A Place to Stay?
He had begged to be spared. What unfolded instead was a scene that defied belief.
Park Ji-hoon — an SS-class villain — had been stripped of every ounce of gravitas, reduced to a grotesque, sniveling wreck pleading for his life. And the force that had brought him so low was overwhelming. The assault had been so one-sided, so merciless, that anyone walking in cold would have struggled to say which of them was the villain.
And the fact that a boy who looked no older than she was could wield power like that... that was what left her truly stunned.
"Did you let the people who said that live?"
Baek Seo-jun turned a gaze as cold as winter on the groveling Park Ji-hoon.
"O-of course I did!"
The lie flew out of his mouth so fast that Seomun Ye-jin's brow furrowed. This was the same villain who had been going on about selling her as a slave — and now he was groveling for his life, playing the pitiful victim. The sight of it was nauseating.
"That's a lie."
Seo-jun looked down at him, his voice like ice.
"I suppose expecting a villain to reform was always a fool's errand."
"W-wai—"
Park Ji-hoon's body dissolved without a trace. The energy pouring from the tentacles that had pierced him flooded over every inch of his flesh and unmade him entirely.
His soul, however, was another matter. An SS-class villain's soul carried a correspondingly high caliber.
AAAAAAAHHH!
A death-wail tore through the air. It was the shriek of a soul — and because he had been an SS-class villain, the grade of that soul was high enough that even the living heard it with terrible, ringing clarity.
"The quantity of energy is acceptable. Measured against a harvest of the entire world, it is a paltry sum — but if there were many like him, the yield at harvest time would have been quite something."
I gave a slight nod at Lamia's words.
"I suppose so."
But simply gathering power this way wasn't the answer. My real advantage was growth. Not swelling my strength by devouring more and more, but cultivating that power myself — that was what mattered above all else.
And it wasn't just about revenge. A threat far greater than the original story's final boss — Lamia, The Black Snake That Devours the World — was already drawing near. The fact that I had inherited her power in the first place was because of that approaching catastrophe.
If I want to stop it, I need to expand my influence, too.
Of course, lofty causes like that took a back seat. What my heart wanted first — what it wanted most — was revenge. It was the hunger for vengeance that had driven me back from the Dimensional Rift into this world.
Seomun Ye-jin watched the boy come toward her.
"You all right, miss? Can you stand?"
The boy who approached her snapped the ropes and the mana-binding cuffs as if they were nothing, setting her free in a single motion. The mana that had been locked away surged back through her, and she pushed herself up on a wave of cool, dizzying relief. Even the senses that had gone dull while her mana was sealed flickered back to life, and the stifling tightness in her chest finally eased.
"Yes. Thank you... for saving me."
She offered her gratitude first. His methods of killing the villains had been brutal, but he didn't seem like a bad person. Maybe that was only because she had been their victim — but either way, the boy standing in front of her was her savior.
"Good. Doesn't look like you're hurt."
"Yes! Ah — would it be all right if we introduced ourselves? I'm Seomun Ye-jin. I'm fifteen."
"Same age as me. I'm Baek Seo-jun. Fifteen."
"Oh! We're the same age!"
Her eyes lit up at that. Knowing that the nameless boy who had saved her was her own age made the distance she had felt from him shrink all at once. It hadn't been his looks — though he was strikingly, almost unfairly handsome — so much as the air around him. He carried himself like someone older, and she had half-wondered if he might be.
She was curious, of course. About his strength. About who he really was. But she wasn't going to pry. She wouldn't ask how someone their age could already be this powerful, or what circumstances had led him to come out of a rift.
There were only two things she wanted to know.
"Do you have a phone number, by any chance?"
"No, I don't. I'll need to get a new one."
The first thing she had wanted was a way to reach him. That, it seemed, was a dead end.
"I see. I don't have anything on me right now, either..."
