I Want to Fuck a Hero (3)
Even in this so-called New Era, when Transcendents had begun appearing here and there, their numbers were still drastically small beside ordinary people. Figures from the national statistics office put the ratio at something like one in ten — and even that only held for children around ten years old. Climb the age brackets, and the share of Transcendents dropped off far more sharply.
And yet it was impossible for the other nine to go on living exactly the same lives as before. Some people came close enough, granted.
Take a doctor who had poured an entire youth into medicine just to earn a license. They, too, were living a life that was at least a little unfair, because however much each one's "cost" might differ, there existed Healing Type Transcendents who could close a wound in an instant. Fortunately Healing Types were exceedingly rare, so doctors were still working hard for their meals in all the old places a Transcendent's hands couldn't easily reach — private clinics, medical school professorships, military physicians. Their salaries hadn't particularly changed, either.
The supermarket cashier was the same, living the same life as before. The schoolteacher was the same, living the same life as before.
Now. One question. What if the work wasn't a profession like medicine, but a line of work whose entire livelihood heroes could snatch away? People who casually surpassed anything like average physical ability, wielded all manner of strange magic, and had even inherited the traits of animals, until they could completely transcend what it meant to be human — what became of the jobs where physical ability itself had been the cutoff?
One profession made a perfect example. The police.
Dismissed as not even a lesser copy of the heroes, they had been reduced to CCTV, useful only for the infrastructure already built. All that remained were the people left to handle the petty work — patrols, interrogations, taking complaints. A pitiful reality. Of course, for me as I was now, it was a deeply welcome one.
"Haa..."
On a road turned to wreckage by rainwater and debris, she ripped a car door free, checked the dump-truck driver pinned behind his airbag, dry-heaved once, and sighed at the paralyzed street.
One minute for the cameras to take a report from citizens. One minute to contact the nearest hero. If that hero happened to be free, arrival within three minutes of that — and the situation was over. A hero-in-training of around twenty had done everything she could. From here on, it wasn't the domain of overgrown children. It belonged to actual adults.
And about a minute had already passed.
Would it be all right to speak to her? Would she take him for someone suspicious? If he let this chance go, would another like it ever come? When was the last time his face had been worth anything, in this era?
Before he could look like a madman, he got the umbrella back over his head and quickly searched his phone for Seo Woojin. It had to have been ten years since his last interview. Surprisingly, the most recent hit was an article from a year ago — some outlet had stolen a photo from his school days, no telling from where, plastered it right at the top, and gushed at breathless length about Korea's third Healing Type Transcendent.
A year ago, that would have made him nineteen. By then he was already sitting blankly through class, turning a very serious question over in his head. How do I use my own power to fuck a hero...? The rest of the articles were from seven years back, nine, ten. The bulk of them clustered right around when he was ten. Another Healing Type had appeared in the meantime, along with every kind of bizarre newcomer, and his name had been buried behind all of theirs.
He liked that. People might not know the face, but the proof that he was this person remained perfectly intact.
He killed the screen and carefully approached her as she tried to fend off the rain with her school uniform. His coat, soaked through, hung uselessly heavy.
"Excuse me. Thank you — for saving me."
"Huh? Oh, you don't have to thank me. I only did it to get academy points."
He had meant to lower her guard by degrees, but what came back was blunt honesty. Maybe she was simply embarrassed to be thanked by a civilian. He still couldn't read her precisely, but from the stiff set of her face, she didn't seem like the type who enjoyed strangers. At this rate, a piece of candy wasn't going to make her drop her guard and come trotting after him, tail wagging.
Hmm. For a moment the piercing in her ear had made him wonder if she might be an easy woman. Apparently it really was just fashion. He liked that. Her value had just gone up.
"It's nothing else. I thought I heard you say your ankle hurt, earlier."
"...And?"
Her voice was sharp. She probably didn't like that he had come closer after overhearing her talk to herself. He would remember that.
"The thing is, I'm actually someone like this."
"...?"
