I Want to Fuck a Hero
A warm spring day.
The broadcast had started with a wildfire, wandered off into some company and some food product where a bad substance had been detected — something like that, anyway — and then a high chance of rain from lunchtime on, so don't forget an umbrella. The anchor, who had been churning out nothing but worthless little breaking-news items, suddenly stopped mid-sentence.
A broadcast glitch?
The man sprawled on the sofa, watching TV, scratched his belly and yawned. This didn't feel routine. Now the sound cut out altogether.
On the screen, the anchor glanced off-camera for a moment, then started murmuring back and forth with someone. Ah. Look closely and the edge of a beige hoodie peeked into frame. Judging by the slight potbelly, it was probably a member of the production crew — she seemed to be talking with that sort of person. Must have been important. Now they were even handing her papers.
She stood there and began flipping through a few sheets, the pages fluttering. Before long her head tilted quizzically to one side. Maybe because she had a decent face, even a nothing little gesture came off cute. She kept the conversation going for nearly another minute, then neatly squared a few sheets of A4 that looked hot off the printer and moved on to the next report.
"...Ah, um."
Stumbling over her words this time. Hmm. He'd seen clips like that on the internet now and then — an anchor accidentally tripping over a line. Once, some anchor had been so embarrassed she even showed tears. He wondered if it would come up if he searched.
He stretched out an arm and picked up the phone lying on the sofa table. What met him was a browser window plastered, edge to edge, with a single story.
"What the hell kind of bullshit is this."
He blinked as he said it.
Honestly.
Living like this, I'd figured a Hero or two would be easy enough to fuck.
"Nngh...."
A Villain — that was the image, wasn't it. A vicious criminal. A terrorist. Some screw-loose piece of shit. An orphan with a miserable family history. Trash rotting society from the inside. Cursed out that thoroughly, and still, when you watched them as a kid, they were a little bit cool.
And the image of a Hero? A mascot. An idol. An elite. A judge who wipes out evil. And someone who offers up their own body for the sake of others.... A genuine idiot.
I'd thought that if I stayed a villain long enough, a few Heroes like that would eventually become something I could use and toss like tissue.
TV. Smartphones. YouTube. Eyewitness accounts of every kind. Proof photos posted up on community boards. The Heroes who smiled so brightly in all of that and became people's hope — I was sure that someday, in secret from everyone cheering them on, with nobody the wiser, I could quietly drag one back to a filthy little room thick with a villain's stink, and onto a bed even narrower than that, stained with spent condoms. Force the resisting Hero down, and watch her pant while a villain hammered his cock into her, thud after thud.
Somewhere in my early-to-mid twenties, I spent day after happy day of villain life dreaming that hope-stuffed dream. I'd only just become an adult — a teenager with nothing to him but a grown body.
...Thinking about it now, it really was an age when lust came before everything else.
"...Nngh...."
Maybe I'd lost too much blood. Clutching the right side of my waist where the scythe had carved me open, I let an ugly groan spill out and sank back against the wall. The pain that had burned like a brand was slowly ebbing. At the same time my head went blank, and the world in front of me bled out of focus.
At seven, when I first got my ability, I never thought I'd die like some petty thug. I clamped a tattered arm tight around my waist and tried, somehow, to keep breathing. It wasn't working. Probably because I'd never been hurt this badly before. I'd kept up my training without missing a single day, and all of it had been nothing but show muscle....
"You... dog of a bitch...."
If I'd been a combat-class Transcendent, I would have at least thrashed. If I was going to be put down this easily, I should've just shut my eyes and spat on that smug face. In the end, far from fucking a Hero, I was about to die like a pathetic idiot without even getting one proper string of curses out.
"Ghk...."
Unfortunately, I can't breathe fire or anything like it. I can't forge a massive spear of ice and run it through a building from the roof down the way famous Heroes do, I can't summon a spirit to take revenge in my place, and I don't have the strength to settle everything with a single sword the way the Named of The Company can.
I have exactly one thing. A healing ability that rapidly repairs the wound wherever I lay my hands....
"Fuck...."
And even that wouldn't work now. Never mind the rib that had snapped clean off — the filthy pain of it stabbing into an organ meant I couldn't concentrate on using my power at all. I think I finally understand what people mean when they say it hurts so bad they could die.
I should've treated the kids faster when they came in hurt from outside. The regret arrived too late.
"Hhh... hhh...."
Is this how a doctor feels when he can't fix his own body? I couldn't even manage an empty laugh. It was that fucked.
"My life...."
...If I'd known it would end like this, then a few days ago, when that ill-mannered bitch texted out of nowhere asking to get drinks, I should've pretended I never saw it. Then even if I couldn't fuck a famous Hero, I could've fucked at least one famous villain to my heart's content until the bedsheet was soaked through, and died happy, right?
Sure, I'd brought a few nameless villains home.... Those were just for practice. Airheaded bitches I'd lost interest in the moment they folded — spend a single night violating them and they'd immediately start chirping Master, Master, words that didn't even get me hard. Practice-run bimbos.
If they'd been Heroes, they would have resisted to the very end. This kind of roughness doesn't feel good at all. Stop, while I'm still asking nicely. The moment this is over, I'll kill you. Yeah. That's when breaking them is actually fun.
"...Heh...."
What good was any of it now. I let out a long sigh and slid down the wall until I was flat on the floor. The slick blood soaking my body was like chocolate drowned in too much water. Whatever had been seeping out warm seemed to have cooled; now it went cold where it clung to me and dried stiff.
