Chapter 176: 31st Floor: Ellie
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 176: 31st Floor: Ellie
*
A very familiar pink aura emanated from below.
Ellie, in the middle of transforming into Eclipse.
She realized Pink Spear had arrived.
'You... you were alive!'
Crack... CRACK!
KABOOOOOM!!!
The ground exploded, and she appeared, riding a black steed Ellie had never seen before.
To some, she might be a whore on a black horse, but in this moment, to Ellie, she was no different from a prince on a white horse.
Just when she was being pushed back by the heroes, she had appeared.
But the joy was fleeting; she suddenly remembered that she was now the villain, Eclipse.
That's right.
Pink Spear, the hero of justice who punishes evil no matter what.
The villain Eclipse... was her 'enemy'.
She didn't expect any mercy.
The punishment of villains—that was her reason for living.
'Ah... still... I'm glad you're safe.'
To die without her finding out she was Ellie.
That was her final duty.
*
Her childhood days.
A time now a little hazy in her memory.
During an argument between Ellie's parents, her mother suddenly awakened her powers.
It was an accident.
It wasn't a serious fight, just the kind of bickering you'd find in any home—complaining about side dishes and being told to just eat what was served.
But in that moment, her newly awakened powers went out of control.
Her father died, and her mother, dazed and staring at him, was dragged away by the police.
It was a simple accident, but villain crimes were unconditionally sent to District 1, to the Villain Tribunal, an organization under the Council.
Contrary to the hope that she would return soon, her mother never came back.
Worse, as rumors spread that Ellie's mom was a villain, she was bullied at school.
Children can be surprisingly pure evil.
False rumors that the villain's daughter must also be a villain spread, and people avoided Ellie. So-called hero wannabes even assaulted her, claiming they were defeating a villain.
"You filthy villain! I'll teach you a lesson! Kyahaha!!"
Thump, thump, thump!!
She was beaten unfairly in a back alley by bigger kids playing hero, but no one helped her.
That Ellie wasn't a villain? Honestly, most of them knew it by instinct. After all, would a real villain just let themselves be beaten so foolishly?
Even with a child's intelligence, they could tell it was wrong if they thought about it for a moment, but they didn't bother to think at all.
Why bother?
All they needed was a punching bag they could hit freely, a target for their frustrations, a toy, a public stress reliever to curse at.
There might have been some who weren't like that, but they were just bystanders who silently condoned the injustice of the group assault.
It was only natural.
In an elementary school where the law held no sway, who would dare defy the powerful clique? Besides, they had the perfect excuse that she was a villain, so they didn't have to feel guilty.
The teachers, of course, didn't pay much attention to the orphaned Ellie either. To them, she was just a nuisance.
But there are always exceptions in this world.
"What do you think you're doing...?"
A chilly voice rang out.
The self-proclaimed hero wannabes who were tormenting Ellie turned their heads to see a girl with black hair and red eyes.
'Who...?'
"Get lost. The future hero, Lord Volgamesh, is giving this villain a harsh lesson!"
"Don't tell me you're protecting a villain?"
"You're not a villain too, are you? No way~"
Usually, even adults would just walk away when they said this, but that girl didn't.
"This... is what you call a hero? No! You're not heroes!!!"
"Hah, and I was going to go easy on you because you're a girl."
"Think you can act tough just because you're pretty?"
Their voices grew louder until it finally erupted into a physical fight.
'Ah... because of me, someone else is...'
Of course, she thought there was no way one girl could beat several bigger boys, but...
She just won.
'Eh...?'
Biting, kicking them in the balls, poking their eyes, headbutting, elbowing—she used every trick in the book to win. This was what it meant to win no matter what. Overwhelmed by her unrelenting spirit, they all eventually ran away.
And when the situation was over, she approached me cautiously. She walked softly, as if not to frighten me.
"Are you okay?"
Her face was swollen and bruised, her hands stained with dirt and blood.
Yet, she smiled kindly, as if to say everything was fine.
That was my 'hero'.
*
From that day on, we were always together.
Her name was Lee Do-hee.
I learned that her parents had been killed by villains when she was young.
"I'm going to become a hero of justice who punishes all the bad villains!!"
She said those words all the time.
Defeating villains.
That was her life's goal, her guiding star.
Always talking about defeating villains, she naturally awakened before she even turned twenty.
