I Want to Fuck Heroes (4)
4. 3. 2. 8.
He pressed the four digits in order, and with that nostalgic little chirp the door lock sprang open.
Maybe it was just that he hadn't heard the sound of home in so long. Something in his chest felt strangely unsettled, like stopping by a house you'd moved away from as a child after years and years. In truth he'd never done any such thing, so he couldn't even say whether that was the right feeling.
He mixed up the bathroom light with the kitchen light, and for a moment the clicks came one after another. It didn't last. The moment he hit the proper switch, the room—stained dark by the grim, ashen rain—began to fill with white light.
He shrugged off the coat that squelched with every step and took in the familiar scene. Three hundred and fifty square feet or so. A one-room comfortable enough for living alone, and the soundproofing was excellent. If you set aside the landlady, a grandmother so overflowing with affection that every necessary phone call bled twenty minutes of useless chatter, it was a place he rather liked.
Long time for this place, too. The first studio he'd bought with money he'd earned himself, back in his first year of high school. The instant the contract deposit landed he'd signed for a two-room and gotten cleaned out by a key-money lease scam. After that he'd moved into an officetel.
He wasn't a tidy soul by nature, so the place was a little dirty. He tore open one of the two-liter bottles left lying around on the floor and gulped, working the dryness out of his throat. He hadn't left the boiler on, and the water had gone cold as it filled his stomach.
With it, one perfectly ordinary thought drifted through his head.
When he'd slapped her hard enough to spatter blood across the table. When he'd torn up the contract with The Company on nothing but his own whim. When he'd nearly been hit by a truck. When he'd talked with that prospective hero whose name he still didn't know. Through all of it, a feeling like being inside a dream had stayed with him, plain as day, tickling at one corner of his mind.
He'd gone through her tastes as a test, down to the last detail, and stored every bit of it in his head so he wouldn't forget. Only now, as he crammed cold tap water down into his gut, did it hit him.
For the first time.
"Phaah..."
He felt alive.
Typing practice was over.
He showered quickly and came back out, minimized the notepad for a while, and searched for whatever had been nagging at him. Past regression. Time reversal. The mental illness of believing you've returned to the past. And so on. Depression and schizophrenia turned up here and there, but not a single result was worth holding his eye.
Then whose doing was it that he'd come back to the past? Or why had ten years of memory been suddenly jammed into his head? Unfortunately, information on an internet open to anyone had its limits as an investigation. Even so, he didn't think hunting down a psychiatrist would help much either.
What if he introduced himself with I'm from ten years in the future? The result was obvious. Until he correctly called the major events still to come, he and the doctor alike would hand down the same verdict: he was insane.
Whatever. He'd drop the idea of seeing a doctor. Once the events actually broke, the fact that he'd returned to the past would become the truth on the spot.
Hmm. If the unease wouldn't leave him, simply accepting the ten years of youth he'd been given—and enjoying them—was one way through it. Surely it wasn't schizophrenia. Deciding it couldn't be that, at least, he pressed the backspace key and held it down.
Next came the admissions guide for Miren Academy, one of the hero-training institutions. He hammered out something like Miren Academy and scrolled with no particular care, the wheel rattling under his finger.
The first thing he saw was the practical exam. Not especially important. It would matter for a Transcendent of ambiguous caliber, but a Healing Type was irreplaceable personnel.
Next. The written exam.
He stared at those two words for a long while, then gave up and moved his eyes elsewhere. The reason was simple. Villains don't study.
Then the mouse stopped for a moment. There, the words application period were written. Before anything else, the leading digit was a one. December. And January. The current date he'd just checked on his phone was February.
Looked like meeting that woman would take some other method. She'd said she needed a weekend part-time job, so he could mark the shops with flyers like that. Or, on her way home after class, he could stage a coincidence and run into her. Something along those lines. And if even that felt like too much trouble, throwing her away was an option too.
This wasn't the world of decades ago, when a couple of heroes per city was the whole of it. These days you only had to walk into a high school to find a couple of Transcendents in every class. There just weren't many abilities strong enough to feel useful.
Anyway. If she was a bother he could discard her, but she was a Miren Academy student. Wasn't there a chance of meeting other heroes through her? If luck let him build a connection, there was no need to kick away good fortune that had rolled in on its own. Plenty of famous heroes were Miren graduates, too, so maybe...
For now, he'd just make sure to keep her on file.
The title was 1.
He dropped the notepad—about twenty-two kilobytes—into a desktop folder called Doggie and was on the verge of shutting the computer off when he spotted a word written near the very bottom, far beneath the admissions guide, and scrolled a little farther down.
What was written there—
"...Hm."
None other than Now Hiring.
"......"
Click.
The sound of the mouse wheel spread quietly through the room.
"The finest heroes, from the finest academy."
The slogan shamed him so badly he could hardly bear to look at it.
Seok Jaehwa, principal of Miren Academy, sat with a laptop before him and tapped the desk without end, fingertip after fingertip. The first half, of course, was not what shamed him. How many heroes had they turned out by now! It was the latter half.
The finest academy. That didn't mean finest in reputation alone. Principal Seok Jaehwa, himself a former hero, had worked hard to invite the very best active heroes from every field as teachers for his students. He took pride in combat-training dummies and an AI more up-to-date than at any other academy, and he spared no support so that enrolled students could forge their abilities to the limit. (If one were honest about it, the money was their tuition.)
Inside facilities like those, they came and went as they pleased, arranged their curricula as they pleased, trained as they pleased, made friends as they pleased, and bloomed. Blossom after blossom. Seok Jaehwa believed Miren Academy was the finest of the fine. He was satisfied. If everything kept flowing according to plan—if only the person arrived who could hold up that train as they please—he would have stayed satisfied straight through.
