The Hero Is Born (2)
Karki rubbed the cheek I’d struck and grinned brightly.
“A thousand? That’s some shape.”
I put a hand to the ground and pushed myself up.
All night long, I’d thrown my fists out as if I were detonating a high-dose surge of mana.
A full thousand times.
It was no surprise my body felt like hell.
My muscles ached all over, pins and needles crawled through me, and fatigue dragged my eyelids down.
I’m about to pass out.
My mind was hazy, the world spinning. I swayed without even meaning to.
“Ah! Boss!”
Karki, who’d been nearby, barely managed to catch me.
“What time is it?”
“Seven o’clock, boss.”
The factory’s day shift started at eight.
“I’m going to sleep for thirty minutes.”
“Okay, boss! Want some water too?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Karki ran toward the factory.
Then it happened.
Ding.
An alarm rang in the air.
I’d already met the conditions and acquired a new hero.
What now?
The instant I saw the blue window, I froze.
- Congratulations on meeting the conditions.
Then the message continued.
- A gift has been granted.
A reward for mission completion.
It was a simple, predictable setup, but there was a twist hidden in it so blatant it made the skin on my cheek prickle.
Ticket for Judgment of the Superhuman (Special): 10/0
The existing hero skill had gained the label “Special.”
And on top of that.
That means I can use it for free ten times?
I should try it right now.
There was no doubt I’d be able to use something stronger, something more special than before.
My heart hammered hard.
I dragged my leaden body along and forced myself to focus.
“……”
Cold sweat ran down my back as I raised my fist, heavy as iron, and tried to thrust it out in a straight line...
“……”
“……Ha. Too damn hard.”
My condition was at rock bottom, and my body and mind felt like someone had cut the power.
Forget it.
I’ll try it later.
I reset the window hanging in the air.
Talent:Purchase.
You can buy the abilities of the object of your admiration.
It was the information I’d seen when I first awakened.
I’d thought all I had was the ability to buy hero powers with the money I’d saved in my previous life.
But that wasn’t all.
The more abilities I buy, the more bonus benefits I get from the process itself.
Even without relying on a hero’s power, I could grow stronger on my own. I was being handed that chance over and over again.
A growth-type talent, then.
If things kept going like this, how strong would I be by the time I’d spent all of my Awakened Balance?
Once again, I realized I’d drawn an absurdly broken card.
Had I just gotten lucky?
Or was this a reward given to me by someone who pitied me?
“Boss! Drink this!”
As if someone had found an oasis in the middle of a desert, I downed the water in one go, my throat burning with thirst.
I woke to the noise of commotion.
I was inside the dark warehouse.
I’d told him to wake me in thirty minutes, but Karki hadn’t called for me.
How long was I out?
Through the narrow crack of the half-open door, the factory’s din seeped in.
The sounds of metal being cut, pressed, sparks flying, and welders hissing all crashed together in the air.
The place under my ass was soft.
It was a makeshift bed made of Styrofoam and stacked cardboard boxes.
This was Karki’s personal bed.
Somewhere along the way, he’d even covered me with a blanket, which meant he’d probably decided to let me sleep longer because he was looking out for me.
I opened the warehouse door and stepped outside.
Karki came running at me like a dog greeting its owner.
“Boss! You awake?”
“I told you to wake me. You’d make the others feel bad.”
“Ayy. You were sleepin’ so soundly, boss.”
When I checked the time, it was already well past eleven.
I hadn’t slept that long, but maybe because it had been such deep sleep, my whole body felt refreshed.
It’s been a while.
In my previous life, I’d suffered from crippling insomnia.
Even after dragging my exhausted body home from work, I could never sleep properly.
My whole body felt like it was made of stone.
Still, I’d toss and turn with my eyes closed.
And even when I finally dozed off for a little while, nightmares would drag me under.
In those dreams, everyone around me died without fail.
My grandmother. My little brother.
Even there, I kept working myself to the bone.
Whenever I woke up, my body and mind were even more worn out.
Living felt like dying.
I slowly looked around.
Everyone was working with their hands without a moment to spare.
Morning was always the busiest time in a factory.
“Where’s the boss?”
“Don’t worry about that. He got so shit-faced with Shin Madam last night that he was already passed out by the time he got here.”
Karki pouted and grumbled.
