Half a Hero, Lee Hayun (2)
"Me? I'm on my shift. Can't you tell just by looking?"
Lee Hayun said it while lounging in a posture far too arrogant for a part-timer. How she could sit there with her legs crossed, a customer standing right in front of her, was beyond any ordinary reading of the situation, but I let it pass. It wasn't that I was afraid of turning into some lecturing old fart. Lee Hayun was simply the kind of woman whose sense of closeness whipped one way or the other over nothing more than this: one, you'd actually talked; two, you hadn't. So her sprawling like that in front of me was probably just her letting loose, figuring she had a junior she was close with.
...Right. That much, I could let go. But if the part-timer at this convenience store was Lee Hayun, wasn't there still one thing that refused a clean explanation?
"...Want me to toss you something from the discard pile? Why are you just standing there staring?"
"..."
"You like tuna mayo? Let's see... Oh. We've got Jeonju bibimbap, too."
...A robber.
How on earth had I heard about it?
"What time do you get off?"
"Eleven. One hour left~."
I had time to kill anyway, so I planted myself in the convenience store and talked with Lee Hayun for a while. At first it was rough going. She kept bringing up things that were hard to volley back—cosmetics this, training that's brutal that—but food, at least, was workable. Lee Hayun's tastes were useful information to me.
"Noodles, any kind is fine... Yes."
"Me? Red bean buns! Fresh cream red bean buns!"
"...?"
"You don't know them? They're so good."
"...I'll try one next time."
Mid-conversation she pulled out a food I'd never even heard of—fresh cream red bean buns—so I filed it away for the time being. Her guard was already well and truly down, but if I kept stacking favorability, nice and steady, the choices open to me would only multiply. I looked down at the bright, innocent smile she wore as she giggled that there were fifty-nine minutes left now, and turned my eyes away before she could start to wonder.
Outside the store, it was boringly deserted. The convenience store near my studio usually had a customer or two even at this hour. Here, astonishingly, I hadn't seen a single passerby for about twenty minutes—and this was a shop tucked between houses in a residential neighborhood. Shouldn't there at least be someone coming in for cigarettes? Was this a block full of non-smoking grandmas and grandpas who turned in early?
I turned it over for a moment, then asked her.
"Is it always this empty?"
"Hmm... Mostly? Around this time, not really?"
Lee Hayun stretched with a long groan, tore open a carton of cigarettes, and slotted the packs neatly onto the shelf as she spoke.
"I've been working here about half a year, and weirdly, nobody shows up right around this hour. No idea why, though."
"..."
"Last time, there was a whole week where not a single person came in? Ten to eleven. Exactly this window."
She went on stocking, humming some unidentifiable little tune through her nose.
...Was it because I'd seen her a few hours ago, rain-soaked, a T-shirt plastered to her body? A baggy hoodie, a convenience store uniform layered over that, and still I could rough out in my head the shape of what was underneath.
This was not the time.
Quietly, so Lee Hayun wouldn't hear, I swallowed the saliva that had welled up and filled my mouth.
"Noona."
"Yeah?"
"I should get going. I came out for a run and just ended up this far."
"...Weren't you here to buy something? You're just leaving?"
"Ah..."
Right. I hadn't actually thought about what to buy. If the part-timer hadn't been Lee Hayun, I would have browsed the shelves and walked straight out. After a brief moment of indecision, I picked up a throat lozenge from just beneath the register.
Beep, beep—the scanner chirped. And before I could get my card out, one slipped from Lee Hayun's wallet a step ahead of me. Some strange animal drawn across it... A memorable card, in any case.
"Here. Payment for keeping me company."
Lee Hayun, as always, with the corners of her mouth tugged up in that loose, foolish grin. Remembering for a moment that she brought up money more than most people did, I left a thank-you behind and walked out of the store.
I jogged an easy two hundred meters, as if I were simply heading home.
Any eyes on me? Any presence hiding nearby?