Most who naturally awaken tend to fall down the path of a villain, but since her desire was to defeat villains, she was able to walk the path of a hero instead.
Even naturally awakened heroes had to attend the Hero Academy. So, Ellie applied to the Hero Academy to follow Lee Do-hee.
‘I don't want to be separated from her…’
Luckily, though Ellie only had an F-rank hacking ability, she was able to find a compatible body.
Ellie was happy with just that. Thanks to the sidekick system, she could be with her even as an F-rank hero, who was barely different from a normal person.
However, after awakening that ability, Ellie accidentally saw something she shouldn't have.
Of course, with her F-rank hacking ability, Ellie couldn't breach the system network of the District 1 underground base. But she was a student inside the academy.
During a class on hero communications, an opportunity to access the internal intranet arose.
It was something she obviously shouldn't have tried, as getting caught would be a crime, but...
'Where... where on earth did Mom go?'
Suddenly, she secretly connected to the internal network to find news of her mother, who had been unjustly taken away.
As she secretly looked through the internal hero facilities, she began to feel that something was increasingly suspicious.
There were no living quarters for the inmates.
There was no information on where captured villains went.
There was nothing about how they found compatible bodies for heroes and granted them powers.
And then she discovered a suspicious, massive underground facility.
She figured out that it was the final destination for villains, and the source of all their powers.
Instinctively sensing danger, she stopped her access for the time being.
But she didn't give up. Starting that evening, Ellie began to slowly investigate the suspicious underground facility.
Three years later, on the day she graduated from the academy, Ellie put the plan she had been preparing into action.
To find her mother's whereabouts,
And… to uncover the secrets of this city.
She was only an F-rank hero, but thanks to nearly three years of thorough preparation, infiltrating the underground facility was easy.
Since her ability was hacking, it was a simple matter to disguise her identity and pass through the security devices.
It didn't take long for Ellie, having entered the underground base, to realize the city's horrific truth.
They extracted the brains of captured villains while they were still alive to harvest hero abilities.
Or, they concentrated the psychic energy the villains possessed and stored it somewhere.
She confirmed that this was the fate of imprisoned villains.
‘Aah... then, my mother... what happened to her…’
Looking further, she found that her mother's ability had already been extracted and transplanted into another hero.
“Why, how could this… WHY!!!!”
Even if they were villains, they were still human.
The same as anyone else.
They were someone's mother, someone's precious son or daughter.
Was it right to do this…?
Suddenly, the very existence of the heroes laughing and chatting nearby became disgusting.
Normally, she would have stopped there, but she didn't. She risked the danger and investigated to the very end.
‘The concentrated psychic energy… where does it go? And why do villains even exist in the first place? Is the reason we can't go outside really because of contaminants?’
Now that she thought about it, there were more than just one or two questions.
The known cause of villain creation was said to be contaminants from the outside.
After the worldwide dispersal of what were called the worst biochemical weapons, high exposure would cause immediate DNA mutation and death, but the result was said to be different if small amounts inevitably accumulated in the body through soil or groundwater.
When those accumulated contaminants suddenly burst forth, one would awaken supernatural powers.
‘Is that really true?’
Ellie, prepared to die, hacked into the highest-level security documents.
Surprisingly, the documents opened even for an F-rank hacker.
Ellie would later find out that everyone working here was brainwashed, so they didn't pay much attention to security. Moreover, while hacking technology in the outside world had advanced through constant conflict with hacking villains, the isolated intranet here was still using technology from hundreds of years ago.
And upon seeing the truth of this world, Ellie was horrified.
This world was built on a terrible lie.
The S-rank hero Chroniel, known as the city's guardian and saintess, was the very person who had ruined the world with biochemical weapons, and the steady creation of villains was intentional.
Knowing the outside would become like that, she had built the underground base in advance and prepared barriers and a special magnetic field.
Her superpower, the ability to turn back time.
While it was her own power, the energy consumption was immense, so she had been extracting the biological psychic energy of villains to use it. She controlled the number of villains to keep them from becoming too numerous, creating heroes and capturing even more villains in the process.
The villain population was controlled by adjusting the contaminant concentration in the groundwater that passed through the underground base to become the city's drinking water. She could have blocked it 100%, but she deliberately purified it slightly less to control the number of villains.