"...No word that he enrolled at another academy."
Murmuring, Principal Seok Jaehwa opened the list of admitted students once more, and his eyes stopped in the stretch of names that began with Seo.
Nothing. Twice, three times, however many times he looked, it was the same. Healing Transcendent. Seo Woojin. This kid. Where had he gone? Don't tell him he'd already signed on somewhere as an agency sidekick.
"Nngh..."
A Healing Transcendent had no particular need to choose an academy, of course. Healing Types were special not only to Korea's famous heroes but overseas as well; if he wanted money, he had only to walk into the agency of whoever offered the highest sum. And long, long ago Seok had already looked into the rumor that the boy extremely disliked exposure in the press. If he'd attached himself somewhere quietly, telling no one, then even the principal had no way of knowing right away. He had connections, but only one ear for news.
There was, however, one fact he had dug out and cross-checked—from the reporter who had handled the interview, and from a classmate out of the same middle school. The reporter had called Student Seo Woojin a cold, stiff student who knows an awful lot about heroes. The classmate had put it as a gloomy hero-otaku bastard who looks perfectly normal and whose hobby is digging up dirt on heroes.
In other words, he liked heroes. More precisely, heroes' information. And a great deal of it.
And so Principal Seok Jaehwa's judgment had been this: a boy like that, rather than entering the agency of a hero whose information was already spread far and wide, might enroll, if only for a while, in an academy packed with fresh heroes. Counting his chickens, in short.
"Blew it."
New information, it seemed, hadn't been as good as money after all. Principal Seok Jaehwa shut the laptop and let out a sigh. With things turned out this way, a few things he hadn't done began, little by little, to feel like regrets. Not reaching out at all, for fear it might burden Student Seo Woojin. And writing—then never sending—a heartfelt email of several thousand characters begging him, please, to come to their academy. Among other things.
But if he really just doesn't show up, what in the world am I supposed to do...
The only Healing Transcendent in this age bracket was Seo Woojin. The next one was still a fifth grader with chubby cheeks. And so there was one embarrassing farce now playing out. Which was—naturally assuming Student Seo Woojin would enroll—that he had prepared a small infirmary on the academy's first floor as a gift for the boy.
"......"
It was fine. The kid had seemed the shut-in type, so he'd prepared a quiet, comfortable room with good soundproofing, but it was fine. Stick an ordinary medical worker in there, someone who wasn't a Transcendent, and the urgent fire would be out. If he said the old infirmary had gotten too crowded and they'd expanded, he could fool the students somehow. He wouldn't escape the pathetic looks asking why he'd spent money on a thing like that when it wasn't even crowded. Thrown in for free would be the looks saying that if there was money for that, he ought to pile a little more onto hero-activity support.
Huu. Sighing, Principal Seok Jaehwa rose from the sofa and straightened his clothes. His stomach hurt. From the tension of how he was supposed to endure those looks.
Just then.
"Hm...?"
Drawing his phone from his pocket, the principal belatedly confirmed that two calls had come in from an unknown number. Ah. Earlier, while he'd been having a bowl of jajangmyeon for lunch, he must have set it to silent instead of vibrate. What a mistake.
"Hmm..."
Spam usually left only a single call. Whose was this? It hadn't even gone through the administration office. A direct line? Rubbing the lower belly that rumbled like thunder, the principal lifted the phone.
"Hello?"
"I'm telling you, it's real!"
"Yeah. Sure."
"My ankle was about to swell up huge from the sprain, and right there on the spot it just—"
"I said I get it. Lee Hayun. So cut it out already. You're making my head spin."
"Ah, okay!"
"...Anyway, what a relief. Ankle's fixed, and I can get the full stipend too. Living expenses were tight this month."
Second floor of the Miren Academy gym. The entrance to the women's showers. Pitch-black hair like a night sky, still under the whirr of a dryer, gave a soft little nod. And then, again—not even five seconds later—the hair that had gone still began to move as if it couldn't contain itself.
"You've never been treated by a Healing Type either, right?"
"...Yeah."
"The feeling's super weird, you know? This warm energy kind of wriggles its way in..."
"...You're so loud.... ...haah..."
"And at the end it spreads all through your body and squirms around every which way, and then pop! And just like that, it's over."
"......"
"Go to a Healing Type and it's done this fast. A cast just doesn't cut it anymore..."
"......"
"Huh? Huh? Jiyoon? Hey, it's still wet here and here."
"If you already know, dry it yourself. I want to look around the academy a little more."
"Ehh... so mean... Your noona's got a makeup class any minute..."
"......"
Step, step. The hair that had been swaying as she walked at an easy pace paused in place. A short white bob, bleached almost entirely white by mana—only when it swayed could you barely catch the black hair underneath.
"...You're going to stay quiet, right?"
"I'll keep my lips sealed just like this."
"You don't have to go that far. ...Just stay quiet. My head hurts. You know I've got chronic headaches."
"Okaaay."
Pretty sure this headache is my sister's fault. She only thought it.
"...Oh, Noona."
"What?"
"What's that room in the corner of the main building's first floor? The one with no nameplate at all."
"Huh?"
"It's there. I saw it on the way in this morning."
A pondering groan drifted over. Even that sound was swallowed whole by the dryer's noisy whirr. Evolution-type. Limiter Release. Lee Hayun, prospective hero of Miren Academy Class 2-B, worried at it a few seconds longer, then spat out an answer.
"Beats me."
"...Forget it. My fault for asking."
"No, I'm serious, there wasn't a room like that... A classroom?"
"Yeah. I get it, so quiet again."
"Aww..."