He had a dream.
The briny smell of metal. A space filled with nothing but stone dust amid heaps of collapsed concrete.
A dream that always stopped at the same moment, in the same scene.
Seoul ten years ago was before the flashy show business of today had taken root.
Those days were, quite literally, the wild. When Gates first opened, humanity regarded them not as a calamity, but as a “goose that laid golden eggs.”
The violence wielded by the early Awakened, who had neither rules nor responsibility, was raw and unvarnished. It was an era that did not even have the flimsy packaging called justice that existed now.
“Jinwoo, this way! Get out through the window!”
His father’s urgent scream rang out. Eighteen-year-old Jinwoo, despite his build, was frozen stiff, nothing more than dead weight clinging to his parents’ ankles.
Behind him came the grotesque wails of monsters filling the apartment corridor. Immediately after, a deafening roar tore at his eardrums as the power of the hero who had come to hunt them exploded.
The hero, who at the time had been somewhere in the middle of the rankings, used an area-of-effect skill that blew away an entire apartment building in order to catch the fleeing monsters.
Kugugung—!
With the explosion, the world turned upside down. Trapped between the collapsed concrete debris, just before he lost consciousness, what lodged itself in his ears was the hero’s casual joke.
“Ah, my aim was off. Well, I got the monsters, so whatever.”
The indifferent words that followed had not washed out of his mind even now, ten years later.
“The search team can handle any survivors.”
His parents, holding Jinwoo in their arms, sank forever beneath a massive slab.
To the hero, that day’s explosion must have been nothing more than “minor collateral damage” that occurred during one operation among hundreds, thousands.
But to Jinwoo, it became a brand that followed him for the rest of his life. A vicious brand that made him loathe Hunters wearing the shell called heroes—those monsters.
“Hah...!”
He woke from the recurring dream, opening his eyes today as well, drenched in sweat.
Under the old LED light, he saw the stained ceiling of a studio apartment barely ten pyeong in size. His heart was still pounding violently as though he were at the scene of the explosion, and cold sweat ran down his chin.
“Did you have a nightmare?”
A cool yet alluring voice greeted Jinwoo. Jinwoo turned his head. He saw Baegya sitting on the windowsill, the moonlight at her back.
Another week had passed in the meantime. It had been a week in which Baegya asked countless questions and Jinwoo avoided answering them.
Perhaps because she had rested well, she looked far more alive than before. But he thought her eyes still resembled a deep abyss.
“It’s finally the weekend, so let me get some sleep. Is watching other people sleep your hobby?”
Jinwoo replied bluntly as he sat up.
The weekend was a sanctuary akin to a temple for office workers. The only refuge without hellish overtime or the team leader’s nagging mixed with bad breath. But with a “disaster-class villain” sitting in his room, a peaceful weekend was already out of the question.
“I’ve kept thinking about your ability.”
Baegya rose from her seat and approached Jinwoo. Every time she moved, Jinwoo thought the cramped room seemed to be dyed in a different color. Merely by her presence, the bleak room became vividly, lavishly colored.
“It conceals pressure, but I still can’t figure out how it operates. Is it a method of designating a specific person, or of defining the space itself?”
“Is that something I have to answer? It’s just a minor skill. And I have no intention of using it for anything besides erasing my presence. I’m just planning to live like an ordinary person and die that way.”
“You don’t know your own value. Or perhaps you do, and you’re looking away from it.”
Baegya came right up to Jinwoo’s nose. The cold fragrance emanating from her stimulated Jinwoo’s senses. He always thought so, but it was far too provocative a scent.
“Is there someone you want revenge on?”
At the unexpected question, Jinwoo’s eyes wavered. It felt as if that pit of dust from ten years ago had unfolded before his eyes again.
“Why are you suddenly asking that?”
“Because your eyes hold a terrible hatred for heroes, just like mine. The names you groan out in your sleep, the fists you clench unconsciously... Do you want revenge, but lack the strength? I can help you.”
Jinwoo let out a laugh of disbelief.
“Help me? Aren’t you the one being chased right now? If you went to the convenience store right across the street, your face would be on a wanted poster. And on top of that, a disaster-class villain helping a petty civilian get revenge. That’s an interesting thing to say. Truly hilarious.”
“If you erase my pressure with your ability, it’s perfectly possible. Battles between Hunters are battles of momentum and detection, you see. Hunter fights are nothing but contests of strength because they can’t hide their pressure. But if that pressure is concealed, even if the target of revenge is Rank 1, it’s worth trying.”
