Donut

A very large donut had been punched into my side, but thanks to it being seared well-done, I managed to avoid bleeding out.

The brutally intense heat had sealed the wound, in other words. At times like this, I didn’t know whether to be grateful that her ability was fire, or resent it even more.

But after I passed out from indescribable agony and came to, I was told that an entire week had already gone by.

A week. It was the first time in my life that such a long stretch of time had simply vanished wholesale.

I’d been worried about what I’d do if I woke up in a hospital, but thankfully, Makina wasn’t that oblivious. I was able to wake up safely inside the capsule she had once been sleeping in.

It had been quite the ordeal secretly bringing it back from Okinawa, but seeing it come in handy like this made all that trouble worth it.

‘Still…….’

It was a relief that I had woken up safely, but there was still a troublesome problem.

“You jerk…….”

Makina, her eyes swollen from how much she had cried, shouted at me with a flushed face.

“You evil bastard, how long has it even been since you said you wouldn’t get hurt, and you come back looking like that? Do you have any idea how scared I was? I thought you were going to die just like that!”

“Uh, I’m sorry. For making you worry for no reason……”

“If you know that, then why did you get hurt!”

Faced with Makina shouting at me with such a razor-edged air, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

Normally, I would have brushed it off with a suitable joke, but this time, I could feel on my skin that her fear had been sincere.

I had broken the promise I made last time, and on top of that, she must have carried me into this capsule, managed the Core Relic and the animals after their control was released, and handled all sorts of cleanup while I was unconscious. Even if I had ten mouths, I had nothing to say to her.

During the week I was asleep, she probably hadn’t had a single moment of peaceful rest.

Makina looked as though she was about to pour out more words, huffing and puffing, but then she checked the wound in my side again and let out a deep sigh.

There was more relief than anger soaked into that sigh.

“Hoo…… Can you use your ability now?”

“Huh?”

“I mean the wound in your side. The capsule is only a stopgap measure. It can’t restore you perfectly. If you leave it like that, it’ll be dangerous.”

Only then did I understand what Makina meant, and hurriedly examined my side.

The part that had been charred black like burnt meat had been roughly filled in by the effects of the capsule, but an ugly scar was still coiled there like a snake.

I had forgotten about it for a moment while Makina was scolding me, but the instant I saw the wound with my own eyes, it felt as though the throbbing I’d forgotten came surging back along my nerves and into my brain.

“Yeah, no problem. This much is enough.”

Still, it wasn’t painful enough to make me lose my mind, so I slowly placed my hand over the wound and used Restoration.

It was the first time I had ever used the ability on myself. How should I put it? The sensation of my organs, muscles, fat, and skin twisting from the inside was strangely unpleasant.

I wanted to pull my hand away at once, but Makina was staring at me so intently that I couldn’t.

And before long, the scar that had occupied my side was wiped away cleanly, without a trace, as if it had never been there to begin with.

“It really is an amazing ability no matter how many times I see it. It can erase a wound that bad in an instant. Isn’t this cheating?”

“Heh heh, you think it only works on wounds? This is the same ability that fixed your broken capsule.”

“Tch, do you know how many times you’ve already said that? My ears hurt, so stop already.”

Once she confirmed that the wound had been cleaned up, Makina’s momentum seemed to soften a little.

Normally, she was a fun little brat to tease, but when she got genuinely angry like just now, she really was scary.

At any rate, after confirming that my condition had completely recovered, Makina crossed her arms and asked with a serious expression.

“So how did you get hurt that badly? Tell me everything that happened. Don’t leave out a single thing.”

I knew she would ask.

It had happened after I withdrew not only my subordinates but all the drones as well, so there was no way Makina could have known what had gone on at the scene.

There wasn’t anything in particular to hide, so I sat on the edge of the bed and calmly explained what had happened then.

About the red flash that came flying from behind me after I healed Nova.

“A hero ambushed you?”

After hearing my story, Makina’s eyes went round, as expected, seemingly quite shocked.

This might be a world where supernatural abilities ran rampant, but even here, hero manuals and human rights very much existed.

The role of a government-certified hero was, at most, the suppression and arrest of villains. Summary judgment and punishment belonged to the judicial authorities.

Aside from that, due to issues like excessive force, it was an unwritten rule that heroes avoided killing whenever possible. And while burning and cauterizing the wound meant I didn’t die on the spot, putting a hole in someone’s stomach was still undeniably a fatal injury.

This could easily be considered attempted murder, not suppression.

“What kind of hero does that!? Is it fine as long as you don’t die?”

“Tell me about it. I didn’t expect to get hit like that either.”

She had even aimed for my head at the end, after all.

If I had pressed the switch a step too late, there would be a lump of charcoal here instead of me.

It was an attack filled with murderous intent, one that anyone could tell had not been meant for an arrest.

“You said her name was Flare, right?”

“If it’s a red-haired hero who uses flames, there’s no one else. She’s the rising star who’s been on the news practically every other day lately.”

Flare. After I fell into this world because of that bastard Tanaka’s antics, the first hero I encountered was her, introduced on the news.