Shin Madam was the owner of the bar the boss frequented all the time.
Ah. So it’s around this time.
At last, the memory of what had happened before came back to me.
I zipped up my old jumper and walked through the factory.
There were only about ten people working here.
The factory was very small.
The boss’s claim that the company pulled in ten billion won a year had been an outrageous exaggeration.
At first, annual sales were around one billion. The next year, three billion. By now, it was probably up to five billion.
Yeah. Maybe one day it really could have become a ten-billion-won company.
Because they kept landing subcontract after subcontract under the big company Seosan, the business would have been fairly solid if it had just been left alone.
The problem was the boss.
I stopped in front of the office and cracked the door open.
“Khhhr...”
The boss was sprawled on a plush sofa, snoring in his sleep.
The foul reek of whiskey hanging in the air stabbed straight into my nose.
Golf was bleating from the television.
The more money the factory made, the more debauched the boss became.
He was already married with two kids, but he kept Shin Madam as his mistress and poured money into her place like his life depended on it.
That would’ve been tolerable, I suppose.
From a Benz to a sports car, then to a luxury sedan.
He changed cars to something expensive at the slightest excuse.
While the workers scraped together miserable meals in the company cafeteria, the boss was a regular at a Japanese restaurant where a single meal cost more than three hundred thousand won.
He wore luxury watches on his wrist and changed his tastes from whiskey to wine.
He even hired a driver and rode around in a limousine.
By day he was wrecked by hangovers; by night he spent his time in bars chasing women.
Meanwhile, he pushed back wages, and because of reckless loans, the cash flow dried up.
As a result, the debt kept growing.
The factory was a goose laying golden eggs.
But the boss was slicing the goose open with his own hands.
In the end, he handed the factory over to a loan shark.
“Ripped away for a song” would be the right way to put it.
And then he set himself on fire while dead drunk.
It was the final fate of an arrogant, lazy, incompetent man.
Ironically, the factory didn’t stop after that.
The loan shark was better than the boss when it came to managing money, but he didn’t care about the workers even a little bit.
The new owner had a saying he repeated like a habit.
“If a fire’s still smoldering, you just fan the hell out of it and it’ll catch again. Right?”
He wasn’t wrong.
The only problem was that eventually the embers burned out completely.
Under the banner of austerity, the loan shark indiscriminately fired people left and right.
The ten workers were cut down to three.
I was one of the survivors, but I wasn’t happy about it at all.
What do you think happens when three people are expected to do the work of ten?
Monday through Saturday.
Thirteen-hour shifts.
Overtime was both mandatory and unavoidable.
Before long, the last remaining worker quit too, as if he were running away.
At that point, it was fair to say I’d been working the whole place alone.
If it hadn’t been for my little brother, I probably couldn’t have held out either.
A shadow fell over me.
“Yongki.”
The voice calling me pulled me out of my memories.
“You’re awake?”
The foreman, his wrinkled face coated in dust, was looking at me.
In the previous timeline, the loan shark had fired the foreman first.
He’d been too old, they said.
I bowed my head to him.
“Sorry. Everyone’s busy, and I’m just sitting around dozing off.”
“It’s fine. Eat this.”
The foreman held something out to me.
Canned coffee and a cream bun.
Here, that was the best snack combination money could buy.
“Come to think of it, we never even thanked you, Yongki.”
The foreman went on.
“You got the old press replaced with a new one and made sure the work was safer. That’s all thanks to you.”
The workers who had been laboring in the factory all stopped their hands.
They shouted toward me.
“These days, those thugs from the gang don’t come around anymore, and it’s such a relief!”
“You can sleep a little longer, so tell us if you’re tired.”
“Yeah! We’ll take care of it for you!”
One by one, I recalled their names.
Mr. Bae Yulim, who’d been cheated out of money and dragged into debt.
Uncle Park Changseong, whose wife had cheated on him and driven him into a breakdown so bad he’d ended up living on the streets before finding work at the factory.
Professor Jang, who had once taught at a school but had been falsely accused in a sexual scandal and now drifted from lottery shops to lottery shops as his only hobby.
There wasn’t a single man here without a story.
Some people might have pitied them.
But I didn’t.
Having money didn’t automatically make a life valuable.
Being poor didn’t make a life worthless.
There were all kinds of ways to live.
