I Want to Fuck a Hero (5)
I had no idea what to wear.
White might be nice. Something about it looked bright.
Or I could just go in the same gloomy black I always wore and call it a day. Other colors weren't even in consideration. Villains are stubborn about achromatic clothes, and the closet of a former villain like me was packed accordingly—a little white, and then black, black, and more black, crammed in until the hangers groaned.
Pick it apart and it was a bullshit philosophy. Still, in my experience, that was how most of them felt. Yozora, that bitch who'd suggested drinks at my place a few days before I died, was flashy enough, but if you looked only at the colors she landed in more or less the same place. So did the other villains, the ones whose names I can't even remember anymore. At best, a pair of jeans was the whole of their fashion sense.
"A watch… right. I don't have one."
Unusually mild for the dead of February, but winter all the same. Instead of the clean white a medical man ought to wear, I pulled on a long puffer with white fur at the hood, grabbed the still-wet umbrella, and stepped out of the house.
All right. Time for the interview.
There's an old saying: pull the ox horn while the iron is hot. The original meaning is so ancient that explaining it wouldn't land, so the short version will do—when the chance comes, don't hesitate. Act at once.
Principal Seok Jaehwa was very fond of that saying. The reason was simple. He was a simple man.
"Heh heh heh."
Weighing this and measuring that, running complicated calculations—none of it suited his temper. A villain appears in front of him, and he kills them with a fist clenched for all it's worth. He finds a villain's hideout, and he drives his knee up, boom, and smashes it apart. He does not negotiate with villains. If the menu is a dilemma, everyone gets jajangmyeon. If they've all gathered and there's nothing left to do, they disband. Even if he's home scratching his belly in front of the TV, the moment a request for backup comes in he charges without a second thought. And if someone he's been wanting to see gets in touch, what comes out of his mouth isn't let's meet tomorrow. It's let's meet right now.
That was the life of Seok Jaehwa, former No. 5 Hero of South Korea.
Which was why Seok Jaehwa, currently principal of a hero-training institution—
"A pleasure to meet you, Seo Woojin."
"Yes."
—considered it a genuine stroke of luck to be facing Seo Woojin at last, even this late. Lucky enough that he personally mixed a cup of instant coffee, grinning the whole time.
Woojin, for his part, glanced at the capsule machine sitting some distance off, then at the paper cup in front of him. A question occurred to him. He didn't ask it. He liked the mix better anyway. They'd probably just spent the money on expensive interiors.
"I feel like I only just called, and here you are already."
"My place is close."
"Close to home, is it… Good."
A question like that, at something like a part-time interview, usually means if we call you in a rush, can you show up anytime? All the more so at a café or a convenience store, where people no-call, no-show as a habit. But Principal Seok was simple. He was merely happy at the thought that he might be able to tuck the Healing-type Transcendent Seo Woojin into his bouquet. More precisely, into the place of the wire that binds a bouquet tight. Or the nonwoven wrap that goes inside, or the paper that sheaths the outside. Somewhere around there.
"From what I saw, it looked like a little over thirty minutes."
"If you count getting ready and all… yes. About that."
"Good. Good. Commute's no problem, then…"
Of course, even if it had been a problem, it wouldn't have mattered. Wasn't that the sort of thing a single house could solve?
"Whether you've got a health-teacher certification, the staffing quota, all of that—I went over it on the phone, so there's no need to rehash it, is there?"
"No. You said it was all up to you, Principal."
The prestigious Miren Academy. Surprisingly, not a national school and not a public one. A private academy.
"That's more or less what I meant, but you're being terribly blunt about it."
"Thinking about it rationally, I couldn't see a reason you wouldn't hire me as the health teacher."
"That's true, but…"
A Healing-type Transcendent. Position: health teacher.
It felt like sending a national-class hero after some two-bit punk. Whether that was a good way to put it, Woojin wasn't sure. He quietly rubbed the tips of his fingers together. Health teacher was a rather regrettable post if the goal was tying down a Healing-type Transcendent, but he didn't care.
Position: health teacher of a hero-training institution.
Where else was he going to meet this many injured heroes?
Of course, if those meetings with heroes had been a little more dramatic, a little more vicious, nothing could have been better. He'd given up on that a long time ago. You go down that road and you get carved up by a scythe the size of a person, slice, slice, and you die coughing blood. Even if it sat a little further from his tastes, the safer road was the better one.
