Hypnosis Apps Are Real (1)
[You will be possessed by the last game you played.]
"Huh."
Fuck.
"I played an eroge."
A dark night. The kind of pre-dawn hour when the only thing that should be glowing is the light of convenience store signs lining the street — and I stood on the rooftop of a high-rise building, staring down at that whole street laid bare below me.
Weeeooo—!
Sirens wailed, shrill and relentless. You might wonder what kind of police cruisers go tearing around at this hour with their sirens blaring, but this was not a world where citizens filed complaints at the station over noise. Not anymore.
"Careful, everyone!"
"The target could be anywhere!"
"The target is an A-Rank villain!"
Radio chatter buzzed in my ears.
"What he's believed to be carrying... is a Hypnosis App!!"
Amid the desperate shouts of agents crackling across the frequency, I mined the transmissions for what I needed.
"An A-Rank Hypnosis App user."
Tap.
Light bloomed from the smartwatch on my wrist. On its coin-sized circular display, only quickly scrolling text shimmered.
[SEARCH COMPLETE.]
[National Police Agency Database: 0 results]
[Secret Society "Pandora": 0 results]
"A new villain, huh."
A sigh escaped me of its own accord. The emergence of a criminal with no record anywhere — not in the light, not in the shadows. Three in the morning, the hour when human beings should be sunk in their deepest sleep. Instead, civilians cowered and trembled, and the suited agents surrounding the mansion stood with pistols drawn.
"Ahem. Surrender quietly."
The woman who stepped forward from among the dozens of agents was black-haired, and the dark circles sagging beneath her eyes suggested she hadn't slept properly in days.
"...I told you to stop wasting your energy on pointless things and go to bed early."
"Shall we attempt negotiation?"
"No need. Spend the time you'd waste talking digging for intel instead. Whether what this A-Rank villain is using is secondhand — or a fresh build that 'That Guy' just manufactured—"
Crash!
A window of the mansion shattered, and something enormous appeared in the frame.
"You fucking bastards...! You won't stay still, huh?!"
A man well over two meters tall. His bare upper body, exposed as if he'd just come from some frenzied exertion, was flushed dark with blood. He'd managed to keep his pants on at least, though anyone getting a closer look would know at once exactly what he'd been doing.
"The moment you fire, this woman dies!"
Naturally enough — the giant was holding a young woman by the throat in front of him, using her as a hostage. A textbook hostage standoff straight out of a movie. The difference from the movies was that for me, this situation was reality, and...
"Master, hehe...."
...the hostage was not behaving like one.
"M-Master! No! It's dangerous!"
Far from struggling, she was crying Master at the very man who'd taken her hostage, and she even seemed ready to throw her own body between the police bullets and him. A situation no sane person could comprehend. But in this world, that kind of sight was common sense.
"You hear me, huh?! The second you fire, this bitch gets riddled with holes!"
"M-Master...! You mustn't say things like that here...!"
"He's under a hypnosis app."
A world where the absurd had become ordinary. A world where the jokes you'd only find in an eroge had come true.
"If it's an A-Rank hypnosis app, driving someone that deep into immersion is no feat at all."
Hypnosis apps existed in this world. Someone had unleashed them upon it. If this were an eroge, the giant would simply have forced himself on the woman and the scene would have played out like any other piece of adult content.
But this world was reality, and people did not use hypnosis apps for their original purpose.
"Do not let that man touch his phone under any circumstances!"
Zap.
A red laser pointer painted itself across the man's hands. The snipers weren't aiming for his head or throat — their crosshairs sat squarely on his hands, as if to blow his arms off before he could so much as snap his fingers. Especially the hand gripping the smartphone, not the one holding the woman.
"Y-you people! Whether you're wearing special lenses or goggles, you know that stuff won't work on me!"
The man raised his voice, brandishing the phone in every direction.
"What I've got here is no ordinary thing! One press of a button and I can turn every single person here into a drooling half-wit!"
With dozens of agents aiming weapons at him, he still wielded that smartphone like a scepter, threatening them all — as if a single flicked app could put this entire scene under his thumb.
"So, how about it?! Want to live out the rest of your lives as gibbering idiots who can do nothing but stare at walls?! Huh?!"
"Ggh...! Team Leader!"
"Excuse me."
The woman who'd been aiming her pistol at the front of the crowd took a single step forward.
"Drive the dozens of people here into idiocy? You have the capacity to pull that off?"
"Of course I do!"
"And afterward, the strength to escape here alive?"
"........."
"I don't know how high-grade your app is, but I doubt you have enough power to hypnotize this entire headcount and still walk out of here."
She was right. It was the kind of response you'd find printed verbatim in the Villain Countermeasure Association's field manual — textbook down to the letter.
"Well raised."
Watching the exchange from a distance, I quietly drew out my smartphone.
"But that's all it is."
They still couldn't see the truth of it — which meant it fell to me to handle this.
[Shall we proceed?]
The message chimed on my watch. Instead of answering, I pressed my thumb to the rectangular phone, slid the screen open, and tapped one app among the dozens stored there.
"Transform."
Click.
Light gathered at the tip of the smartphone. Current surging from its core condensed into a bullet of pure energy at the muzzle, and I aimed the barrel downward.
My target was—
"Oh."
