Dark Hero
The Hero Association maintains that there is currently no gap in public safety across Korea...
Critics have begun arguing the Association's incompetence, calling for a reexamination of the tax revenue allocated to the organization...
"Ugh."
The moment I flipped on the news, the same endless flood of coverage about the recent catastrophe came pouring out again, tireless as ever. Not that I could blame them.
Among the nations of the world, Korea ranked relatively high when it came to public safety. For a country of its size, it produced an impressive number of talented superhumans, which meant a solid roster of active heroes — enough to make it one of the most secure places on the planet. Shelters and emergency infrastructure were well maintained, and civilians tended to follow evacuation orders without much fuss. Civic awareness ran high here.
I grew up in that Korea, and looking back, I was quietly suffering from a pretty serious case of safety complacency myself.
The fact that I'd never seriously thought about developing my own ability until I met Astra — until I stood face-to-face with a giant monster — said it all. I'd just assumed my peaceful daily life would keep going forever. Villains, monsters, all of it... those had always felt like stories from some distant country.
This time was different.
It hadn't been a nationwide disaster — just the region straddling Chungcheong and Gyeonggi — but the simultaneous emergence of monsters combined with coordinated villain attacks had been something else entirely. And then there was the death of a hero who had always been out there, patrolling the city, looking after its people. Of course the public was reeling.
"Obviously we need to expand heroes' patrol ranges and hours beyond what they are now!"
"That approach won't last! And heroes aren't machines! The current system is already sufficient!"
"Sufficient? It's precisely because we kept thinking that way that something like this happened!"
I'd switched channels out of boredom, only to land on a panel of grim-faced men earnestly flapping their jaws. From what I could gather, they were arguing about adopting systems used by overseas Hero Association branches, or something along those lines...
Does any of this even matter?
Watching politicians who weren't heroes — who weren't even scholars in any related field — go at it so passionately was almost comical. The Hero Association was a supranational, extra-legal organization that transcended any single nation's interests. It cooperated with governments; it wasn't subordinate to them. Sure, it received police support and partial funding through tax revenue for operational costs, but it was still a peculiar entity that was not, strictly speaking, a government agency.
That was the Hero Association.
They're not seriously under the delusion that they can dictate how their heroes operate, right?
No — this was just anxiety finding a voice. Heroes had been treated as invincible, and their public image had been carefully built up to match. Now that one of them had died, ordinary civilians were left with the gut-deep fear that they themselves could die even more easily. The shock of realizing that the villain who had butchered a hero had been lurking right in their own backyard. And when the public fell into that kind of panic, someone always needed a way to soothe them.
"Yes — today we've invited the heroes who apprehended the B-plus-class villain behind this large-scale terrorist incident. Would you mind introducing yourselves briefly?"
"Hello. I'm Astra, the C-class hero in charge of Eain City in Chungcheong Province."
"I'm Snow White, C-class hero for Miro City right next door."
"Oh. Both of them are on?"
And there it was — the method the Hero Association had chosen, playing out right on my TV screen. Two faces I knew extremely well. Astra and Snow White, the ones who had captured the B-plus-class villain during the terrorist attack, being put front and center as the Association's public face.
Mastermind, though. Really.
I stared at the two of them as they earnestly told the public to rest easy, that they'd successfully captured Elastica — the ringleader of this whole mess — and that life could go back to normal. As someone outside the Association, I had no way of knowing the full truth. Still, I had a gut feeling that the villain they'd arrested wasn't actually the mastermind behind any of this.
The official story is that it was pure coincidence — but the monsters and the villain attacks lined up with almost surgical timing.
I'd learned that much thanks to Baek Seol, who'd dumped the entire chaotic situation on me when I'd gone to the scene myself. She hadn't said it outright, but I was capable of thinking for myself. With that information, at least this much deduction was possible.
Can they create monsters artificially?
The monsters that threatened our lives could appear anytime, anywhere. They were born when wild animals and plants absorbed superhuman power — but the exact mechanism had never been properly explained. Naturally, manufacturing them at will was supposed to be impossible. If that kind of technology existed, you could just as easily mass-produce superhumans instead of monsters.
And yet this whole incident felt as if the villains had deliberately spawned those monsters at precisely the right moment.
No. If that were possible, the villains would collapse society overnight and seize control of the world.
Well. Getting this deep into serious speculation just because I'd gotten tangled up with two heroes was probably ridiculous. Questions about villain technology and all the rest of it were the Association's problem, not mine.
I finished thinking and turned off the TV. At least I'd caught up on the two of them through the screen, since I hadn't seen their faces in a while. That was something.
"I heard they've been busy lately."
Maybe it was because those two had achieved the biggest results in the entire terrorist incident. Cast as the reassuring faces of public recovery, they'd been so swamped that I hadn't managed to meet either of them. Not once since Baek Seol and Astra had both visited at the same time — not even after I'd formed a contract with Baek Seol as well.
I'd fully expected to start providing them with buff dishes right away. Instead, I was the only one with free time.