Just saying the name Seo Woojin clearly wouldn't mean a thing to her. What this moment needed was simple show-and-tell. He pulled up the year-old article on his phone and swept aside the rain-soaked bangs that had started stabbing at his eyes, showing her his face. The school had a hair-length rule, so the photo in the article was much shorter than the hair he had been growing out since graduation.
Looking at it now, that length might have suited him better. Should he cut it short again?
"Seo Woojin. A Healing Type Transcendent..."
"Yes."
Only now did her expression turn a little friendlier. She must have had him pegged as some pervert angling for a conversation after being rescued. For all her pointless wariness, her real feelings showed completely on her face.
"Um, but... well..."
Strangely, though, the wariness that had just vanished began creeping back up over her expression. No. Not wariness. Something else. How to put it — deep green eyes brimming with melancholy, lips working in hesitation, her right leg testing the ground in little presses as if gauging exactly how much the ankle hurt. It felt as though invisible puppy ears had popped up on her head and folded flat.
What was this...
"I, um... I don't have any money..."
He said nothing.
Ah.
"I'm grateful, really, but I'm still a student, so there's nothing I can give you..."
Only then did a few things she had said earlier come back to him. A weekend part-time job, wasn't it? He dropped his gaze a little, and the mint T-shirt — soaked, clinging softly to her body — filled his vision again. Some strange pattern. A meaningless word printed huge across the chest. A brand he had never seen in his life. Probably no-name bargain stuff. The star-shaped piercing in her ear didn't look expensive either. He could roughly sketch the story in his head.
"I have no intention of taking your money. You just saved my life. How could I..."
"Really? For free...?"
"Yes. Really."
"But when a Healing Type treats you, even something this tiny easily runs you four thousand dollars..."
"Keep that up and I'm just going to leave."
"Ah, no! I won't say anything! I'll be quiet!"
An unaccountable sadistic impulse stirred, and the moment he took a light grip on the conversation, she clamped both hands over her mouth and daintily held out her rain-soaked right leg. A strange little sound effect — hoit — came free of charge.
One offer of free treatment, and they seemed to have gotten familiar at a ridiculous speed. No. Remembering how stiff she had been when he first spoke, it was too early to relax. Her guard had only loosened for a moment because a round of playful talk had passed between them.
Ignoring the shutters clicking in a chorus behind them, he held out the umbrella.
"Would you hold this for me?"
"Yes!"
"And you don't have to keep being so formal. I'm twenty."
"Oh? Then I'm your noona?"
"What?"
"I said I'm your noona. One year older."
Maybe it was because, until about thirty minutes ago, he had been thirty. He had told her she didn't need the formal speech, and still it irked him a little to end up calling her noona over a gap of a single year.
"Should I call you noona?"
"...Ah, no. The one treating me is the oppa. Yes."
"I'll just kneel, so you don't need to stick your leg out like that. Noona."
"Okaaay..."
Well, fine. A form of address didn't carry any great meaning.
"What a relief... I was sure if I went to the hospital again it'd be over forty dollars."
"It only costs forty dollars?"
She nodded hard, holding the big black umbrella, and grinned a dopey grin. Setting aside the face of a country puppy blissed out on a roasted sweet potato, he understood now. That smile meant money saved.
"You probably don't know, being a Healing Type, but forty dollars is a lot, okay? You haven't been to the hospital much, have you?"
"Hmm."
"And I'd need a cast, too. Then I couldn't do classes or club activities properly..."
There was always that type among Evolution Type Transcendents. Raw strength already formidable, but not yet fully ripened, so the moment their concentration slipped they blew past their limit and strained their own bodies. This woman seemed to be exactly that case.
"...Ah. Before I start."
"Yes?"
"I'll have to put my hands on you. Is that all right?"
"You're only touching the ankle anyway, right? That's what the article you showed me said."
"Yes. Just the ankle."
"I don't mind. It's not like you're touching somewhere weird."
"Then..."
"...Um, excuse me."