After that, when I first met Nova, at Nova’s debut stage, and now, ultimately, even punching a hole in my side.

If you called this fate, then I suppose it was fate.

“So what are you going to do, Jinwoo? You’re not thinking of just letting it slide, are you?”

At Makina’s unusually sharp question, I smiled crookedly, as if she had asked something obvious, and answered.

“What else would I do? Returning what I receive twofold suits my nature.”

If Nova had ambushed and injured me, I would have laughed it off, saying I had been careless.

I might even have been delighted, praising her for surpassing my expectations.

She was the protagonist I had chosen, and I had willingly taken on the role of villain for her sake.

But suffering such humiliation from a third party who wasn’t Nova, and an uninvited guest who had barged into the stage I had prepared without permission, then simply letting it pass—that did not suit my temperament.

There was my dignity as a villain to consider, and above all, she had to pay the price for stealing a week from me.

“Naturally, she needs to pay for the donut. She made me such a big, beautiful donut. I can’t accept it for free, can I?”

Only when I gave her a gift greater than the pain I had received would the relationship between a true hero and villain be complete.

@

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will win every battle.

Since ancient times, they have said that if you know yourself and know your enemy, victory is certain.

Although the first time I fought Flare, our dear Nyangsik had knocked her flat in one blow, there was no harm in digging down to the bone for information on an enemy.

The wound in my side had fully recovered, but at Makina’s urging, I quietly rested for one more day and adjusted my condition.

Then, starting the next day, I immediately began scraping together information on Flare.

I combed through everything from the public information posted in the hero database to paid databases, various wikis, internet articles, and even trivial reactions in online communities.

On top of that, I mobilized Makina’s hacking skills to extract even the Hero Association’s non-public personal records, and based on that address, attached animals to her and established a twenty-four-hour surveillance network.

Perhaps because she was an S-rank hero, the sheer volume of information on her was overwhelmingly greater than Nova’s.

It took a full two days just to sift out and organize the important parts.

Nova, on the other hand, had been treated so poorly that there was nothing to find even when I looked, so I’d had to create everything for her one by one.

If not for Makina, I truly would have had to spend a considerable amount of time building up information on Flare.

Hero name: Flare. Real name: Han Ju-a. Age: twenty-three.

Her ability was, as expected, the power to manipulate flames. Rather than simply spewing fire, she used techniques that compressed flames into sharp blades or arrows and fired them.

When first registered, she had been A-rank, but she was promoted to S-rank within a year. Her career as a hero was one year, shorter than Nova’s, but the number of villains she had arrested in that time was staggering.

“Huh, 117? That’s impressive. What, is she stamping them out in a factory?”

To arrest over a hundred villains in a year, not as part of a team but solo.

I didn’t know whether to call that incredible, or say that this country’s public security had gone to hell.

In any case, the information on Flare was dazzlingly impressive compared to Nova’s, but one item in particular caught my eye.

[Special Note] Extreme hostility toward villains: Habitual use of force beyond what is necessary when suppressing targets. Displays attack patterns intended not for simple incapacitation, but for causing permanent physical damage to the target.

“Hostility, huh. This is beyond the level of hostility.”

When I looked through the related internal disciplinary records and victim cases, sure enough, our dear S-rank hero had all sorts of issues.

“Well, well. Every villain she arrested got fed a donut. Come to think of it, she put a hole in that muscle pig’s side too.”

It wasn’t just me. She had punched holes not only in the sides of numerous villains, but also in their legs, shoulders, and all sorts of places where she had cleverly avoided vital points.

In severe cases, the shock had even caused limbs to fall off, and there were blunt reviews left behind saying that heroes with healing abilities had suffered quite a bit cleaning up after her.

At any rate, while her cruelty was apparently becoming controversial even within the Association, there was also a fairly large segment of public opinion cheering her on as a hero without mercy for evildoers, especially among the masses who hated villains.

Whether in the Korea I used to live in or in this neighborhood, people’s distrust of the justice system was exactly the same.

As a result, she was a hero whose supporters and haters were split to extremes.

A hero of hatred who, despite being able to suppress her opponents easily, deliberately took pains to inflict the worst possible agony, stopping just short of killing them.

She was more dangerous and twisted than I had expected in many ways, but for me, that was actually a welcome thing.

The more twisted the enemy, the more fun it was to break them down.

“──I’ve decided, Han Ju-a. I’m going to thoroughly crush you.”

Cruel though her methods were, she was still someone who had contributed to protecting Korea’s public order from villains.

On top of that, she wasn’t particularly an obstacle blocking Nova’s path, so under normal circumstances, she would have been a hero I paid no attention to.

But now that I had taken on the name of the villain Sigma, leaving the one who put a hole in my body alone would be impolite.

When she is overwhelmingly defeated by the villain she so despises, and the cruelty she has wielded returns to her, what kind of face will she make? I’m already looking forward to it.

I stretched and turned my head toward Makina.

A cold, villainous smile hung on my lips.

“Get ready, Makina.”

This time, the objective is not a terror attack for Nova’s trial, but a hero hunt as a villain.