Hero
The demon known as the Eroder thought to itself that if the battle had dragged on any longer, things might have turned dangerous.
Thanks to its fission ability, its life had never truly been at risk—but any other demon would have been forced to retreat with grievous wounds.
The Eroder began drawing its divided body back into one. The dozens of fragments that had been scattered across the field slowly fused together until it stood once more as a forty-meter colossus. Some parts were so thoroughly ruined that restoration was impossible, leaving it a little short of its full height, yet the result was still more than acceptable.
If it simply stepped outside, devoured a few humans, and returned to the Demon Realm, it would be able to forge a body far larger than before.
The demon prepared a spatial leap toward the clone it had planted outside. Darkness swallowed the surroundings; for a fleeting instant it slipped free of the dimension and reached for the familiar aura waiting beyond—
Then searing pain lanced through it.
Krrrk—!
Cracks spider-webbed across the carapace that armored its entire form, and the body that had been about to cross space slammed back into the real world.
Thud-thud—!
The price of interference before the leap could complete was catastrophic. The tentacles that had already transferred were gone, no longer attached to its side, and its flesh had been flayed away, exposing a hideous red ruin.
The Eroder bared its fangs, searching for the fool who had dared obstruct it. It swore it would carve the offender into pieces and display them in its castle.
Until that moment, the demon had still felt secure—right up until the one it believed it had already killed rose to her feet, perfectly intact.
“Haa… damn, that hurts like hell…”
Two pairs of horns jutted from snow-white hair. Her body was painted in blood, and her eyes burned with an unnaturally vivid crimson light.
The Eroder had seen a figure like this somewhere before.
The… Demon King?
The short-statured being who had once shattered armies of tens of thousands and stood before it with arrogant pride overlapped with the girl in its vision.
“Ugh… a demon…?”
When I opened my eyes in the darkness, the first thing I saw was the Eroder.
Wait—the Eroder?
Did I know this thing?
A strange expression crossed my face even as an alien sensation prickled atop my head. I reached up with both hands. Instead of the soft hair I expected, my fingers met a pair of sharp horns.
“Horns…?”
Horns—features that belonged to animals, demons, or magical beasts—had sprouted from my skull.
“Urgh…!”
A violent wave of nausea hit me a beat later. It felt as though two irreconcilable senses were coexisting inside me at once. Only then did I understand what had happened to my body.
“Darwin…?”
Every ruined muscle, every shattered organ—heart, lungs, entrails—had been replaced by black tissue. Darwin, parasitizing me through the power of erosion, was temporarily holding my death at bay.
“….”
An omnipotence beyond anything I had ever known surged through me. On pure experiment, I lashed out at the demon’s eye.
Shiiik—!
A black tentacle erupted from my back and punched through the Eroder’s eye at several times the speed of sound. In an instant a hole thirty centimeters across bored clean through the organ.
The demon reeled, clearly thrown by how completely my movements had changed. I didn’t fully understand what was happening either, so its confusion was only natural.
Still, I did what I could right now.
Dozens of tentacles burst from my back. Each moved with its own grotesque mechanism, yet all of them streaked toward the demon as one. The black limbs carved fresh wounds faster than the creature could regenerate.
I felt its shock. It had no face to speak of, but the atmosphere around it told me everything.
Kugugugu—!
The Eroder finally unleashed its erosion, overturning the ground beneath my feet—yet with Darwin substituting for half my organs and my physical ability soaring, the attack was meaningless thrashing.
Every step carried me five meters forward. My body had transcended human limits, moving with a speed and power I could never have imagined before.
“Darwin, fire.”
High-speed dashes let me slip past incoming strikes and flying debris while the tentacles I launched from my back slammed home. Unable to block the follow-up, the demon was carved into three pieces and immediately tried to fission.
But—
“Too obvious.”
Utterly predictable. A textbook move I had already anticipated. So this time I answered with the counter I had prepared.
The fission power stolen from the demon’s own genes flared. The tentacles that had broken free of my body shifted shape—some mirroring the Eroder, others becoming mantis-like, mole-like, every form Darwin had absorbed. They latched onto the three severed chunks of the demon and shredded the flesh without mercy.
Incomprehensible terror began to freeze the Eroder’s body. Had it fought at full strength from the start, it would never have been pushed this far—but it was already too late.
One of the three divided bodies met complete annihilation. It no longer fissioned, no longer revived; it simply crumbled into dust and scattered on the wind.
Only then did the demon realize something had gone terribly wrong. Death itself seemed to stand right before its eyes—and for a former sovereign who had once ruled above all others, that truth was intolerable.
It abandoned fission. Instead it gathered every scattered scrap of flesh, even the tiniest fragments, and rebuilt its body. Then it began preparing a single, all-or-nothing strike that could easily wipe Seoul off the map.
Seo-hyun sensed it as well.
“No way… damn it…!”
Blood-soaked nails tore through tentacles. Mantis claws ripped carapace. Countless needles pierced the joints. Multi-ton boulders were hurled with crushing force. The hits were landing; a little more and the demon’s life would end.
But the Eroder finished first.
A bizarre wavelength that shook the world erupted from the demon.
The surrounding environment twisted into impossible shapes. Like the paintings of surrealists, reality warped, cracked, and bent. The effect reached far beyond this battlefield, spilling past Seongbuk-gu.
I’ve never seen anything like this…
I had heard demons possessed strange powers, but I never imagined one could affect the world itself. And I could already estimate the scale of this dreamlike ability.
It’s only distortion for now, so the damage might stay limited at first. But as time passes, buildings will collapse, people’s organs will twist, and the casualties will grow exponentially.
At that point, abandoning the capital might become the only option.
How do I stop it?
I sank into brief, frantic thought. Killing the demon was the simplest answer, yet my strength alone could not manage it. Darwin’s power had raised my once-pathetic body past the level of most heroes and granted me a host of abilities, but if the Eroder had not been caught off-guard, I would have been the one crushed. Darwin was still incomplete, and I was still a stranger in this body.
After long, fruitless deliberation I realized there was no path forward.
…Yeah. Sometimes there are disasters no single person can handle.
I sank to the ground. Honestly, I was exhausted. I had already done everything I could. The thought brought a strange sense of relief.
I saved everyone around me.
Right. There was no need to save everyone. I wasn’t a hero.
So why, then, was I standing up again?
Wearing an expression that said I truly did not understand myself, I charged the demon once more.
Time passed. How long, I could not say.
I succeeded in stopping the Eroder’s final act—but I was a wreck myself. Half my body was gone. The demon, equally ruined, stood before me. It would have no choice but to focus on recovery for a while.
“Haha…”
Laughter slipped out. Maybe it was because death was so close. If I had simply waited, I could have escaped with my life. Yet I had chosen this stupid path instead.
And somehow… the feeling wasn’t bad.
“So this is why kids love playing hero…”
I had saved Seoul.
Two short words, yet that simple fact alone made my heart pound.
With death approaching, I waited for the demon to come. It looked at me with the eyes of an enemy who still offered respect, then shaped a tentacle into a blade and set it against my throat.
I closed my eyes in answer—until a single raindrop struck me and jolted me from my thoughts.
“This is…”
Rain was falling. A purifying rain that brought cool clarity with every touch and restored body and spirit alike. And as far as I knew, only one person in the world could call down rain like this.
“Usa…”
He arrived faster than I expected.
High on the cliff, a man wearing a rain-cloak woven of rice straw gazed down at us, blue eyes gleaming.