And she had been ruling the city alongside a few of her trusted followers, distributing this power to them as if it were a divine blessing.
In reality, she was just a psychopathic futanari bitch crazed with stimulating sex and power.
All of humanity had been massacred by that psycho bitch, and the survivors were being raised like livestock, trapped within walls like a birdcage.
An unknown rage welled up inside her at the state of this horrific city.
The separation from her parents in her childhood.
The group bullying that turned her into an emotional dumpster.
Her mother's meaningless death.
The terror and murder happening all over the city.
‘This has to be destroyed…’
In that moment.
A storm of powerful emotions swirled, and Ellie naturally awakened.
Gaining S-rank power, she tried to destroy District 1 and the underground facility itself...
The result was defeat.
She couldn't defeat the old crone couple who had been accumulating power for hundreds of years.
Pledging to fight again in the future, hiding her severe injuries and returning to her normal life was the best she could do.
Even after such a massive incident, Ellie surprisingly lived a normal life.
Humans are creatures of adaptation.
Failing to avenge her parents was a great regret, but she had also inflicted a lot of damage, and since it was a long time ago, her emotions had cooled a bit.
Besides, the citizens and villains being raised like livestock wasn't her business. The most precious thing to her was right by her side.
“Pink Spear-nim. You worked hard again today.”
[You too, Ellie. You worked hard. Get some good rest.]
“Okay~”
Perhaps it was because she had grown up watching her back.
Just hearing her voice made her feel calm and warm.
Maybe the truth of this world didn't matter at all.
Maybe it was enough to just enjoy this small happiness, she thought, erasing the underground facility from her memory.
She didn't entertain the reckless thought of telling Pink Spear the truth she knew.
Natural awakenings often amplify one's deepest emotions.
Pink Spear, who already lived to defeat villains, developed an even greater hatred for them after awakening. If Ellie revealed she was a villain, their relationship could be shattered, regardless of the world's truth.
And she didn't want to burden her by telling her something so enormous.
In the middle of all this, thinking it might be useful to gather villains, she created a villain community called [Under Site].
Just in case, she also left a bunker and the technologies and history books she had smuggled out of the underground facility there.
She thought she could continue living a peaceful life.
Until those filthy heroes extended their evil hands toward Pink Spear.
“That disrespectful bitch. Her time in the spotlight ends today.”
Sometimes, people who should never be heroes become heroes.
Since they only check compatibility rates and make anyone who applies a hero, even people with the mindset of a villain could become one.
His identity was none other than the A-rank hero Volgamesh, the main perpetrator of Ellie's childhood bullying and the one who received a harsh lesson from Lee Do-hee.
He would pretend to accidentally let villains escape and make secret deals with them.
The plan was simple. Lure Pink Spear into the underground and ambush her.
Funnily enough, the heroes who were close to Volgamesh also joined the plan.
“She was a bitch I've wanted to fuck at least once.”
“Honestly, the way she acted all high and mighty after catching villains was annoying.”
"I'll pretend I didn't see anything, so do as you please."
Ellie, who learned of this through the villain community, was shocked once again. It also brought back her childhood trauma.
‘This... is a hero? Disgusting… No, you're all fakes. You're trash born from devouring ordinary people.’
The only true hero is Pink Spear.
The rest are just butchers hired by that old crone to manage the city.
Thinking that, her anger boiled over.
‘The sin of targeting my hero. You will pay dearly for it.’
And so, the S-rank villain's attack on District 5 began, and shortly after, Lee Do-hee awakened a new power.
‘I'm glad I did it.’
She killed all the useless heroes, and her relationship with her grew closer.
It went beyond admiration and envy, blossoming into feelings of affection and love.
And though she knew she shouldn't, she began to harbor a darker emotion as well.
She entertained the thought of making her retire as a hero and running away somewhere to live, just the two of them.
She wouldn't have to work as a hero, and she wouldn't have to take unnecessary risks.
Although it took time to purge the disobedient low-class villains who had dared to rape her, her love wasn't that kind of physical love, so as long as she was okay, it didn't matter.
In fact, despite what had happened, Pink Spear seemed unfazed. As if her only mission was to be a hero of justice who defeated villains, she didn't seem to care much.
After that, she used the villain community to ponder how to make Pink Spear retire so they could live together. Then the incident with the Ice Heaven Emperor occurred, and she once again stepped in to resolve it, but the problem was that the old crone in District 1 came out stronger than expected.