"Kind of a waste of uses, though."
I opened my phone and found messages from both of them waiting. Even their texts carried their personalities — Astra's polite and careful, Baek Seol's finished off with an emoticon. Same content either way: they wouldn't be able to come this week either, just like last week.
My uses are already topped out at two. And I've already burned one for nothing.
So right now, my ability's available uses were sitting at a full two. And with both of them canceling again, I was looking at another week of just throwing those buff uses away. Considering how much I'd gained from these buffs lately, watching them expire unused felt like a genuine shame.
"Maybe I should just use them on myself."
I stared at the messages for a moment, and the thought bloomed — if the uses were going to waste anyway, why not put them toward myself? That was how I'd been using the ability before I ever met Astra and Baek Seol, after all. The way the momentary buff rolled through your body, leaving you feeling stronger and sturdier than any ordinary tonic meal, wasn't half bad either.
The deliberation was short. The action was fast.
I dug through the fridge for leftover ingredients and found a cut of bone-in beef short rib. Okay. Tonight's menu is braised short ribs.
I set aside a decent portion of the ribs and started soaking them in cold water to draw out the blood. The patches of yellow-white fat got torn off and discarded — clean broth was the goal. While the blood drained, I prepped the sauce. Onion and pear went into the blender, roughly chopped, then strained for a smooth base. Black sugar, soy sauce, starch syrup, cooking wine, and minced garlic went in next, mixed into a sweet-and-savory marinade.
Once the blood was fully drawn, I pulled the ribs out, dropped them into a large pot, and gave them a good boil. Skimming every bit of foam that rose to the surface, I let them cook through once, then rinsed them clean and returned them to the pot. The prepared ribs and sauce went in together, and I set them to simmer on medium heat for a long, slow cook.
"Just add the garnish later and we're done."
I was rummaging for carrots and potatoes to use as garnish when sound from the TV — still left on — reached me from the other room.
"Hm?"
A name that was hard to just gloss over. I stepped out of the kitchen for a moment and looked at the TV.
B-class villain Black Cat Lady. Among the villains operating in Korea, she was probably the most famous of them all.
Why so famous?
Investigation results have revealed that Cheongsang Construction was a front company used for money laundering by a villain organization. Related materials have once again been submitted anonymously to both the Association and the police...
"Well, damn. Impressive."
The news was reporting that the company robbed by a villain had itself been a villain's puppet. And that was exactly why Black Cat Lady was the most famous villain of them all.
People tend to call her a dark hero more than a villain, don't they?
She was classified as a villain, but she never committed murder or terrorism. The only crime Black Cat Lady ever committed was theft. And even then, her targets were limited to outfits like the one currently on the news — villain organization fronts — or corporations swimming in corruption on a scale that defied imagination.
Black Cat Lady had appeared like a comet roughly two years ago, making her name by completely gutting a villain organization's funding pipeline. Back then she hadn't even earned the moniker Black Cat Lady, and the Association had rated her threat level at a mere D-plus. In just two years, she had climbed to B-class — and she'd done it without ever resorting to murder, purely through theft.
Considering that the Association factored in both the damage a villain caused and the power of their abilities when assigning threat levels, that was no small feat.
The Association calls her a villain, but...
The public called this woman who exclusively preyed on villains a hero. The Association, of course, had her registered as a villain. Fair enough, maybe. She was an unregistered superhuman who had never joined the Association, and no matter how thoroughly she cleaned out villains, her work still caused real social damage — stock markets lurching violently, among other things.
"People are dying over this!!"
"Yikes."
On screen, a citizen mid-interview was wailing over stock holdings that had been reduced to worthless scraps of paper. It was precisely that dual impact that had made Black Cat Lady a legendary villain with countless fans and just as many anti-fans.
Me? If I had to pick a side, I tended to see her as a kind of dark hero.
Dark heroes were superhumans who had awakened abilities but never reported that fact to the Association, carrying out hero work independently. Some wanted to kill criminals themselves out of personal grudges; others simply hated the Association. Quite a few of them hid their identities and operated as heroes on their own.
Black Cat Lady is basically a saint by comparison.
Plenty of dark heroes lost sight of their goals and methods and drifted into something halfway to villainy. Against that backdrop, someone like Black Cat Lady could absolutely be called a hero. She was even famous for leaving the stolen money behind with instructions that it be properly returned to the victims — handing it off to the police or the Association without taking a cut. It was people who'd caught a fleeting glimpse of her appearance during those handoffs who had given her the moniker "Black Cat Lady" in the first place.
And that's also how she ended up a B-class villain.
Wasn't it the time she breached Association security, infiltrated the Hero Association itself, and left the stolen assets inside that pushed her threat rating up to B-class?
Either way, she was a remarkable person.
Blub-blub-blub.
"Crap—"
I'd gotten so deep into my thoughts while watching the news that an ominous sound started coming from the kitchen, where I'd left the heat on. I scrambled back to check on the braised short ribs — and because of that, I missed the rest of the broadcast.