She used to carry business cards for just this sort of thing. She had done a fair amount of modeling, and people recognized her often enough that agencies would press cards into her hands, trying to cast her or hire her for a shoot. She kept her own cards on her in case she ever felt like taking a job. She had no interest in becoming a celebrity, but if a modeling gig caught her eye, she would swap cards and that would be that.
Being kidnapped by villains, however, was not a situation in which one packed a phone, a wallet, or a stack of business cards. And "a contact number" had only ever meant putting hers into his phone anyway.
"Then... do you have a place to stay?"
That was the second thing.
"A place to stay, huh."
She saw him close his eyes for a moment. Recalling something, maybe. His expression darkened — the look of a person remembering something ugly and deeply unpleasant.
"No. Not anymore."
She asked her next question carefully.
"When you say 'not anymore'... did I just overstep?"
She was already worrying that villains had taken his family from him — that asking about a home had been a terrible breach. Seo-jun huffed a quiet laugh.
"You're a worrywart, aren't you, miss? Don't sweat it. It's nothing. The people who used to be my family are all perfectly fine. Eating well, living well. After all, they sold me off to villains to save their own skins."
"What?"
What he said next was beyond anything she had imagined. She couldn't bring herself to ask what he meant. The picture she had painted — a boy who had lost his family to villains — was almost quaint next to the truth he had just laid out.
"Th-then you don't have a place to live?"
"That's right."
She scrambled to change the subject. She was fifteen. A topic that heavy was more than she could carry. So she steered them back to the question of where he would stay.
"W-well, if you don't have anywhere to go, how about staying at my place? I live alone, you know! There's nobody else at home!"
The truth was, her own family situation was nothing to envy. Her parents had died in an accident, and she had been raised with her grandmother's help — but she and her grandmother did not live together. At home, she was entirely on her own.
"Miss. Are you asking me to move in with you?"
He looked at her with something like disbelief, and her chest gave a sharp, mortified twinge. The embarrassment arrived all at once, and late.
"Ugh! Th-that's not— ah. No. I guess it is living together. Wait... um, just think of it as boarding! Boarding!"
Her words tangled. She forced them back into order and pressed on. This was boarding. Not... the other thing.
"I have as many empty rooms as you could want. So just make yourself at home! What do you think? Tempting, right?"
Seo-jun folded his arms and seemed to actually consider it. She found it faintly absurd that she was this nervous over a simple offer — but she told herself it was the least she could do. A small attempt to repay the debt of being saved.
"What's the monthly rent?"
She shook her head so fast her hair swayed.
"There's no need for rent! No — I won't take any! You saved me, so it's free!"
"Hmm. This is starting to sound like, 'I saved you, so hand over the house.'"
The cynicism in his voice finally made her puff out her cheeks.
"You don't have to look at it that way... I'm saying this because I'm genuinely grateful."
She pointed at the black snake coiled around his shoulders.
"And a snake like this would need to be registered as a pet... but it doesn't look like an ordinary snake, so I doubt registering it would be easy. Finding a rental that would take you as a paying tenant would be hard, too. So keeping it at my house would be much more convenient."
Seo-jun stroked the snake draped over his shoulder.
"You've got a point."
He muttered under his breath that it wasn't as if he couldn't have solved it himself — then looked at her.
"Then I'll be in your care, miss."
"Yes! Ah — about the villains you took down here... there aren't any bodies left, so claiming the bounties would be difficult. Would you like me to serve as a witness?"
"No, it's fine. I don't plan on making this public."
He shook his head, and a faint coldness settled over his face. The sudden chill in his expression made her flinch. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quiet and sharp.
"For now, I'd rather my existence not come to light just yet. There are people who'd make things... inconvenient if they noticed."
I still couldn't afford to have my existence noticed.
I remembered it with perfect, unbroken clarity.
The SSS-class villain. So Gang-seok.
Not for a single moment had I forgotten that he had filmed the scene that day. I had to get my hands on that footage. No matter what.
Still... even if I did save her, this girl is just inviting me into her home? Does she not have a single shred of caution?