‘No, this isn't my fault. She's coveting Pink Spear-nim's power…!!’
By the time she tried to stop it, it was already too late.
Now, all that was left was war.
During that time, Ellie had steadily gathered high-ranking villains, and the heroes had slowly become corrupt.
Her chances of winning weren't zero.
With them, she would attack District 1.
*
“[Destroy everything, burn it all!]”
The Villain Alliance, which started in District 5.
She hacked not only the villain community but also the broadcasting stations, live-streaming Eclipse's speech on every channel.
"[You have all been raised like livestock by the S-rank heroes. Villains were nothing more than human elixirs for them to fatten themselves up and gain eternal life, and they were created intentionally. All villains, rise up! Let us show those rotten heroes that we are 'human' too!!]"
With that, she revealed the shameful secrets of District 1 that she had compiled to the entire city.
Some might have believed it, but naturally, more people dismissed it as a villain's false propaganda.
But it didn't matter.
The villains all believed it and began their advance on District 1 with Eclipse.
Potential civilian casualties?
Ellie had no sense of a hero's duty or justice.
When she was being beaten as a child, no one helped her. The only one who came to her aid was Pink Spear.
As long as she had her, it didn't matter how many other people died. She didn't even bring the villains along out of pity.
She had a little sympathy for the villains who had been forced to change, but most of them were truly trash.
And finally, Eclipse and the Villain Alliance, advancing triumphantly on District 1, clashed with the elite heroes.
The modern elite military units couldn't be used due to Eclipse, but the heroes of District 1 were formidable.
Especially Chroniel's inner circle.
A-rank heroes who maintained their youth despite being 50 to 80 years old, they were council members, academy instructors, and Chroniel's closest aides.
They were strong.
Far stronger than the S-rank-in-name-only Ice Heaven Emperor, they were elites who could fight a hundred A-rank villains at once.
And the biggest problem, of course, was those two S-rank heroes.
Countless villains and a mechanical legion rushed forth from a giant metal sphere, but.
"Not a chance."
Shing.
A black sword aura slashed horizontally through the air, instantly bisecting hundreds of villains and the mechanical legion.
'Now's my chance.'
His defense was practically that of a normal person. She attacked by launching thousands of steel pipes at once, enough to cover the sky and make evasion impossible.
He parried the pipes at an unbelievable speed and dodged nimbly, but it seemed impossible to block them all, as one or two embedded themselves in his body, and then...
P-P-P-P-P-PAK!!!
Dozens of sharp steel pipes pierced through his body.
Seeing that, the villains cheered for a moment.
"Waaaaaah!!!"
"All hail Eclipse! Let's go fuck the other bitch!"
"......"
Shing!
The heads of the villains who had charged forward flew into the air.
All the steel pipes were gone from his body, and Dimension Cutter stood there with a smile, his body and clothes perfectly intact as if time had been reversed.
The cause, of course, was Chroniel's time reversal.
Even for an S-rank, reviving him, with his fragile body, wasn't much of a burden.
The old crone couple's combo was stronger than she thought.
He had put all his stats into attack power and agility, so even a graze from his attack was fatal, yet he was hard to hit and kept reviving even when struck down.
Even if she wanted to target Chroniel first, A-rank heroes were already protecting her in layers, and above all, she couldn't get past Dimension Cutter's attacks.
'This is impossible. There has to be a way...'
She needed to advance, but instead, she was being pushed further away.
Seeing the immortal Dimension Cutter, the villains grew scared and began to flee.
Her signature technique, the black steel sphere that automatically created her mechanical legion, was split in half and shattered.
The sun, which had been hidden by the steel sphere, shone through.
'Do-hee... I'm sorry. I guess this is it.'
But just then,
The ground split open, and Lee Do-hee appeared, riding a black steed.
*
'What is going on?'
I was confused at first, but I quickly grasped the situation.
The villain, Ellie, who came to save me.
And the heroes who brutally raped me and tried to extract my brain.
But if I kill Ellie, the ordeal ends.
In truth, I had already decided whose side to take on my way up.
Once the answer was set, a thought occurred to me.
Why did I even hesitate over such an obvious answer?
"Farewell."
Using the Bicorn's charge skill, I pierced his heart before he even had a chance to react.
CRUNCH!!