly not following.
“Does that mean Master knows?”
“Yeah. An ability is, at its core, a goal and a craving.”
“A goal? A craving?”
“Exactly. Nobody can predict what power a person will awaken, but once they have it, what makes that power grow isn’t physical training—it’s the strength of their goal and their craving. Those goals and cravings aren’t always pure, so people who push them in a good direction get called heroes, and those who push them in a bad direction get called villains. Not always, but often enough.”
Valkyrie’s goal and craving had been to build a world where people could live safely. That purpose had been so firm, her passion so fierce, that in the original story she only grew stronger with time. But as her rank rose and she glimpsed the government’s ugliness, doubt crept in and her power began to wane. Then she learned the truth behind her younger sister Eunhwa’s death, and her goal twisted into something else entirely: destroy everything connected to the government and leave not a single related person alive. She fell and became Dark Valkyrie—but that new craving was so pathologically intense that her power skyrocketed, letting her rampage until the moment she died.
That rule had no exceptions. The clearer and stronger the desire, the greater the power an ability user could unleash and the wider the limits of what they could do with it. Dimension Walker was the perfect example—after nearly starving to death on the streets as a child, he awakened and made his sole purpose “a life where I can do whatever I want,” and he obtained power enough to make that life real.
“Master, I want to kill every government human and every scientist who ordered these experiments on me. If I crave that hard enough, will my power grow?”
“Uh… no idea. You’re not a normal case, so it probably doesn’t apply.”
In the original, there had never been any description of artificial heroes growing stronger through wishes or desires. Abilities obtained through forced experiments rather than natural awakening simply carried that limitation.
Eve pouted at my answer.
“You don’t know that either? Tch… so much for that. Useless Master. If you can’t help in a fight, you should at least be useful as a knowledge base.”
“You little—! That’s why I just explained the part you didn’t know! Once I refine my ability and invent new applications, I’m going to fix that attitude of yours one of these days.”
“Hmph. Master is far too weak to be scary. And I am already perfect, so my attitude needs no fixing.”
Eve stuck out her tongue, scampered to the fridge, pulled out a tub of 31 ice cream, and started shoveling it down again.
Ever since I brought that girl home, food and snack expenses had exploded. A creature that supposedly didn’t even need to eat or drink was taking revenge for her life as a test subject by developing an appetite that was emptying my wallet.
Lately I hadn’t been able to pocket anything for myself; every job had been pure propaganda or exposé work. Life was getting tight.
Come to think of it, Bukso Dairy’s been making a lot of noise lately…
Long before the Kid G Scandal they had already been infamous for abusing employees and franchisees, price-fixing, refusing refunds on defective products, false advertising—and above all, a family-run empire where the first and second generations embezzled and evaded taxes while the third generation did drugs. A company rotten to its roots, just like the SCP Group I had hit before.
Conveniently, their chairman had also been one of the proud trash featured in the Kid G Scandal. As a target, they were perfect.
This would be my first move after the big exposé, and I was essentially declaring open war on the government… so maybe it was time to hit them hard.
“Master, your expression is extremely sinister.”
The next day, a crime notice from Kid G arrived at Bukso Dairy headquarters.
Those arrogant parasites who colluded with power, fleeced consumers, and treated people like spare parts will be erased from this world forever.
The notice’s unusually harsh tone sent Bukso Dairy into hysterics; they screamed that Kid G was about to commit murder. In the end the Hero Union, under government orders, mobilized an unprecedented force of A-class heroes with orders to exterminate Kid G.
“Hey, I’m going too! That bastard Kid G gets worse by the day. Someone’s got to teach him that if you climb too high without knowing your place, your wings melt and you fall.”
“Dimension Walker. With Nightingale gone, you are the only one who can track Oblivion. Leave the extermination order for Kid G to the others and do the job only you can do.”
“Come on, Union Leader. There’s another S-class besides me. Why am I the only one stuck with this?”
“You want me to give orders to Dreamweaver when we can’t even find him? The second we locate him I’ll dump every single task on his head, so please just find the man. And if you do run into him, tell him to drop by our side for once.”
“Haa… damn it, fine, fine. But I’m not spending my whole life chasing someone else’s tail. I won’t feel better until I’ve paid that Kid G bastard back properly.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Dimension Walker left headquarters still grumbling. Kim Seyeol, Leader of the Hero Union, gathered the heroes assigned to the extermination order, briefed them with the operators on every foreseeable scenario, and built contingency plans for each one.
When the long meeting finally ended, he looked at the person who would command the operation.
“Kid G’s outrages grow worse by the day. This time… haah… the government has issued special instructions that we are to treat the matter with the utmost care. Everyone, give it your all. And you—although this is your first operation as an A-class, you have more experience facing Kid G than anyone else. I want you to take full command of this operation, Valkyrie.”
Standing at the very front of the hero formation, Valkyrie answered in a half-dead voice.
“…Yes, Leader.”