"Yes."
"If I say halfway through that the way you're touching me feels perverted, you'll just leave, right?"
"...?"
"...Sorry. I'll be quiet."
She was already treating them as close, tossing out a joke he couldn't make sense of. Were her standards for closeness just that low? Total stranger. Best friends in the world. Something along those lines. She hasn't even told me her name yet...
No ears, no tail, no other physical traits — she was definitely an Evolution Type. So why did every action, every way of thinking, make her seem like some people-loving neighborhood puppy? Forget it. His head hurt.
Permission in hand, he went down on one knee in front of her and began carefully stroking the ankle she had held out. It was raining, and now that he looked, she wasn't even wearing sandals — just cheap slippers. That didn't particularly matter. What came next did.
"This much is fine, right? Keeping my fingers on you."
"I was j-joking. It's not weird at all."
"Then we're good."
A Healing Type Transcendent. In his case, the cost was a brief fatigue, and the condition for activation was keeping at least three fingers against the area around the injury. Most people knew that much and nothing of what came after — because a Healing Type would never tell them the truth, and ordinary people never imagined there might be anything beyond the healing.
Wasn't a painting the same? You assumed the picture in front of your eyes was everything. Very few people tried to dig through the empty air and ask what might have existed outside the frame. A Summoning Type summoned spirits, golems, great autonomous mechas. A Magic Type cast magic. An Evolution Type was what people called superhuman. A Mutation Type let the traits of animals seep into a human body. A Healing Type was no different. A Healing Type could treat the injured. And so nobody knew they could do other things.
Well. Maybe that was simply because they had been named Healing Type from the start.
"Huu..."
Was this her first time being treated this way? A faint sigh drifted down from above his head, as if she were nervous. He ignored it and carefully poured mana into her ankle.
Ah — mana was a name he had given it himself. Whenever he used the ability, something hot ran from his heart, along his arm, past his fingertips, and into the other person's body, and he had never had a word for it. So when he explained it to people, he always borrowed from games and called it mana. Easy to understand was good enough.
Slowly. Slowly. He slipped the mana into that slender white ankle and carefully excavated the inside. How to put it — poking apart the places where the mana caught and wouldn't go forward, breaking them open. He didn't know the principle. Healing simply happened when he did it this way. Just as he couldn't explain how he was able to move his own arm, this thing called mana was the same.
And by the time he had shattered every wrong part of the ankle—
"...It's amazing. It doesn't hurt anymore."
"..."
"Ah, I'll be quiet..."
He shifted the mana that had been moving only in the ankle a little higher. Past the knee. The firm thigh, tempered by training, was the same. Then, around the pelvis, it split in two — into three branches, into four, scattering into many — so he could go over her body carefully, piece by piece.
Where she was most easily broken. Where she had broken herself, with her own hands. And so, where she mistakenly believed her erogenous zones were. Where the real ones were. All of it. Just as he had done with the women who had been his practice toys. So he could examine every bit of it.
"...Um, aren't you finished?"
The deepest place — one no ordinary man would ever reach, not in a lifetime of fucking her. The middle stretch, driven in and out without end, puk, puk, scraping along the vaginal walls. The entrance, just right for fingers to slip in and out. The area around that entrance, where you could play without ever pushing inside. And beyond those: the throat, the armpits, the thighs, the asshole, the breasts, the feet, and on, and on.
He checked them one after another, swallowed hard, and slowly drew the mana back out of her body.
"It's done. Noona."
"Thank y— ...eek? My leg cramp—"
You don't know yet, do you. That there are places far more sensitive than the spots you rub so thoroughly when you masturbate. Several of them.
"You go to Miren Academy, don't you?"
"Yes, second yea— j-just a second, hold me up— kya—"
"Hmm..."
"...Ah, are you my junior, maybe...?"
"Who knows."
"What?"
"I never turned in an application."
"What? It's already February...?"
He wondered. When she was forced to find out — what kind of face she would wear, looking up at him.