I checked as I went, turned a few corners, and waited three seconds. Then I spun, cut back the exact opposite way, and started toward the convenience store again. About a minute. Long enough for a culprit who'd been casing the area to decide it was time to move. Waiting and waiting never brought anything to an end; when an opening appeared, you finished it in a single stroke. So if the culprit had been hiding nearby, lying in wait, they would already have passed through the automatic doors.
I did wonder what I'd do if it was a robber with a knife... but an Evolution Type Transcendent of Lee Hayun's caliber wasn't at much risk of getting stabbed by a blade some ordinary person swung. Still, I was a little uneasy about what would happen if the robber was a Transcendent too. I could heal her myself. I'd just rather she not come out of it smelling like someone else.
Drawing close to the store again, I killed my footsteps so I wouldn't botch the thing. From a distance, the convenience store was still spilling out its bright, glittering light. Nothing looked different from before. Fortunately, the residential streets were choked with cars parked every which way. I wedged myself into the gaps between them, moved carefully, and stopped where I had a clear view of the store, concealing myself.
...Regrettably, nothing had happened yet. All I could see was Lee Hayun, counting the cash in the register before the handoff to the next shift, making sure the amount came out exact.
Hmm. I'd wondered if the culprit couldn't make a move because I'd been inside the store—but had the whole thing just been a delusion? Or maybe, since I'd stayed in there so long, they'd already given up. I popped the gifted throat lozenge into my mouth and slowly took in my surroundings. Alleys to either side. An alley on the diagonal. No matter where I looked, I couldn't sense a single presence. It was an uneasy quiet, the kind that feels as if a ghost might show itself at any moment.
...
Roughly fifty minutes. I'd stick around until Lee Hayun's shift change, more or less. If it were anyone else, I wouldn't particularly care if a robber put a knife in them. I tugged my neck warmer up a little higher and watched the alleys, letting the lozenge melt.
Ten minutes passed.
A rustle—a small footstep, from somewhere close. My vigil over the alleys, as if I'd appointed myself Lee Hayun's stalker, ended there. I shifted my gaze at once to where the sound had come from.
A woman who looked a little tense was picking her way down the alley on careful feet. Five-seven or so. Pretty tall, for a woman. Aside from that, the notable thing was that her glasses were quite thick. Her build was ordinary. Nothing about her suggested she was trained, but she wasn't overly thin or heavy either.
If she'd simply been walking—or at the very least walking with a cigarette—I wouldn't have given her a second thought. But the rise and fall of her ribcage as she kept taking deep breaths, and the suspicious habit of glancing behind her again and again, naturally shoved my thoughts in one direction.
That bitch. The robber.
But how to put it. She was a woman, for one thing, and her face looked a little too mild for someone about to brazenly rob a store. It threw me.
I watched a little longer, and the feet that had been walking in a straight line changed direction. Toward the convenience store, no less.
The door chimed, thin and bright, and the woman stepped inside. Unlike when I'd walked in, a lively voice calling "Welcome!" came through clear as anything. Nothing yet. She hadn't suddenly drawn a knife from her pocket; she'd only slipped between the middle shelves the way any shopper would. Maybe I'd been judging people too much by how they looked.
I was in the middle of revising my assessment of her when, as if she'd made up her mind, she gave her shoulders one big heave, took off her glasses, and shoved them into her pocket.
There are Transcendents like that, now and then. The kind who can only use their ability once a few trivial conditions are met. Or the kind who deliberately place restrictions on themselves, limiting the ability in ordinary life.
A bad feeling creeping over me, I stepped carefully out of the dark. Should I have taken up a position closer in? I'd been watching from a good fifteen meters off, and because of that the woman—snack in hand, already closing on the register—was far faster than I was.
She was staring straight at Lee Hayun's face, tension written on her so plainly that anyone could have read it. While Lee Hayun scanned the barcode. While she took the card and ran the payment. While the sale ended and Lee Hayun moved to hand the card back. Even while Lee Hayun tilted her head, puzzled by the woman who simply stood there.
