It was a hellish Monday morning. The subway was packed, and he hated the thought of going to work so much he could die. But even from the moment he’d leaned his head against the subway door, he’d had a bad feeling about today.
The moment he opened the office door, Assistant Manager Kim in the next seat poked his head over the partition and whispered.
“Jinwoo, be careful today. The team leader got into it with Accounting this morning because his corporate card went over the limit. He’s in a state where he can’t see straight, so whatever you do, don’t make eye contact.”
Jinwoo thought he was a grateful man. He gave him information like this, after all.
“Isn’t that an everyday thing?”
Jinwoo hadn’t even sat down and pressed the power button on his PC yet.
“Kang Jinwoo! Get over here!”
At the team leader’s shout, the entire office went quiet as if cold water had been poured over it. Jinwoo let out a sigh and headed for the team leader’s office. On the monitor was the payment module code Jinwoo had uploaded yesterday.
“Are you out of your mind? You don’t see that because of one typo here, every payment approval this morning got bounced? You did this on purpose, didn’t you? Were you determined to ruin the company?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll check it and fix it right away.”
“Fix it? Hey, if you go poking around saying you’ll fix it and end up blowing away the DB too, are you going to take responsibility? Are you the owner of this company? Is the CEO your friend? Even if he were, that crap doesn’t work on me!”
Jinwoo listened in silence. He had no connections. He’d entered under the fancy name of open recruitment and had been rolled around mercilessly for four years now.
The team leader huffed and tapped Jinwoo in the chest with a bundle of documents.
“Fix everything before lunch today. If you can’t, there’ll be no meat for you at the company dinner tonight. No, don’t even come. Stay here and guard the company while watching the servers. Got it?”
A company dinner like that was honestly more comfortable to skip. If he went, he’d just have to read the room and grill meat. On top of that, he’d be eating meat while being cursed at. Still, he kept his expression under control.
“…Understood.”
Returning to his seat, Jinwoo tapped at his keyboard and thought.
Ten years ago, the hero who had shattered his family had worn that exact same expression. That face, so self-righteous even after ruining someone else’s daily life. It was identical to that arrogant face that had only gone on about his own performance record.
Before he knew it, time had passed and lunch hour arrived.
On the cafeteria TV, the fifth-ranked hero “Flame Fist” was smiling in the middle of an interview.
“To the citizens who suffered damages, the Association has promised sufficient compensation! Justice is always by your side!”
Behind that smile, the alley where Jinwoo’s life had been threatened yesterday was being filmed in ruins. Watching it, he had to hold back the sneer that tried to rise on its own.
Compensation?
The application for consolation money from the Association alone was over fifty pages, and the review period was half a year. In the meantime, no one talked about the people forced out onto the streets.
It wasn’t even his business, yet the rice in his mouth felt like grains of sand. Heroes were always like that.
At 11 p.m., when he finally struggled home from work, Baegya was sitting on the sofa, rustling a bag of potato chips as she asked,
“Your face doesn’t look very good. Did something happen?”
Those potato chips—I bought them for myself. Complaining felt petty, so he kept his mouth shut.
“It’s because I was working. Someone hiding away like you wouldn’t know about it.”
Jinwoo tossed his bag aside and sat down in front of her. Baegya set down the snack bag she’d been eating from and stared at him.
“You said you’d take revenge for me. What are your conditions? Nothing in this world is free.”
“Maybe it is free?”
“There’s no such thing in this world.”
“Well, that’s true, actually. There is something I want. I wanted to ask you to help me.”
“What kind of help could I possibly give you?”
“Do you know what the most exhausting thing is about living as a villain? There’s nowhere to rest. Even if I stay still, the mana detectors the Association people shove at me from somewhere start screaming mercilessly. That’s why I need your ability.”
“So in the end, you’re telling me to become a villain. Do you know what that means? I’ve lived my entire life without even paying a single fine.”
“If it makes you uncomfortable, think of it as ‘business.’ How much do you make at that company? Forty million won a year? Fifty?”