The men here quietly, stubbornly, and viciously did their jobs from their own places in the world.
They made equipment for those who fought monsters in places no one could see.
“Yongki! Wanna hit a karaoke place after work today?”
“Yeah! I sang a song yesterday for the first time in ages, and the stress just went right out of me!”
Karki sprang up and cut in.
“No! Boss is gonna eat cold noodles with me!”
“Look at this idiot talking nonsense again! Since when were you the boss’s? Karki’s got the face of some wild beast, but he likes men!”
“What? And you look like some slave from the Joseon era. Even your name’s Park Changseong. You’re exactly the kind of bastard family would be ashamed of!”
With the trash talk flying back and forth, the factory turned into a madhouse.
Watching them, I felt my shoulders loosen a little.
Yes, the factory was a place of labor.
But to me, it was also a home, a foundation, the place where I’d come from.
This time around...
I’ll never let this place collapse.
I looked at the foreman and said, “I’m fine now. Put me back on the line.”
I pulled on my gloves and gripped the Burn Light raw material, smooth and gleaming in my hand.
And just like that, an ordinary day began.
Thwack! Crack!
Someone grabbed a Burn Light helmet and smashed it into a man’s face.
Blood splattered across the helmet, and the man on the receiving end was left a wreck.
“Ghk!”
The man screamed and collapsed.
Seo Gwang-pal stared at the helmet and clicked his tongue in admiration.
“Damn! This thing really doesn’t break easy, huh.”
Seo Gwang-pal wore a ridiculous elephant mask to hide his identity as a hunter.
Because the mask was meant for children, it barely covered his eyes, nose, and mouth.
Seo Gwang-pal checked the business card clutched in his hand.
“You’re that delivery rider, right?”
The one he’d beaten was none other than the man who had given Choi Yongki a ride to the industrial complex.
The man lifted his head, his face a mass of blood.
“...Who the hell are you?”
“Me?”
Seo Gwang-pal thought of the bastard who’d had the nerve to talk about being a hero right in front of him.
He lowered his voice on purpose and spread both hands in a threatening gesture.
“A villain.”
“……”
The tattooed man, broad-shouldered and covered from head to toe in ink, glared at Seo Gwang-pal.
Normally, someone with that kind of look in a comic or a movie would be the bad guy.
But in this situation, it was the exact opposite.
Seo Gwang-pal had ambushed the tattooed man while he was on a delivery run and dragged him into this alley.
The fact that he’d charged at the motorcycle with a body slam and come away completely unharmed meant he was definitely an Awakened one.
The tattooed man clenched his teeth.
A villain?
But there was no reason for a villain to target him specifically.
It was rare to see a dumb villain reckless enough to commit a crime in the middle of a road just to steal pocket change.
The tattooed man lifted his head.
“What do you want?”
Seo Gwang-pal adjusted the mask that was biting into his face.
“The guy you gave a ride on your bike. Where’d you take him?”
The tattooed man searched his memory.
Was one passenger really that memorable?
Just yesterday, he’d ridden his girlfriend around along the Han River at dawn, enjoying the night view.
“Which one are you talking about...? Ghk!”
“This bastard!”
Seo Gwang-pal drove a knee into the man’s stomach and shoved a photo in his face, one taken by the intelligence team.
The tattooed man forced his eyes open.
It was the back of a man wearing a shabby jumper.
He recognized him at once.
The man who had taken down Big Lava.
He had a wild gaze and carried a strangely lonely air about him.
The tattooed man shrugged.
“No idea. Who is this supposed to be?”
Seo Gwang-pal chuckled under his breath and nodded.
“Right. A punk like you doesn’t listen unless I speak nice and gentle.”
The brutal beating continued.
By the time the tattooed man looked like a rag.
Seo Gwang-pal asked again.
“So. Where’d he go?”
“...T-there.”
The tattooed man coughed up blood and pointed somewhere with a finger.
At last, the chance to catch the one he’d been desperately searching for had arrived.
Seo Gwang-pal leaned in and lowered his ear.
“What? Where?”
The tattooed man pointed at Seo Gwang-pal’s bald head.
“Looks like a dick.”
Veins bulged on the scalp Seo Gwang-pal hadn’t managed to hide under his mask.
“Fine. Let’s see who wins.”
Seo Gwang-pal tore off the mask and lifted the helmet once more.