A Villain's Life

“Phew… another rough one today.”

I’d worked the whole day under Yang Hayun’s distrustful gaze, and before I knew it, it was time to clock out. The moment I stepped into Scorpion’s room the tension drained right out of me. I loosened my tie and perched on the edge of the bed. Early spring had left a chill in the air, and the evening glow stained the room orange.

Now that the fear of being cut from the company had lifted, body and mind both felt heavy and slack. Part of me wanted to fling it all aside, lie down on the bed and fall asleep… I shook my head hard and pulled myself together.

I’ve only cleared one hurdle so far.

Thanks to the performance bonus, the worry about being cut at the month-end evaluation had eased. But this was Songnang, the Villain Special City, where law and ethics had both vanished. Anything at all could happen here, anywhere, at any time, and nobody would find it strange.

— Bang!

Just then the door flew open without warning.

“Gwahaha! So you were in here? Sorry about that. I should have knocked, at least.”
“No, it’s fine.”

That scorpion tattoo inked across the bald scalp belonged to my roommate, Scorpion. Instead of his usual rumpled things he had a proper suit on, and something about that struck me as odd. He let out a hearty laugh and shucked it off to change. Scorpion must have caught me looking, because he clapped me lightly on the shoulder.

“Don’t just shut yourself in the room. If you’re up for it, how about a drink?”
“…A drink?”
“Hm? You didn’t know, then. There’s a bar in the basement of the Beyond Villain dormitory!”

The place I’d been staying in was, astonishingly, a dormitory belonging to the Villain organization Beyond Villain. And the dorm manager who looked after it was Scorpion… who ran the bar as its bartender at the same time.

“Come on down if you want. First customer gets fifty percent off!”
“Um… even so, I don’t really want to—”
“Good! Let’s go together.”
“What?”

Half-hauled along by Scorpion, I went down into the basement of the walk-up. He undid a door bound shut with a thick iron chain, and the room behind it turned out to be a surprisingly convincing bar. A dozen-odd people were already inside, drinking and making a racket. I followed Scorpion’s lead and sat down at the counter.

“Anything you feel like drinking?”
“No… do you have a recommendation? I’m not much of a drinker.”
“There’s a menu for guys like that!”

Scorpion poured from one bottle after another, worked a shaker, and had a cocktail finished in no time at all.

“Here, give it a try. It’s a Venom.”
“Venom…? It isn’t poison, is it?”
“Gwahaha! It does look the part. You won’t die from drinking it, so don’t you worry.”

A light-green cocktail with a yellow tint landed in front of me. It looked exactly like a poison potion, just as the name Venom suggested. I gave it a cautious sniff first, and it smelled like orange juice with a hint of fruit under it. I drank, and the taste was much the same as orange juice too; only at the finish did a hot alcohol burn linger in my throat.

“The alcohol isn’t strong on the nose, so you’ll be able to drink it like juice.”
“It’s good…”
“Which is only natural, since my skills are outstanding. Gwahaha!”

Sipping at the cocktail, I took a discreet look around. It was the basement of the Beyond Villain dormitory, so most of the people there wore shirts, like me. Here and there I could pick out people with strangely built bodies who looked like Gift awakened.

So even a Villain Special City is a place where people live, in the end…

Two days in the Villain Special City, short as that was, had left me with one impression: crime isn’t as common here as I’d thought. Of course, there’s no telling what goes on inside the pitch-dark back alleys I’d be too frightened to set foot in… At the very least, this wasn’t the demon realm outside the human world the forums made it out to be.

— Clunk.

Just then Scorpion set a new cocktail down in front of me.

“Huh? This cocktail… I didn’t order it.”
“It isn’t from me. Squirt, the lady over there said to give it to you.”
“What…?”

I looked where Scorpion was pointing and found a woman sitting at the counter a little way off. Her face had something cat-like about it, and the moment her eyes met mine, she smiled with them. She rose from her seat and came straight over to sit beside me.

“Hello. The way you kept looking around while you drank made quite an impression on me. This looks like your first time here… am I right?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Please, drink up. It’s on me. It’s a cocktail called a Mimosa — orange-based, so it won’t be bitter.”

I sipped at the cocktail, and sure enough it fizzed, the carbonation riding along with the fresh bite of an orange base.

“It’s good. Thank you.”
“Not at all. I like talking to people who come here for the first time.”
“Ah…”
“I’m called Cattia.”
“Catti… a?”

I’d heard the name somewhere before. Villains tend not to give out their real names, and plenty of them pin a ‘nickname’ on themselves the way Scorpion has. Which meant the woman beside me was a Villain too. And I had heard of a Villain called Cattia.

I think I’ve heard it on Hero Gamble?

A sentence flitted through my head: ‘B-Rank Hero Holywoman vs. Cattia of Superior’. That was the fight I’d bet on right when I first awakened my Gift. Surely she wasn’t…

“Are you, by any chance, with Superior…?”
“That’s right! I never imagined there’d be anyone who could recognize me when I’m not even using my Gift!”
“Ah…”

— Snatch!

She grabbed my hand out of nowhere, delighted. I stiffened awkwardly, and she caught herself at once and let go.

“I’m sorry. I was just so pleased that I…”
“N-no. It’s fine. It’s only, you’re completely different from how you look on TV — it took me by surprise.”
“That’s because every one of us Villains with Superior can control our Gifts. Normally we’re in human form.”

None of that was information I’d heard anywhere before. All I really knew about the Villain organizations was roughly their names. And hearing it straight from a real Villain, I was drawn quickly into what Cattia had to say.