Baegya smiled softly and continued.
“Rob just one slush fund safe the heroes have hidden away, and it’ll be more than your lifetime salary. The artifacts the Association has siphoned off through the back door are as good as cash on the black market. You seem to have a lot of complaints about your company life. The funds to quit that life and live comfortably forever? I can prepare them for you within a week.”
“Are you saying you’ll bribe me with money? Do you think it makes sense to commit crimes and live happily on the money earned from them?”
“It’s not a bribe. It’s compensation. Payment for your one-of-a-kind talent. The heroes’ money was built on someone’s tears anyway. The world won’t collapse just because we take it and use a little. Couldn’t you even think of it as returning that money to society?”
Jinwoo couldn’t answer.
In his head, the word “resignation” flashed with intense brightness.
A life where he didn’t have to endure the team leader’s breath every morning, where he didn’t have to wrestle with broken servers until dawn.
If such a thing were possible. And if he could even take revenge.
“If you help me, I’m going to create an organization. An organization that gathers people who were unjustly trampled and punishes those heroes who only pretend to be splendid. With you, I can create one. Alone, all I can do is act as a villain, but together, we can make a team. A team that can help countless victims.”
It would be a lie to say those words didn’t make him hesitate.
Jinwoo fell asleep in the midst of his worries. But today, too, he woke up in the middle of the night.
It was already 2 a.m. When he turned over, thinking he should at least drink some water, his eyes met Baegya’s, who was lying on the floor.
“Did you have a dream?”
“Who knows.”
Baegya sat up and looked at Jinwoo as she spoke.
“I was like that once too, but I don’t have nightmares anymore. Because I ended the related bastards with my own hands. How long are you going to groan in your sleep? Don’t forget that there’s someone who can do your homework for you.”
Baegya’s voice, filled with certainty, touched the last of Jinwoo’s patience.
“Is it really… possible? Is my ability really worth that much?”
“It’s possible. It isn’t just a matter of potential; it truly has tremendous value. I may be a villain, but I don’t live by telling lies. Ah, except to heroes. Anyway, have you made up your mind now? Then choose. Will you go back to that hellish office tomorrow, or will you throw in your resignation and become my partner?”
Jinwoo looked down at his palm. The hand of a worker, callused from coding. Just ordinary citizen A.
He felt as if he were standing on a boundary. A crossroads where he had to choose between being a villain or an ordinary citizen.
“…Can you give me an advance for operating expenses? As a replacement for severance pay.”
For the first time, Baegya laughed aloud, beaming.
“Of course. The decision you’ve made will be the best one of your life.”
The next morning, Tuesday, the office was as noisy as usual. The team leader approached Jinwoo’s desk again and threw down a bundle of documents.
“Kang Jinwoo! I told you to fix this, didn’t I? You still haven’t finished? Is there something wrong with your brain? Skipping the company dinner yesterday must’ve made you feel real alive, huh?”
The bundle of papers grazed Jinwoo’s cheek and scattered across the floor. Normally, Jinwoo would have bowed and scraped as he picked them up, but this time, he remained seated and looked up at the team leader.
“Hey, aren’t you going to answer? Are you defying me right now?”
Jinwoo took out the envelope he had prepared in advance from inside his jacket and placed it on the desk with a sharp thud.
“This is my resignation. Please calculate my severance pay and unpaid allowances properly and deposit them.”
The team leader let out a hollow laugh as if he couldn’t believe it, then his face turned red and he shouted.
“What? Resignation? You think there’s anywhere that’ll take you if you leave? One word from me in this industry and you’re finished! Should I make it so you can’t even get a part-time job at a convenience store?”
Jinwoo rose from his seat and turned around without even gathering his things. Looking straight into the eyes of the team leader blocking his path, Jinwoo murmured in a low voice.
“Team Leader, your breath really stinks every morning. I don’t know whether that’s the smell of rotten pride or a stomach problem, but please take care of it. What did the people sitting next to you ever do wrong?”