…Come to think of it, wasn't that woman from Miren too?
Where had Reaper come from, again? Woojin was turning over the information he'd gathered back then, stroking the rim of the paper cup with a finger, when the principal's face across from him drifted into view. Looked like the man had something he wanted to say.
"That part."
"Yes?"
"That's what I wanted to discuss with you, Woojin."
"…A salary negotiation?"
"No. The part about being a health teacher."
Principal Seok said it while folding in half the sheets of interview questions he'd brought along. He'd carried them in for form's sake, and now that he thought about it, he hadn't needed them. Why? Because he was the principal.
"Why a teacher, and not a student?"
"The application window had already closed."
A simple reason. Thanks to that, Seok Jaehwa could nod without having to think very hard.
"Then there's something I'd like to propose."
"Yes."
"Would you consider enrolling as a student, rather than coming on as the health teacher? I can make the opportunity."
"Not a particularly tempting offer. There's nothing in it for me."
And there truly wasn't. If Woojin set foot in the academy as the health teacher, a salary of no small size would come his way. If he set foot in it as a student, the income vanished, and he'd be the one paying tuition to the academy instead. And if you asked whether being a student came with some separate advantage, not especially. Whatever shape it took, what a hero-training institution taught its prospective heroes came down to killing villains. A Healing-type Transcendent had no method for killing villains. In other words, there was nothing to learn.
Ah. There was a way to kill them sexually. He thought of it, and it felt like an unfunny joke, so he kept his mouth shut.
"Student Woojin. This may be quite a rude thing to say."
"Go ahead. I've got a fairly thick skin."
"…I understand you're extremely fond of heroes."
"……"
Not even that rude, really. Woojin took a sip of coffee, then nodded.
He remembered the interview at ten years old, when he'd spent something like twenty minutes describing a single hero who looked so perfectly, filthily his type. He'd assumed the whole thing had been edited out. Apparently the rumor had leaked from somewhere, somehow. …A little embarrassing, that.
"So rather than staying shut up in the infirmary as the health teacher, wouldn't it be better to build real friendships with the other Transcendent students? They're prospective heroes too."
"You're not wrong."
He wasn't wrong. However.
"I just don't quite see why you'd go that far out of your way for me."
It was a little suspicious. Whether that was really the reason he wanted Woojin enrolled as a student. Arms folded, Woojin studied the principal across from him. He didn't actually think the man was hiding anything all that strange. At most he'd be angling for the publicity of our academy even has a Healing-type Transcendent! But that worked just fine if Woojin stayed on as the health teacher, didn't it? Wasn't the health teacher post the better one? Did he really need to be a student? Come to our academy and whatever's hurting you gets cured, clean! ought to be plenty.
That was how Woojin saw it.
"…Well."
"Yes."
"You're twenty, aren't you?"
"That's right."
"At an age when you ought to be out enjoying your youth, burning it up—starting in as a 'teacher' already seemed a little early, so…"
"……"
But the principal was simple. Just a hot-blooded, simple man. The sort of man who still suited being a hero better than being a principal.
Seo Woojin answered quietly.
"…I'm fine with it."
He did not, of course, add that he had been thirty.
The small talk was more or less finished. What he'd be doing as the health teacher. Commute hours—surprisingly, he'd been told a certain amount of freedom was fine. Academy rules. The salary negotiation. A pure-white health teacher's coat that was clean enough and somehow still not to his liking. And so on, and so on.
By the time the unfinished business ran out, red light was wavering beyond the curtain.
"…On paper you'll be a 'teacher,' but I'll explain you to the students as a Health Committee Member. They're the same age as you at the youngest, or younger, so having them address Instructor Seo as the health teacher would be uncomfortable in its own way."
"That much doesn't matter."
"Kids these days are very particular about that sort of thing."
"They are."
In the end, take away the salary and this wasn't much different from enrolling as a student, was it? If he'd explained it that way from the start, I would have just nodded and been done with it.
I crushed the empty paper cup, dropped it in the trash, and got to my feet while checking the notification screen on my phone. An empty notification window. Same as always.
"I'll head out, then. Just to confirm—I start tomorrow. Correct?"
"Yes. Some of the second- and third-years are at the academy even now."
"Sounds exactly like high schoolers stuck in supplementary classes over break."
"It's a little different from that. The outstanding students are out on practical training. Right now the only ones left are the troublemakers who didn't get a love call from an agency."
"Aha."
