B-Rank Hero Angel
Haa... I'm losing my mind.
I thought I had slipped the death sentence. I hadn't. I was still terminal — and the time they had given me was a month. At that point, they might as well have told me to lie down and die.
So that's the gist of it. If I want to survive, I train women.
It had been a long time since I last played the game, and aside from the cast itself I knew precious little. Even that scrap, just now, was something to be grateful for. I could at least give thanks that I hadn't become a Kaijin stripped of human shape. The stronger a Kaijin grew, the more often they left their human form behind — though the truly powerful ones could probably keep it in check themselves.
Train a Hero, and I gain lifespan the normal way. Anyone else, and whatever lifespan I receive is cut in half.
Thank god the details had been driven into my head in full. Without that, I wouldn't have had the faintest sense of where to begin.
Train a man, on the other hand, and my lifespan shrinks...
That alone made the goddess's wishes perfectly plain. Her goal was nothing more than this: the women of her world, trained by Arang. That, and nothing else.
Might as well get moving.
The Kaijin known as the Sadistic Doctor was the smallest of small fry, a nobody who didn't even exist in the Hero Association's database. Which meant there was one sure method available only in this moment.
I came out of the alley and into the sunlight on the street. My clothes, fortunately, were ordinary enough not to catch the eye, and I slipped in among civilians without a ripple.
Abilities unlock as my lifespan grows... and all I can use right now is Lustful Touch.
Lustful Touch was one of the traits carried by Kaijin and Villains who committed the fouler kinds of sex crime. Not that the trait amounted to much. It stimulated the erogenous zones and could throw a part of the body — or the whole of it — into heat. There was nothing combat-ready about it. A technique meant solely to sexually degrade its target. Nothing more, and nothing less.
...Honestly, I don't even look like Hero material. A Sidekick, maybe.
As I was now, I stood only a little above a trained athlete — far too lacking to be called superhuman anywhere that mattered. A Sidekick's role was to assist a Hero, so that much might actually be within reach.
From the look of the city, this is Neo City... and the Association should be nearby.
Luckily, I had dropped near the building that housed headquarters. I didn't have a single coin and had been wondering what on earth to do, so this much, at least, I could call a relief. Like it or not, the Hero Association was where I had to start.
The Hero Association, planted in the heart of Neo City, was so vast that "lavish" didn't begin to cover it. The scale was obscene enough to make you wonder whether the public's taxes weren't quietly melting away. The headquarters climbed into the sky with no fear of heaven and no visible end, as if to announce, even indirectly, just how high the Association's authority stood.
As expected, this close to the Association. Plenty of Heroes around.
If anyone asked how you told a Hero from the rest, the answer was simple. Most of them wore outlandish costumes to soak up attention and drum up popularity. A Hero was a kind of influencer, when you thought about it. They were the ones who saved people — how could a job like that fail to be popular? Of course it drew stares.
Inside, the ground floor opened out like the lobby of some major corporation. Heroes moved about on their own business, or killed time in the lounge. The place was nearly reserved for Heroes alone, so none of it was strange.
Sidekick applications go through the desk. A simple test, and then you hear whether you passed or failed.
The Association wouldn't have a scrap of information on a Kaijin called the Sadistic Doctor anyway. However dead serious they were about catching Kaijin and Villains, they weren't idle enough to gather data on a nobody with no reach and no threat, and file him in the database.
I headed for the desk. The staff received me not with kind smiles, but with faces worn thin by overtime and leftover work.
"Welcome... May I ask what brings you in?"
"I've come to apply as a Sidekick."
"...Ah. Confirmed. Please wait a moment."
The clerk left his seat wearing a tired expression.
Here or back home, pile on enough work and people start dropping dead.
I hadn't held a company job before the possession, but I'd seen, now and then online, the misery of office workers drowning in overtime. Thinking of that, it struck me that this place, too, was a world where people simply lived.
And while I waited...
Click, click.
Bright footsteps in heeled shoes sounded behind me. The noise drew my eyes, and I turned.
That's...
A woman was coming toward me.
Long white hair. Breasts about the size of a modest watermelon. Blue eyes. She was a good deal shorter than I was, and yet, by a woman's measure, tall enough to be called so. Stranger than any of that were the great wings on her back. Pure white, the kind that brought an angel to mind — they made her seem like a true angel herself.
Her beauty emptied my head for a moment, but I knew who she was.