Silence fell over the office, and from behind him came the sound of his colleagues’ suppressed laughter bursting out.
Leaving the team leader’s scream behind him, Jinwoo kicked open the building doors and stepped outside. The noon sunlight felt brutally refreshing.
When he returned home, Baegya turned her head from the window and asked,
“Looks like you really let it all out? Your expression has completely changed.”
“Yes. Let’s do it. Let’s try. I’ll trust you.”
“A good choice. You’ve now taken your first step toward becoming an excellent villain. Shall I start with congratulations?”
“Don’t joke around.”
He had made up his mind, and now he was taking his first step. For the first time, he brought out the ability he had never told anyone about.
“First, let’s check what we have to work with. You said you were curious about my ability, right? I’ll tell you everything.”
After taking out some water and drinking it, he continued explaining as if vomiting the words out.
“My ability can first conceal my own aura. And it can conceal other people’s auras too. For twenty-four hours. It stays in effect even if we’re separated. I don’t know how many people I can affect at once. And my hideout—the space I think of as my own—I can grant this ability to it. Then the auras of the people there are hidden.”
Baegya’s eyes flashed. She immediately understood the value of the ability Jinwoo described.
“It’s even more incredible than I thought. Good.”
As she said that, she smiled. No matter how many times he saw it, he thought it was a smile that could enchant even people.
“Starfall. That’s my ability. It lets me turn mana into waves of light and wield them like falling stars. It’s powerful and very flashy. Thanks to that, throughout my life as a villain, it’s left unmistakable traces, and I’ve been hunted relentlessly.”
Come to think of it, she’d said she was once a hero, hadn’t she?
He wondered why he hadn’t known someone like her. But it was only natural. He’d never had any interest in heroes. It hadn’t even been long since he’d started remembering heroes’ faces at all.
“We’ll have to rent an office. Including living facilities, of course. If we gather people there, we can make a team. Then I suppose we’ll need to attach a suitable company name to it. Does any good name come to mind?”
Jinwoo glanced over the coding books on his desk and spoke indifferently.
“Let’s call it Runtime Software. It just means the time during which a program is running. We’re not actually going to develop anything anyway, so the name doesn’t matter.”
“Runtime… Well, I don’t really know what it means, but it doesn’t sound bad. Now then, you be the team leader.”
A sudden proposal to be team leader. And not just an ordinary team leader. It meant becoming the head. He had enough sense to understand that much.
“What? Why me? I don’t have any combat power.”
“Because the organization is made possible by your ability. The core becomes the leader. Isn’t that obvious? Only if you become the head will the core remain steady.”
“So an office worker becomes the boss of a villain team in an instant.”
As he said that, Jinwoo found himself smiling crookedly without realizing it.
“Oh, and Representative. Since you threw in your resignation, you should take responsibility for dinner tonight. I’m sick of eating the instant food you buy every day.”
Baegya said it while waving a delivery flyer.
“Oh, right. Managing the money is your job now too. Now hurry up and order tangsuyuk. I’m craving it for the first time in a while. I’m a dipper, by the way. You’re not one of those shameless pour-the-sauce people, are you?”
“Is that something you ask of someone who just quit his job today? And what if I am a pourer? Are you going to break this alliance?”
“Oh my, so you are a pourer. Hmm, I’ll let it slide specially. And for someone who supposedly quit, you got reemployed right away, didn’t you? In that case, you should actually be giving a job-warming gift. So please order from somewhere good.”
Jinwoo clutched at his hair and opened the delivery app.
The first official duty of the villain alliance Runtime was to empty the representative’s wallet and offer tangsuyuk to the number two who was practically number one.
“Damn it… To think the representative of a villain team has to sit here choosing the lunch menu.”
Beyond Jinwoo’s grumbling, Baegya’s delighted laughter overlapped.
The daily life tormented by overtime had ended. The extraordinary life he had so stubbornly ignored had arrived. He had lost his job too. Now he was moving toward a future he could no longer turn back from.
And yet, despite all that, Jinwoo felt more at ease than he had on any other day.