Chapter 8: A Hero Needs a Villain

The woman in the rabbit mask stood up, brushing herself off.

She stared at me for a long moment.

I removed my mask. She followed suit.

Lee Si-hyun, was it?

Her eyes were filled with pity and a hint of anger.

Tears streamed down her face as she approached me and lightly slapped my cheek. It barely registered.

“What were you thinking?!”

The dead man’s words echoed in my mind. I mumbled, my head lowered.

“It would have been… unfortunate.”

“You’re still a child, even if you’re strong. You deserve to be loved, to have friends, to see the good in the world…”

I looked up at her tear-stained face.

Why did she care so much about me? We had just met.

Was it because of my appearance? I looked like a young girl. unScarred.

Though few girls my age had experienced having their limbs severed and reattached.

Or killed guards on a whim.

To me, killing those guards had been a trivial act. Just as locking me up and experimenting on me had been a trivial act for the researchers.

Their daily routine.

“Don’t cry. It’s not worth crying over.”

Then what was worth crying over? I had screamed from pain, but truly cried from sadness… only once.

—————–

We left the building.

No one stood in our way. They were all dead.

The walls and floor were painted red, but my body was clean. Perhaps I should have stained myself, as proof of my work.

We loaded the surviving test subjects, those without abilities, onto a truck. I climbed onto the back of Si-hyun’s motorcycle.

Was I pitiful? I didn’t mind pity, but I didn’t want to be pitiful.

I clung to Si-hyun as we rode back to the city, leaning against her as she wept for me. I felt warmth, and a strange sense of unease.

“Tell me your name.”

“Ha-rin. Yoo Ha-rin.”

I felt compelled to tell her. The words slipped out before I could stop them.

“It’s a beautiful name.”

The compliment warmed me. I had forgotten what it felt like to be praised.

——————

Back at the apartment, I was scolded.

At least I was sitting at a table, not strapped to an operating table.

“You can’t disobey orders and act alone, even if you beg us to let you. We can’t take you with us if you do.”

“Then I’ll go by myself.”

“I was just… doing what I wanted before school starts.”

“That’s not something a child should do. That’s for adults.”

Si-hyun sighed when I didn’t respond.

She had become my handler, it seemed. Perhaps because she was closest to my age and gender.

I didn’t mind, but she seemed determined to mold me into some ideal version of a young girl.

“Why don’t you visit your friend, the one you wanted to see, the reason you want to go to that school? No one will know you were in that lab. We burned the files, and everyone involved is… dead.”

Not just dead. I had hunted them down, drowned them in their own blood. Saying they were “dead” made it sound like they had died of natural causes.

I didn’t want to seek her out.

I wanted it to be accidental. A chance encounter, preferably in a difficult situation.

Not some heartwarming reunion of childhood friends.

I just wanted to see her. The circumstances didn’t matter.

“You must have lived a normal life before you started wearing that mask.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to live like that too. Happy, with someone else.”

“Then do it.”

“But… spending half a year with people in white coats changes you. Being trapped in that small space, you start borrowing happiness from the future.”

Finding joy in trivial things, desperately clinging to hope, waiting for someone, especially Seo-jun, to rescue me… this was the result.

“I don’t enjoy doing this. I don’t feel any sense of revenge. Killing researchers doesn’t make me happy.”

It was like picking up trash on the street. I did it when I saw it, but if I couldn’t be bothered, I would just walk past.

“Then what do you want?”

“Why do you care? Just go do whatever it is you do. Leave the useless, bratty girl alone.”

“I… had a younger sister.”

“Don’t compare me to her. We’re not alike.”

“You’re right. Not at all. My sister was obedient and kind, just like me.”

Her face crumpled, and she left the room, as if on the verge of tears.

I stared at the empty chair, then picked up the remote and turned on the news.

A burly man in a blue uniform was yelling into a microphone.

– We will not tolerate this act of terrorism! The lives of innocent children and researchers were taken…

I changed the channel.

The surviving test subjects would be trained as operatives if they chose to stay. Those who wanted to leave would have their identities erased and be placed in orphanages.

Easy enough, since they were already dead.

A pretty woman in a neat suit stood in front of the burned-out lab, speaking in a monotone.

– In the wake of the recent attacks on research facilities, the Superhuman Response Agency will be deploying A-rank ability users to key locations…

I changed the channel again. I just wanted mindless entertainment, but every channel was talking about the lab.

Everyone was talking about it.

And Seo-jun would hear about it too. The hero(warrior), the world-saver, would have to find and defeat the villain everyone was condemning.

And I wanted them to know.

It was better to be remembered as a masked monster, a ruthless killer, than to die anonymously in a basement as test subject Number Eleven.

That kind of recognition wasn’t something you could achieve by learning to play the piano, surrounded by happy people.

That’s why you weren’t happy. No one would remember you just for playing the piano.

You weren’t a musical prodigy, just a pretty girl playing someone else’s music.

And no one cared that you learned to make coffee. No one would remember you just for being a good barista.

But if everyone remembered me, and you, as the villain on TV, the ruthless monster… then my only friend, Seo-jun, would notice me too.

She would see what I had become, how I was living, while she was enjoying her life, oblivious to my suffering.

This was all for Seo-jun. Because of her.

I, the ordinary, kind, gentle girl, was disposable, even after ten years of friendship. But…

If I became the monster they described on TV, then Seo-jun would need me.

A hero needs a villain, after all.