B-Rank Hero. Hero name, Angel. Real name, Shin Yuyeong.
A woman of staggering talent, who might one day become an S-Rank Hero.
Still B-Rank. So I've come in at the very beginning.
I could fix the point on the timeline well enough from the ranks Heroes held before they grew.
Which means the protagonist should still be at the academy.
I was genuinely relieved that the monstrously gifted male lead had yet to come into his own. Because that man was a pure-love fanatic to the extreme. Of course, pure love in this game carried another meaning. Harem-style pure love, you might call it... I had truly hated that part of it, but at least he never went around taking other men's women, so I had played in earnest all the same.
Not that I don't prefer a pure love that looks at only one person...
My life was hanging on this, so I had to train them one way or another. I could only accept it. He was different. Tell the protagonist he would die if he didn't train women, and he was the sort of man who would simply accept death with perfect humility. What would someone like that say if he saw what I was doing?
I'd be lucky not to get cut in half on the spot.
The thought had barely ended when Shin Yuyeong closed the last of the distance and took my hand.
"...?"
Her face made it impossible to guess what she was thinking. No wonder. She was so starved of expression you could almost believe she had no feelings at all. The first time, I had thought I was looking at a sociopath.
Wait...
While our hands were joined, my mind spun desperately. If I used the ability now, in the middle of this contact, what would happen? She had the talent, yes, but she was still only a B-Rank Hero. I didn't even know whether the ability would work on her as she was.
If it succeeds, though, I might be able to push the training forward quickly.
I had watched every heroine's pure-love ending, and even then I hadn't been able to pin down their sexual tastes or their weak points. The sex after those endings was far too soft, and far too kind — an experience with nothing whatsoever to do with training.
Then... I'll start.
I triggered the ability at once.
Other superhumans drew on mana or inner energy. Heroes did not. They needed no energy at all; they used their abilities according to their will alone. What they spent in its place was mental power, which was why a strong Hero's mind was strong as well. Most Kaijin relied on mental power or the flesh, too, so in a sense you could almost say the root force of Kaijin and Hero was the same.
"Who might you be...?" I asked, her hand still caught in mine.
"Ah."
Only then did she seem to come back to herself. She let go and took one step back.
For now, I had to pretend I didn't know who she was. A B-Rank wasn't a widely famous Hero. Knowing her would be the stranger thing.
"It's a habit of mine... From time to time, without realizing it, I take hold of other people's hands..."
She answered still expressionless, fidgeting with her fingers.
...I had no idea she had a tendency like this.
Damn it. If you're going to drop me into a world like this, at least put some information in my head. For a moment, the goddess was hateful all over again.
"Ah. I see."
I swallowed a small flare of anger.
"Um... Applicant?"
Right on cue, the desk clerk returned with the paperwork.
"Your Sidekick examination has been approved. You may go and take the test now."
"Understood."
I nodded and followed the clerk. As I went, I left her a quiet word.
"If fate allows, I'll see you again."
"......"
She gave no reaction at all.
Once Arang was gone, she was left there alone.
...Strange.
Something felt wrong. A little after she had taken his hand, a tingling sensation had risen through her. It wasn't pain, and it wasn't unpleasant. A subtle feeling that even she, having felt it herself, could not quite name. And because of that, a thin thread of interest stirred.
The wings on her back began to flutter, ever so faintly.
"The first examination is the Sidekick aptitude written test."
I stepped into the room, sat, and looked over the sheaf of papers set before me. They were crammed with questions about Heroes, and with essay prompts built on vague, slippery ideas.
"You have one hour. Solve them within that time and submit."
"Understood."
I knew nothing about the Sidekick exam, so the sight threw me for a moment — but I soon took up the pen with a steady hand.
After how long I've played this game, something like this is easy.
I might not know the game's trivial incidents, or anyone who wasn't a main heroine, but the fundamentals I had completely. In short, the answer key might as well have been sitting in my head.
"My god..."
The woman supervising the exam could not hide her shock. No wonder. An ordinary man had sat down to take the test, and some twenty-five minutes later he had solved every problem and turned it in. Suspecting he had simply guessed because the questions were too hard, she ran the sheet through the grading machine...
A notice of a perfect score, spilling out of the machine.
"......"
Afraid the machine was broken, she fed the sheet into another. Every one of them returned the same judgment: a perfect score.
Through that, she understood. A talent had appeared who would become the most capable Sidekick in the history of the Hero Association.