Baegya added as if making a declaration.
“You may be weak, but you are someone who can place absolute power in another’s hands. The chance to resolve the matter you can’t forget even in your dreams is right now. You don’t even need to do it yourself. There’s someone here who can do it in your stead.”
At those words, Jinwoo fell silent without realizing it. For ten years, he had imagined it thousands, tens of thousands of times. Ways for an ordinary person with no power to kill a Hunter. Poison, electric current, an accident... But at the end of those fantasies, his parents’ last words were always there.
Do not grieve. Be happy. Those heavy words.
And the fundamental fear of the act of killing a person itself, along with the fear of legal punishment, held him back as well.
To such a man, the lethal temptation called “a proxy” beckoned.
Jinwoo looked at Baegya before him. She was someone who had already crossed that line.
“When you took revenge... how was it?”
Jinwoo asked in a cracked voice. Baegya briefly turned her gaze out the window. The city’s crude neon signs stretched out coldly.
“People say revenge is meaningless. That all that remains is emptiness. It’s all a lie. The moment I finished my revenge, I felt as if the lifelong congestion that had been weighing me down finally cleared. It was refreshing. And it was terribly peaceful.”
Jinwoo saw the truth in her eyes. It was the tranquility only one who had finished their assignment could possess.
“What is the life of a villain like? A life where you’re hunted every day and the whole world is your enemy. Do you never regret it?”
“In my heart, I’m still a hero. They’re merely the ones calling me a villain. Regret? No. If anything, being with them was more of a hell. This is better than enduring so-called comrades constantly waiting for a chance to stab me in the back. At least now, it’s clear who my enemies are.”
She sat on the edge of Jinwoo’s bed and whispered quietly.
“The problem is that I can’t rest easy. But if you help me, that problem can be solved. Let me hide. Hide me from the Association’s relentless detection network. If you do, I can take care of that revenge for you as much as you like.”
Jinwoo looked down at his palm. It was the hand of an insignificant petty civilian. He had awakened, but he possessed only an unremarkable power.
And yet now, with this hand, he had become able to decide the moment of revenge.
But the instincts of a petty civilian still stepped backward.
“Fine. For now... rest here over the weekend. I need to think about it more. But there’s a condition. You do the cleaning and laundry in my house. Think of it as rent.”
Baegya blinked as though flustered, but soon let out a small laugh. To think he would make a disaster-class villain do housework.
“To demand something like that from a villain. Still, it’s not bad. I suppose that’s what living normally means.”
On the weekend afternoon, a commotion Jinwoo had not anticipated occurred. Someone claiming to be from the management office appeared in the hallway outside the front door.
Where in the world would there be a management office employee who went around leaking pressure all over the place?
It had to be a full inspection by the Hunter Association searching for Baegya.
“Baegya, hide! In the closet!”
Jinwoo shoved Baegya into the closet and opened the door. What he saw, of course, was not a management office employee. Nor was it a security guard.
It was an Association agent dressed in uniform.
The moment the door opened, he barged in without warning, a pressure detector in his hand. The machine scanned the room while emitting a beeping noise.
Of course, even so, it could not catch the presence of Baegya, who was inside his boundary.
Jinwoo barely suppressed the sigh that escaped on its own.
“Ah, what is this about? From the weekend morning, no less.”
“We received a report that a suspicious mana reaction was detected nearby. We ask for your cooperation.”
“I haven’t seen a single person, let alone a cat. I was coding until dawn yesterday and only just woke up, so please don’t disturb me. I’m tired to death.”
Jinwoo responded with the most irritated office-worker expression he could manage. The agent scratched his head and withdrew. The door closed, and Jinwoo opened the closet. Inside, Baegya, who had been crouching there, looked up at him.
“That man just now was an Association agent. And yet he couldn’t find me... Your ability truly is incredible. Perfect concealment.”
“It’s still an ability that can’t do anything on its own. I don’t even have the strength to knock a single person down.”
“Instead, if you’re with someone else, it’s an ability that can become the greatest. Think it over and give me an answer. If you want to finish that assignment of yours.”
Instead of answering, Jinwoo pulled the blanket over himself again. He did not want to think. But in his head, Baegya’s voice echoed endlessly.
“In your stead.”
It was a word of temptation that would not leave him, no matter what he thought.