The Controversial Hero
I'd come to university a little late, and among my classmates that made me hyung to the boys and oppa to the girls no matter whose side I ended up on.
Somewhere out there, surely, were long-haul repeaters who had spent even more years than I had clawing their way into a school. And yet, curiously enough, among this year's Class of '24 freshmen in Political Science and International Relations, there wasn't a single student who had even sat the entrance exam twice.
They liked me anyway. Every one of them had walked into college the moment high school ended, which meant the only person who had spent a few years actually earning a steady wage was me—and that only for a short while, with the UN forces. On nights like this, when there was drinking to be done, it was fairly often me who at least covered the first round.
That evening I sipped my soju and let my attention settle on the news coming from the television in the corner of the bar.
"Taehyun hyung, your glass is empty. Let me top you off."
"Oh. Yeah."
At my classmate Juhyeok's words I absently held out the soju glass I'd been gripping and let him fill it.
Juhyeok flicked a glance toward the screen I'd been fixed on.
"Figures. Ex-peacekeeping, so the second UN news comes on you can't look away. Where'd you say you were again, hyung? Cambodia?"
"Wasn't it Suriname, not Cambodia?"
Juhyeok was wrong too, but some idiot had managed to drift even farther from the answer.
"You're all wrong, you bastards. How many times do I have to say it was Congo?"
"Oh, right, something like that. Come on, hyung, tell us a story. You were stuck in Africa for three whole years—there's got to be plenty you still haven't told."
"Last time you said you'd seen a superhero, right? So did you actually fight supervillains? Do villains and UN soldiers get into firefights? Do you fight alongside the heroes? Do the heroes ever save your life?"
"For crying out loud. I keep telling him to quit dragging up the old days, and every time this bastard drinks he doesn't hear a word I say. You lot will go your whole lives without ever holding a gun, so you wouldn't get it—but for a veteran, military service is a thing shot through with pain and suffering you can't even put into words. That's what I'm telling you."
Even as I said it, I didn't really mean it. Not usually. If you wanted the mood to rise, a little playing hard to get was part of the act.
I had been a show-off for as long as I could remember. At bottom I was about as ordinary a human being as a person can be, and still I liked parading whatever set me apart from ordinary people. A military record, rarer these days than it used to be, made excellent material for propping up my self-respect. I'd wondered whether army talk from a man three years their senior would only bore kids whose lives—the occasional supervillain materializing downtown aside—would stay far from war and the service. Maybe because the man buying the drinks was the one talking, they enjoyed it more than I'd expected.
Today, though, I didn't feel like starting. The news pouring out of the television had caught hold of me and would not let go.
"Shut up and watch the news, you little shit."
"What kind of hyung comes to a drinking party and tells people to watch the news? You're fine most of the time, but sometimes when you drink you start squeaking out these mood-killing lines."
"You study international politics and you don't watch the news? Shameless. Hey—that's a professor from our department."
"Oh, it really is. Hyung, are you taking his class?"
"No. I just want to watch. I'm curious what he's saying."
By then a heated debate had already broken out among the panelists.
Empress. Her full hero name was Iron Empress.
The hero they called the Empress of Iron was a citizen of the Republic of Korea. Her real name was Lim Yeri.
I had been listening so carefully because I sensed the segment was about to say her name—so why, the moment it actually did, did my ears go muffled and my chest draw tight? I knew it was ridiculous to feel that way now. I knew, and it happened anyway.
No. Even before that, the fact that I had gone still the instant I sensed Yeri would be mentioned was absurd enough on its own. Why had I?
After what I'd done to her, was there still some leftover attachment in me?
My head was so thoroughly occupied by other thoughts that I didn't even notice the people beside me lifting their glasses for a toast, and I finished my soju alone in a quiet swallow. Juhyeok laughed as if he couldn't believe it.
"What is this guy even thinking about? Why isn't he clinking?"
"Oh—ah, sorry. I mean, why are we toasting when I'm watching TV?"
"Anyone listening would think this was a movie theater. Get a grip. Did you come here to drink, or did you come to watch television? Go home and watch it by yourself."
"I told you I live alone. Where would I have a TV?"
Then someone else turned toward the television.
"Still, that face belongs on a screen. Doesn't she look like she showed up to shoot a movie? No wonder Taehyun oppa's distracted."
In the brief stretch I'd gone blank, the panel had ended and the screen had already moved on to the next breaking story. I blinked and looked back at the set.
"She killed another one? A supervillain?"
"He must have had it coming. That's why she killed him." A female classmate had cut in.
Iron Empress had a strangely large number of female fans, and even if this one never said it outright, anyone with eyes could tell she was one of them.
Among ordinary people the subject might have ended there. The ones gathered around this table, though, were first-year undergraduates in Political Science and International Relations—young students of politics whose blood boiled and whose tongues sharpened the moment a topic like this was thrown down. I knew exactly what kind of debate was about to start, so I stayed out of it and quietly sipped.
"Still, under international law, if non-lethal suppression is possible, you're supposed to do it that way."
"International law is international law. You've got a villain with powers right in front of you and no idea what they'll hit back with, and you're just going to sit there and subdue them safely? Have you even seen a movie?"
"And a movie is a movie, coming from you. Other heroes manage just fine, don't they? So why is it only Iron Empress, the one they call the strongest, who has to leave a corpse every time she shows up?"
"But that international law, and the non-lethal principle in the UN Charter—I heard the UN made all of it so they could run human experiments."
"What kind of nonsense is that now? Have you been drinking? Well. Obviously you have."
"No, I'm serious. The UN Secretariat is kidnapping the supervillains and experimenting on them to develop new weapons, so they stop the heroes from killing them and use a sense of justice as the excuse. The UN's real purpose is actually—"
"Oh, shut up. Because of you the debate we finally got going is dead. Is this party cursed tonight? Why are there so many people killing the mood in the middle of things?"
"Why is it my fault you can't answer what I'm saying? Listen to this guy. Hyung, you tell them. You were in the UN forces, weren't you? Stories like that don't really go around?"
"Taehyun hyung isn't even listening. He looks completely done with this."
It truly wasn't worth paying attention to, so I wasn't listening at all.
But the news itself—the thing that ought to have been focused on what actually mattered—showed no interest whatsoever in the dead villain. It was busy taking apart, in detail, the brands of the sunglasses and the trench coat Yeri had worn into court today, and putting an estimated price on each. Part of me wondered why the public needed to know any of that. Then again, maybe a report like that did more good than a seminar on international law, or on the wicked conspiracies of the UN.
Once the drink had settled in and the shock of hearing Yeri's name had faded, an amusing thought came to me. I had let the kids talk however they liked for about twenty minutes. Then I set my glass down on the table with a clean tap and smiled.