Unblinking.
She was staring at Lee Hayun's face.
...Well. If the woman were a devoted fan of hero trainee Lee Hayun, that could explain it. But—
Ding. Ding.
"Hey."
"...?"
—watching Lee Hayun, who'd been holding the woman's eyes all that while, fold and drop as if she'd fallen asleep, I could tell a fan was not what this was.
"W-wait, you've got it wrong—"
Thud.
A human head, so long as it doesn't actually crack, tends to make a sound clearer than you'd expect. I grabbed the woman's skull and slammed it into the convenience store floor, and when I saw her twitching and crawling like an insect, I went to Lee Hayun.
For the moment, she only seemed to be asleep. But Magic Types were the sort whose abilities you couldn't name until every card was face up, and this might be one of the more troublesome kinds. A powerful ability that kept you asleep for life until the caster chose to release it, for instance. Or perhaps putting people to sleep wasn't the real power at all, and hypnosis was the true body of it.
Anyway. That woman hadn't come to a convenience store just to buy a single snack. To clean out the register. Or to strip the organs from the girl asleep in here while she was at it. She must have come with some purpose of that sort.
I laid Lee Hayun down on the floor in a comfortable position for the moment and approached the woman I'd just put down. The twitching hadn't stopped. There was a little blood—maybe her head had bounced off the floor and split—but so long as she could still communicate, that hardly mattered.
"F...fuck..."
"Undo the magic first."
"Can't... undo it..., you fuck..., an hour... has to pass..."
She hacked and retched, drool spilling from her mouth as she feebly waved her hands. I seized a fistful of her hair and hauled her up to eye level. She clawed wildly at my arm and the back of my hand, demanding I let go, but that was all she could do. The tips of her feet, straining desperately to reach the floor, swayed in a pitiful little dance.
"That true?"
"Why would I... go out of my way... to lie..."
I wasn't a combatant who worked the front lines, but I'd picked up a few things looking over the shoulders of villains. Yozora's, especially. People become honest more easily than you'd think. All the more so when their own life is tied up in it.
So I—
Thud.
—drove the woman's head into the floor once more. Maybe because her feet hadn't been touching the ground, the sound was louder than before.
"Haa..."
Maybe because it had been a while since I'd put any real strength into something. I was considerably warm. I pulled off my neck warmer, set it on the register, laid a hand on the woman's head, and rapidly set about healing the damage. As mana raked through the inside of her body, the ugly hacking that had been going on since earlier quickly died away.
What came back, though, was an extremely unpleasant stare. Full of rage. A stare that said she would kill me somehow, no matter what it took. She still hadn't gotten honest.
Thud.
Blood and some unidentified fluid sprayed together off the floor where the sound rang out. This time I'd angled it wrong; her nose seemed to have broken. I blew out a sigh and healed her wounds again. The same hacking subsided, and this time a slightly different gaze turned on me. Dull, and without any life in it, like a fish that had been out of the water too long. Only now, it seemed, was she of a mind to talk.
"The magic. Undo it."
"..."
A brief silence. Then, with a hand that trembled hard, the woman drew out her glasses and set them over her eyes. Those same chunky glasses from before.
Lee Hayun opened her eyes immediately after.
"...Mm?"
Sparkling clover-green eyes, thoroughly unsuited to the grimness of everything a moment ago, blinked and slipped back behind her lids.
"...Huh? Wha?"
Lee Hayun rustled herself up off the floor and came this way with an uncertain, put-out tread. She looked back and forth between me, standing there perfectly fine, and the woman kneeling on the floor and shaking, and spoke.
"...Ma'am. Did you fall?"
"..."
It was a very Lee Hayun reaction. So why was the sigh coming out of me?
"Uuum...? Why's my head all tingly...? Woojin, why are you here again?"
"Noona. Make a call first."
"A call? Out of nowhere? To where?"
"112. And where do I check the CCTV?"
"112? Uh, um, that's—the computer's in the back, the room that looks like a storage closet..."