So the woman I'd seen during the day was a troublemaker too, then. …Well, yeah. Hurting herself because she couldn't even control her own power—troublemaker was fair. Given what the name Miren was worth, a troublemaker among the top one percent, but still.
I traded a rough goodbye with the principal, worked the stiffness out of my body, and headed down to the first floor.
Mm. The infirmary I'd be using was supposedly stuck in a corner of the first-floor main building. I ought to confirm the location first, so tomorrow's commute wouldn't hit a snag. Checking the door and the walls while I was at it would be even better.
Maybe because it was the main building, there wasn't a student in sight. A few heroes who looked like instructors brushed past me. A male hero whose upper body was built like a bull. A male hero with something like seven rings on his left hand alone—magic type, or just his taste. And, for some reason, a male hero with his head shaved clean, the sort of PE-teacher look you'd only see in an adult game. All of them male heroes. I had no idea who any of them were, and no reason to greet them, so I ignored them and made for the corner of the first floor.
And the place I arrived at—
"……"
—was nothing but a door, sitting there bare, with not a single thing hung on it.
This ought to be the first-floor corner the principal had meant. But there wasn't a single pictogram of the kind any man, woman, child, or dog on the street would recognize as an infirmary. There should at least have been a green cross. Or a nameplate that said infirmary. The one mercy was that they seemed to want the privacy kept: there wasn't even a small window cut into the door. I liked that. The handle itself, when I took it in hand, felt quite high-end. One point added.
…But the location, and the atmosphere…
Don't tell me they meant to turn whatever had been a storage room into the infirmary starting tomorrow. If so, the soundproofing was starting to look a little suspect.
I opened the door without expecting much. Fortunately, the door itself felt extremely heavy. It dragged hard along the floor and still opened without a sound, which suggested something like a brush seal had been fitted along the bottom. Three points added.
The inside, unexpectedly, wasn't a storeroom. It had the shape of an ordinary infirmary. Not very wide—maybe fifty square meters. A plain infirmary, a little larger than the one I'd seen back in high school. Strangely enough, it didn't seem to have a trace of human hands on it, and I couldn't tell why. Maybe it was clean because an infirmary can't help having patients in and out all the time. Now that I thought about it, that might be it. What was I going to do? I was no good at keeping things tidy.
Breathing in some nameless, refreshing deodorant, I went in and first drew the curtain a little, the one that had been tied back and left helplessly wide open. Only then did my eyes feel a bit easier.
I turned my gaze. A desk stretched out in an L. In front of it, several beds lay in a row, covered in white sheets. A desk was a desk; what mattered was the bed. I wasn't expecting much from an infirmary bed, but if it was reasonably soft and could take the weight of two adults, that would do.
Should I climb on and test it? I was walking toward the bed without much thought when—
"…?"
In front of the bed hidden under the white sheet, I found a pair of old canvas sneakers. Small, worn canvas shoes, a little splashed with muddy water from the rain. Their owner's feet must have been small.
"……"
That aside, why were they here?
I stared at the shoes for a moment, then slowly drew aside the white sheet covering the bed. Inside was a guest who had found the infirmary before I did. Dead asleep, with a face that didn't know a thing about the world.
A girl whose snow-white, medium-length hair—lightly covering her left brow and the top of her shoulder—suited her extremely well. When a villain I'd toyed with before had hair just like that, she'd thrown a fit about it being a beggar cut. Probably this one could pull it off because her face was on the small side.
The chest rising soft and full inside a snow-white knit, lifting with every breath, was a chest, sure. The smooth-looking thighs trapped in stockings stretched so tight they looked ready to split were thighs, sure. But my eyes caught, for a moment, on the pitch-black wired earphones running to an ear left slightly bare. These days everyone was on wireless, so was she one of those people who went on about the sound quality of wired earphones? For someone like that, they looked incredibly old.
…Well. Anyway.
"……"
What was I supposed to say? Somehow, she… this woman looked like someone I'd seen before.
I tilted my head and studied her face a little longer.
"……Ah."
I remembered.
Codename: Witch.
The witch who turned the cockroaches gnawing at society into beautiful shards of ice and shattered them until not even a trace remained. The witch who, even while she did it, never once showed a smile. The witch famous for a private life sealed tight behind a veil. South Korea's No. 8, ten years from now.
Lee Jiyoon, ten years younger, was lying defenseless in front of my eyes. In an appearance a little shabbier than the one I remembered.