Perhaps, they might not have been enjoying peace. They had been living with the truth hidden beneath the name of peace, but reality may still have been a cesspool where villains rampaged.
Just as the sun continued to burn even if you covered the sky with your palm, no matter how much they longed for peace and fabricated it from lies, reality was no different from hell.
“Run! We have to escape—!”
The students who had witnessed someone collapsing before their eyes were feeling that fact to the bone.
The school lay in ruins after the villain attack.
The students screamed and ran toward somewhere safe, but even so, with the entire school covered in villains, that wasn’t such a good choice either.
The students kept encountering villains. Some were lightly injured, some seriously injured, and though a minority, there were those who had died miserably. It was only natural, in a way, that they trembled in fear seeing their injuries or corpses.
Humans are beings who cherish their own lives the most. If they looked upon this hell that was no different from their future and felt no fear, it would be one of three things: they had the strength to overcome fear, they had a mental problem that prevented them from feeling fear, or they were not human.
The young students did not fall into any of these three categories. Thus, even if they were paralyzed by fear and sat down, there would be no one to chastise them. After all, the only ones who might were their classmates trembling in fear just like the villains—but anyway, that was the way it was.
“Run! Hero Course students are over there, so there should be teachers there too!”
But they continued to flee. They knew that stopping when they were in immediate danger of dying was a foolish act.
They were, after all, students enrolled in Korea’s only Hero Academy. They may have grown complacent, swept up by a false peace, but they hadn’t completely turned their eyes away from reality. Or perhaps it was precisely because this wasn’t the first time villains had raided them.
The students kept running with the thought that they needed someone to protect them. The villains did their best to kill them somehow, but nevertheless weren’t achieving proper results, yet the students were gradually losing the strength to flee.
“You bastards, finally cornered you.”
Words no different from a death sentence fell upon the fleeing students.
The moment they turned the corner of the hallway, a group of villains appeared. Each and every one of them brandished weapons with menacing faces, or activated their abilities glaring at the students.
The students instinctively looked back, but the villains chasing them were still behind them, and this meant there was nowhere left for them to run.
The students realized. With their own strength, they could no longer flee anywhere. The choices remaining to them were to meet their deaths right here, or—
“O God.”
They cried out to a god who might be their only savior and squeezed their eyes shut, but no god existed to reach out to them. If a god whose very existence was uncertain were to side with young students, would not even those who had already died have been spared?
“Stop.”
However—that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be saved.
“Who the hell are—kuk?!”
It didn’t matter if God didn’t listen to their words. Society had been created not by God’s will, but by people coming together. Even without God, there were humans.
Although the human who reached out to them was a senior only a few years older than them, the students could smile with their eyes wide open. Their seniors—the girl before their eyes now—
“—is a hero.”
Because she was a hero who would bring them salvation.
“Will-o'-the-wisp!”
The girl with long silver hair shouted, and her golden eyes began to gleam with strange colors.
Fireballs floating in the air charged straight at the villains and collided with them, sending the villains flying backward to crash into the walls. The other villains who saw this changed their target to her, thrusting their weapons and aiming their gun barrels, but even so, they were subdued in an instant.
The students watching that sight in a daze realized why they were called the Golden Generation.
The class president of the Hero Course third-years, Seong Hangyeol, and the vice president, Choe Jihyeon, needed no mention, and the senior before their eyes right now, Seong Hyeona—
“—Are you okay?”
—was shining brighter than any hero they had watched in videos.
The villains who had been smiling as if they would kill everyone at any moment all collapsed, and after finally stomping on the last villain, the girl swept her bangs back and smiled as she looked at the students—only then did they stop staring blankly at her and nod repeatedly.
“Are you general course juniors?”
“Y-Yes!”
“Don’t cry. We’re here now.”
She comforted them and smiled kindly, then soon checked the students’ condition and let out a sigh of relief. There were those with minor injuries, but none with life-threatening serious wounds. It could be said that not losing their lives in this hellish place was impressive enough.
“What about the other seniors...?”
“They went to rescue other students. I was the same, but thanks to that, I met you.”
She smiled to reassure the students, then immediately took her phone from her pocket and made contact. She didn’t have the in-ear earpieces used during hero activities, but she typed in the class group chat that she had rescued the students, then immediately moved out.
She was smiling and comforting her juniors, but strictly speaking, the situation wasn’t good. Reporting the situation crudely via cell phone rather than in-ear earpieces, lacking information to the point of not knowing how many villains had invaded the school, and the number of students who could move right now was small.
“—Let’s go for now.”
“Where to?”
“The auditorium. Everyone said to gather there.”
However, they did what they could. They moved, believing in their friends, believing that they would win this time too. Having gone through countless incidents since the entrance ceremony and grown, these students were now strong enough not to pale in comparison to heroes, and thus they could hold faith in their comrades.
“Ah, there are still first-year juniors left! They must still be trapped inside the classroom—”
The students immediately moved to evacuate. But when a male student hesitated and spoke, everyone’s expressions hardened. They had weighed the fact that they needed to save those juniors against their own safety and stopped in their tracks.
“It’s okay. A reliable ally is heading there.”
But Hyeona smiled and spoke confidently. Her faith in her classmates was strong, and in particular—
“Our Ice Princess!”
Her faith in the student named Choe Jihyeon, whose skills were outstanding even compared to them, was even stronger—
“That bitch, it’s Snow Woman! Capture her—”
“Blizzard.”
Choe Jihyeon. The girl using the hero name Snow Woman was, as she expected, easily subduing the villains and pressing forward.
“...Damn it.”
A cold atmosphere fitting her still expressionless face as usual. Freezing villains solid as she advanced, she began running down the stairs like mad.
“—Kill her!”
“Don’t get in my way!”
The villains who had no intention of letting her go thrust their weapons—
“—Blizzard.”
The result was the same as the villains who had faced her earlier. The villains who faltered at the breathtakingly frigid air immediately froze into ice statues and hardened, and the moment they collapsed to the ground, the ice binding them melted away everywhere except their limbs and mouths.
The skill to take down villains in an instant despite still being a student, and the clean follow-up. Displaying performance worthy of recognition among heroes and citizens, she deserved to be called the Ice Princess, the nickname her friends had given her—
“I don’t have time for this.”
—yet anxiety was visible on the face that had seemed like an emotionless doll, and the honest words that slipped from her mouth revealed that she was someone with a warm heart.
—The other students might be in danger. No, they definitely are!
She had kicked open the classroom door with her friends after hearing Hangyeol’s words in order to protect the students. That was why she was now running toward the classroom of the first-year Hero Course students who were her juniors, but dark imaginings continued in her head.
With the villains having reached the third floor where they were, there was no way the students on the first floor were safe, so what if they had all died?
She tried to shake off these grim thoughts, but it wouldn’t come easy. Therefore she reached the first floor with all her might, turned the corner and checked the hallway—
“—Move it, move it. You might get on the bad side of the god you serve at this rate, you know?”
She ran into villains wearing masks on their heads, with outfits markedly different from the ones she had seen until now.
“...Lady Ash.”
“What’s with you? Suddenly like a dog about to shit—Huh?”
As a villain pointed ahead and spoke, the red-haired villain turned her head. She discovered a hero standing before her and froze—
“Ah, I’m gonna get an earful when I go back.”
Smacking her forehead at the sight of the hero before her—the girl their god wished to protect with near madness.