“I’ve always liked cats. There’s one I’ve kept from way back until now, and people around me have always told me I’m like a cat.”
“I see… So is that why you decided to become a cat beastwoman?”
“Something like that. That’s part of it, of course, but the real purpose is this.”

Cattia laughed mischievously and made a circle with her thumb and index finger.

“Money… is it?”
“Yes. It’s a little awkward saying it myself, but Villain work makes decent money. Though my main source of income is magazines.”
“Magazines?”
“Oh my — you know who I am and you don’t know about the magazine? I had no idea. This is it.”

She pulled something out from inside her jacket and held it up for me to see. A photo spread of a giraffe beastwoman in a bikini was plastered square across the cover. I was so shocked I couldn’t get another word out.

“It’s one of the revenue streams for us Superior Villains. Depending on how much you sponsor, you can see things that go rather further than that… Are you interested?”
“…”
“If you are interested, apply for the sponsors-only magazine on the Superior homepage, and be sure to write ‘Cattia’ in the referrer field. That gets you a ten percent discount.”

As though she’d said everything she came to say, she smiled with her eyes and rose from her seat. Her gaze swept the room as if hunting for other prey, and it was exactly the look of a predator. Before I knew it she had whispered something to Scorpion and taken the seat beside someone else.

…At least I knew one thing for certain now. She was in Villain work for the money.

Meanwhile, at that same hour. In a Hero-only hospital room inside the Hero Association…

“Huigyeong. Are you all right? Are you coming round?”
“…Where is this.”
“The Association infirmary.”

What Cha Huigyeong saw when she woke was a pure-white hospital room and a single woman. The woman had a doctor’s coat thrown carelessly over her shoulders, and her name was ‘Mother Healia’. She was an A-rank Hero, but her Gift rapidly healed the wounds of Gift awakened, and that made the Association treat her as a person of the very highest importance.

Cha Huigyeong realized why she was lying here.

“I… lost?”
“Yeah. Stay off the internet for a while. The forums are in an absolute state about you dropping your guard to mess with your phone in the middle of a fight.”
“…”
“Rest up a bit, and once your head’s clear you can discharge yourself. I’ve got someone else to treat, so I’ll be off.”

— Rattle. Thud.

The moment Mother Healia shut the door and disappeared, silence swallowed the room. Hero Association hospital rooms were single-occupancy as standard. Left alone, Cha Huigyeong ground her teeth hard.

“Im Taeseung…”

The thick mask she wore in front of other people peeled away, and her real face showed itself. She took out her phone and read through the text messages Im Taeseung had sent all over again.

The voice recording, and the leak to the internet that had shaken her nerves. She swallowed hard and played the recording. The contents she hadn’t been able to check in the middle of the fight.

“…”
“…What is this?”

Nothing at all had been recorded. An occasional rustling sound, a little microphone noise, and that was the whole of it. Of the exposé she had feared, there was nothing.

Cha Huigyeong opened the internet and searched her own name and her Hero name.

Far from an exposé, there was nothing but news covering her own defeat. The exposé articles Im Taeseung had talked about hadn’t blanketed the internet at all.

No. Come to think of it, the Hero Association would never have let articles attacking her stand in the first place. Which meant Im Taeseung had sent those fake messages from the very start, purely to screw her over.

— Smash!

The phone she had hurled, unable to master her rage, lay scattered across the floor in pieces.

She’d been given a quiet word that her promotion to A-rank Hero was set for within a few months… and now, with this controversy, it might be pushed back, or written off as though it had never existed.

“Im Taeseung… that little shit dares to make a fool of me?”

— Grrk. Grrrrk.

She ground her teeth harder and harder, and threads of blood dripped from her lips.

Im Taeseung was the beast who had lived holed up in a corner of a room on the money she gave him. And that thing she’d kept on money alone, with no job and not so much as a part-time gig, had stabbed her in the back?

— Tromp, tromp.

“!!!”

Her burning need for revenge lasted only a moment. Footsteps were drawing gradually closer outside, and Cha Huigyeong hurriedly arranged her expression. The door slid open with a rattle, without so much as a knock. A middle-aged man stood there, blunt-featured and unsmiling.

“Speedgirl. I heard you were awake.”
“Director, sir.”
“Never mind the pleasantries… I trust you’ve seen the news. Thanks to you, the Hero Association’s image is in tatters.”

Cha Huigyeong flinched at the Operations Bureau Director’s words. Within the Hero Association, the Operations Bureau handled the Association’s deployments and the analysis of intelligence on Villains, and it would be no exaggeration to call it the real power inside the place.

“Killing the articles when Hyperman’s leftovers nearly kicked up a fuss was hard work as well. Have you forgotten already?”
“I’m… sorry.”
“We had to write off the attack on Hero Association headquarters as a simple mishap… and the press bastards took every won they could wring out of us for it.”

The Director swept his hair back and spoke as though chewing the words and spitting them out. Hyperman’s leftovers… Im Taeseung’s flight, and the untimely Villain assault that came of it. The Hero Association had dismissed the incident as ‘a collapse caused by the building’s deterioration’.

“The one you were keeping has run off, and your numbers aren’t good either. Do you imagine the Association can look kindly on that?”
“S-sorry…”
“So the matter of your promotion to A-rank will be left a while longer, and watched.”
“Director!”
“Keep your head down and stay still until the dogs and pigs are done barking¹. Pull another stunt like this… and next time it won’t be your promotion that’s on the line.”
“Director! Director, sir!”

— Rattle. Slam!

The Operations Bureau Director paid no heed to her calls and walked straight out of the room.

Alone once more, Cha Huigyeong stared dumbfounded at the closed hospital-room door.