I closed my eyes. Even keeping them open was exhausting.
Old men say that so long as they can still lift a spoon, they can still have sex. Complete bullshit.
Maybe because real death had come this close. One by one, the things I'd hate to die and leave behind rose out of memory. The sex videos I'd filmed for blackmail, every last one of them useless now. The piles of extra-large condoms I'd kept stocked, checking the expiration dates so I could have sex whenever I wanted. And the notepad where I'd laid out each Hero's weaknesses, and whether there was a gap I could work my way into.
...Huh. Somehow it was nothing but stuff to do with getting filthy.
I should've lived a little kinder. Without a single stylish last line like a Hero, leaving behind a thought as cheap as your average bottom-shelf villain, I lay sprawled on a pool of blood and wheezed. My breath grew thinner and thinner. Slowly. Slowly. As if someone were pressing a hand down into the pit of my stomach.
And as I faded out like that, I caught the bitter smell of coffee and blinked my eyes open again.
"You don't have to read it all that carefully. Healing-Type Transcendents are rare, so I'll give you the best treatment in the business."
"...Yes?"
"No, that's not it. We were never the sort who needed to hash things out over a stupid scrap of paper like this in the first place."
A loud clap, as if to say look here. Then a right hand thick with muscle thrust out in front of my eyes. Beneath the rolled-up shirt sleeve, the hair grew dense for any human.
Right. So that was... a gorilla, was it. A Mutation-Type ability.
"I'm counting on you from here on. Seo Woojin."
I said nothing.
The scene was unfamiliar, and yet it turned familiar fast. An interior swollen with vanity, courtesy of solid backing behind it. And for all that, a sofa — secondhand, maybe — with grime practically sparkling as it oozed out. The coffee machine that rude bitch had liked so much, the one I'd never used because I only drank instant coffee mix. And this furry arm in front of me. This nastily grinning face. I knew them far too well.
"What are you doing? Woojin. It's been days and you're still not sober? Why's the kid so out of it?"
Ten years ago. The day I'd just become an adult and drunk myself blind, this was the bastard who'd dragged me into a shadowy back alley and struck up a conversation with a scout offer. Going on, creepy as a stalker, about how he'd had his eye on me for days because I was a Healing-Type Transcendent. And since becoming a villain happened to be my own dream for the future, I'd been cast right off the street with hardly any friction.
But that wasn't what mattered now. Why was the memory from back then playing out again in front of my eyes?
I sorted through the situation calmly and reached a conclusion. It seemed to be... the past. An incredibly insane thing to say, but what was I supposed to do when the scene in front of me was exactly that?
Ah, right. A life flashing before your eyes. Maybe this was that. Except for something people said whipped by in a blur, it was awfully slow. What the hell was this. Had I gone crazy for a second? A dream?
I was staring straight at the furry hand held out in front of me—
Smack!
"Wha—"
I slapped my own cheek hard enough that something cracked in my neck.
Smack. Smack. Smack. I kept hitting until the question broke, and then the other side. Smack. Smack. Smack. Hard enough that blood and spit sprayed across the table.
"...Nn."
Strange. Even after all that, the scene in front of me didn't change. I swallowed the blood pooling in my mouth and, too thrown to do anything else, stared blankly down at the furry hand clenched tight into a fist.
It hurt. It hurt like a motherfucker — enough that I knew perfectly well this was real. And though I'd clearly hit my cheek, the tip of my nose stung too. Was I getting a nosebleed?
I ran an index finger under my nose, then set a hand to my face and pushed my healing ability through to cool the heat. ...It cooled. Exactly the sensation I knew, as if this place were reality itself.
While I sat there blank, unable to understand, the nosebleed that had just burst trickled out with zero sense of timing and wet my lips. I didn't need to check whether it really tasted like blood — when I'd slapped myself, the inside of my cheek had split and I'd already swallowed plenty. And it had come out of my nose, which made it gross besides.
Anyway. Had I really returned to the past with my memories? Or had I become a lunatic who only thought he had?
After blinking for a while, I pulled a tissue from the box on the table and roughly wiped the nosebleed away. If it was the latter, that would just be too sad, wouldn't it? So better to force myself into believing the former.
Living as a villain and dying ten years later when a Hero raided the hideout. Me, certain I'd died there, coming back ten years through some process I couldn't explain. The document in front of me that would decide the life ahead. All of it, reality without a single lie.
"Hoo...."
On top of the trash can where a scorched-rice candy wrapper had been, red tissues piled up in a soft heap.
"Y-you, what are you doing?"
I didn't answer.
"Woojin?"
Still nothing.
...Ah. For the record, the bastard in front of me was one of the combatants. For the record, it was the post where you ran into Heroes the most. For the record, it was the post where it was easiest to fuck a Hero you'd beaten in a fight. And for the record, according to what I'd been told two months ago when it was just the two of us over drinks, he was still a virgin.
"H-hey, you're scaring me, so say some—"
"I'm sorry."
And so, looking over a contract whose terms were decent enough if you ignored the total lack of the four standard social insurances, I took my chance.
"Sorry for what?"
"It's just, all of a sudden, starting a moment ago, I wanted to live on the straight and narrow."
"What?"
"So I slapped my cheek, to get my head straight."
"Huh?"
"This contract. I'd like to pretend it never existed."
"Never— what?"
"Goodbye."
Villain.
I quit on the spot.
Dying ten years from now, I could dodge that one way or another. But a job like this.... A worthless, dogshit job where I couldn't even fuck a Hero properly.