Just before I fired, our eyes met.
"Who dares mess with my Master...."
"You're fishing for the wrong person."
"!!"
At the woman clutched in the giant's arms.
Taaang!
The laser bullet streaked down like light itself. Faster than anyone could react, it plunged toward the ground.
Pitchok.
In the darkness, a single flash pierced the hostage clean through. It wasn't a laser pointer tracing her head — it bored straight into it, and blood burst from the side of the woman's skull in a wet spurt.
"Ah...."
Everyone froze — the agents who'd had their own guns trained on the hostage, and the woman spattered with her blood alike.
"That's—"
"Team Leader! It's that bastard!!"
Her subordinates' voices rang out toward her.
"You bastards! You want to die?! Can't you see the hostage here?!"
Thum-thum-thum.
The light of helicopters swept across the man. Even with his head blown open and hanging limp, he held the corpse up like a living shield, threatening everyone around him — and there wasn't a flicker of hesitation in his eyes. As though this were something he simply had to do.
"It's...!"
The woman they called Team Leader turned her gaze on me. Reverse-tracing the trajectory of that brief flash to locate my position — that much was genuinely commendable.
"Again...! Again, you—!"
But a pity. She hadn't realized who the hypnosis app's true owner was.
"Ah...! Everyone, find the woman's smartphone!!"
Too late. The cooldown on my second shot had just expired.
Taaang!
A blue flash punched through the pants pocket of the woman who had been a hostage — and was now a corpse. Smoke began to rise from the shredded pocket where a ruined smartphone smoldered, and a moment later, particles of red light rose from within and floated up into the sky.
And that clump of light—
"Scan."
Shrrrrk!!
The hunt was over. The light streamed into my smartphone — the phone of the one who had become its rightful owner.
Spa-ba-ba-bak!
A searchlight whipped around toward me. The helicopter circling overhead had finally found me, and a glare bright enough to blind poured down over my body.
"It's...!"
"Aaah."
As if talking on speakerphone, I held the smartphone up to my mouth like a microphone.
"A hard night, gentlemen."
"Murderer!!"
The woman screamed.
"You helmeted freak...!"
"You bastards! Can't you see this?! The moment you touch me, this woman is a dead woman! Got it?!"
The giant was still gripping the dead woman's body and shaking it, but by now his shouting was nothing more than noise to be lost beneath the whir of rotor blades.
"Who are you?! What do you want?! Ten years ago you were a ghost — why have you come back now?!"
All that answered her was the woman's own rage-choked shriek.
"You killed my mother like that, and now, after all these years, you crawl back out — WHY?!"
If I had to answer — if I had to.
It was for you. And for all of you.
"You don't need to know."
I swiped the screen and opened another app.
"Not ever."
"...! He's trying to run! Everyone, fire!"
"What?! Team Leader, live rounds—"
"I'll take responsibility!"
Guns swung toward me. Even the snipers marked me — but it was already too late.
Click.
Taaang!
The instant the gunshot rang out, I had already pressed the app.
"Time Stop."
Time Stop — S-Rank
The world drains to gray. All things stand still.
The world turned monochrome. In that colorless space where everything had frozen, only the woman who'd fired her bullet at me kept her original color, glittering in soft pink.
"...Better off not knowing. Better off."
I searched my memory. Ten years ago — the day one child's mother fell victim to a hypnosis app. The moment she became a puppet who existed only to obey someone's commands, her dignity stripped away, a slave in everything but name.
The woman standing there tonight — no, the mother whom that little girl had known — was nowhere in that memory. There had been only a single female beast, wearing a shape no child should ever have been made to see.
—Thank you for killing me, big brother.
The girl's mother died. The girl's father ended his own life.
"...Better off not knowing. Really."
Wave after wave of fatigue crashed over me, and I turned my head to the side.
Click.
Weeeooong—!
A bullet whipped past my ear. Color flooded back into the world, and I gave the woman a quiet little wave with my smartphone.
"A shame."
"What...?! You cowardly bastard! I'll kill you! I swear I will!"
"Do as you like."
Whoosh.
The world froze once more, and I clutched my smartphone and sprinted at full power toward the rooftop on the opposite side.
[Physical Enhancement active.]
[Time Stop (S) in use — ability limited to A-Rank.]
[Battery remaining: 57%.]
In the frozen world, a mirror showed me myself. A masked figure in something like a helmet, draped in a coat — a phantom clad head to toe in black.
[Sustained use of Time Stop accelerates battery drain.]
Whoosh!
Kicking off the outer wall of the high-rise, I fled the scene at speed — away from the incident, toward the large black van parked near a park far off.
Hiss.
I swung open the van's rear doors, and inside sat the white-haired woman, her eyes fixed on the dozens of monitors filling the cabin.
Click.
The moment I shut off the app, I closed the van's doors behind me, and she rose without so much as a flinch of surprise, heading quietly for the driver's seat.
"Shall we head to the scene?"
"No."
I slumped into the passenger seat, leaned back, and plugged in my phone to charge.
"Take us to Neo Seoul Headquarters."
"Yes, sir."
Viiiiing—
Surrendering myself to the soft hum of the electric motor, I quietly closed my eyes.
The year 2030. Ten years had passed since the day the first hypnosis app was unleashed upon this world.
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