Training

“Taeseung, are you really going to be all right?”
“About what?”

Outside the offices of Beyond Villain, the Villain organization. I’d clocked out sharp, not a minute of overtime, and now I was standing around chatting with Yang Hayun. I was waiting on Scorpion, but she wouldn’t leave.

“Didn’t you get a taxi?”
“I can’t just go when I’m worried about you.”
“…Worried?”
“Yes, the way people around here are looking at you isn’t normal. What if something happens to you…”

I looked around the way she said to, and plenty of heads ducked away. Watching me, then, and pretending they weren’t. It left a bad taste, though surely nobody would try anything right in front of the company.

“It’s fine. I’m getting a ride straight home anyway.”
“Then… before I get in a taxi, at least take a few of these.”
“Hm?”

She dug something out of her small handbag and held it out to me. A spray, a pocket knife, and a keyring with a little teddy bear hanging off it.

Ah. The keyring went straight back into the handbag.

“It’s Villain Repellent Spray.”
“…Villain Repellent Spray?”
“Yes, that’s just what it’s called — the contents are exactly the same as a self-defense spray. Pepper and capsaicin? Something along those lines is in it, apparently.”

It sat small and snug in my palm, just right for a pocket. There was a safety catch on it too, so no risk of it going off in there by accident.

Yang Hayun held out the pocket knife next, gripped in her hand.

“It’s folded up inside, but press this button here and — shhk! — out comes the blade.”
“Are you even allowed to carry something this dangerous around?”
“When you’re commuting into the Villain Special City, this much is a must-have. I keep spares just in case, so take them! Consider it payback for the profits you made me!”

— Tap-tap-tap!

She waved and climbed into a taxi.

So this was the sort of thing you had to carry to commute in and out of the Villain Special City… Maybe I’d been taking all of this far too lightly.

Maybe I should buy a few things of my own when I get home.

I slipped the spray and the pocket knife into separate pockets of my pants. Small as they were, that reassuring feeling of simply having them on me. I fiddled with my employee badge and thought.

And that line about being safe as long as you’ve got the badge — who knows anymore.

Harm anyone carrying a Beyond Villain employee badge and you get paid back double, without exception. That was what let ordinary people out of elite backgrounds come and go from the Villain Special City at all.

A threat like that only works on someone with common sense, though. Normally, catching and killing someone like me carries more risk than gain, so nobody bothers. But what about a staff member with a fifty-million-won bounty on his head? Wasn’t there every chance somebody desperate for quick cash would take a run at him? Thinking it through, the fine hairs on my neck stood on end.

I need a way to protect myself.

It’s funny coming from me, but I’m weak. My physical ability goes without saying, and my Gift is a long way from combat too. Put me up against an average grown man and I’d probably struggle to win.

That left me two ways. The first was to discipline myself through training.

And the second—

“!?”

My vision blurred in an instant, and the future began to show itself. The Gift, manifesting in the least expected of moments. My alarm lasted only a moment; what was playing in front of my eyes left me no choice but to focus.

What is this?

This wasn’t just a phone or a TV screen, the way it always was. The footage showed the front of the company, the very spot I’d been looking at only moments before. Then something like static crackled across it and my whole field of view washed white. As though somebody had struck me.

That isn’t where it ends.

The picture shook wildly, nothing coming through properly, like a camera knocked out of focus. I was watching myself force my eyes open even after the blow landed.

And the last thing visible through that blurred field of view was… some man holding a wooden bat, looking down at me with chilling eyes.

“…”

The footage ended right there. A Gift that had come and gone too short and too sharp to judge anything from. Only one thing was certain: I had been attacked.

If I’m attacked, then when? Where?

I looked around like a madman and saw nothing. There was nobody nearby suspicious enough to attack me. Only people walking on, each going their own way.

“This is…”

Sorting through the tangle in my head, I looked straight ahead, and a powerful sense of déjà vu came over me. The angle of the sunlight, the number of cars, their colors, the number of people walking along the sidewalk. Every last one of them identical to the opening of that footage.

Which meant—

— Swoosh!

I bent at the waist without warning, and a chilling wind went whoom over my head.

“What the fuck. He dodged that?”

A thick, coarse curse smacked against my ear. I put a few hurried steps between myself and the voice, and only then did a human shape come into view. The face matched the one the Gift had shown me, exactly.

A Gift that turns the body invisible?

There had definitely been nobody around me a moment ago. If the déjà vu hadn’t made me duck, I’d have taken the bat and gone straight down. The future I’d seen through the Future Observation Gift, come within a hair of true.

“Fifty million won! Come along quietly, would you!”

The man’s face crumpled into a scowl as he raised the wooden bat. This was no crime of impulse; he was plainly after the bounty on my head. I threw myself backward into a roll, graceless as anything, and got clear of the bat.

— Psssht!

I turned as I came up, and the Villain Repellent Spray I’d pulled from my pocket went off. Yellow mist, straight into his face out of nowhere. He dropped the bat at once and clapped his hands over his eyes and mouth, but the spray was already in.

“Cough!! Cough, cough!”
“…”

He twisted his body this way and that as though in agony. A vicious stench of drink coming off his clothes as he thrashed. He’d gotten himself thoroughly drunk, recognized my face, and gone for an ambush, by the look of it.

I was wondering whether I should still make a run for it when I heard someone behind me.

A humanoid robot, jet-black from head to foot, had appeared, ‘Beyond Villain’ printed large across its chest. One of the security models that patrolled in and around the company, and a product of the Villain organization Villain Corporation.

“Cough— f-fuck! You tin-can bastard… let go of me!”

“Gyaaaagh!!”

— Krrunch!

The security robot bent the man’s arm all the way back on itself, then tied him up. His hands and feet trussed by that brutish grip, the man slung over the robot’s shoulder, its footsteps carrying him off somewhere. All that was left in front of the company was the wooden bat he’d dropped.

…I’m alive.

— Flop.

I sat down right there on the road, past caring that my pants were getting filthy. The tension drained out of me and my legs went with it. The future I’d observed through the Gift wouldn’t leave my head.

Did I nearly die just now?

Both my palms were shaking when I looked down at them. Pure luck, that the one attacking me was a drunk Villain acting on impulse. What if Villains had put together a careful plan to abduct me and come at me with that instead? He might have slung me over his shoulder where I’d fallen and strolled out invisible.

— Hoooonk!

“Squirt! What are you doing sitting down there!”
“…Ah.”

The horn brought me back to myself, and there was Scorpion’s car. That battered old thing put me through reckless driving on every commute, and I’d never been so glad to see anything. I all but ran to the passenger seat and climbed in.

“Let’s get going, quickly.”

— Vroom.

Only once the car pulled away did my breathing settle. Scorpion kept studying my face even as he drove.

“One look and I can tell. Flies been swarming you, eh? Gwahaha!”
“…”
“So? How does it feel to be a celebrity?”

Scorpion laughed with every tooth showing. He’d taken one look at the wooden bat and the state of me and put it together. Any other day I’d have snapped something back, but today I didn’t have the strength for it.

“Squirt, don’t go thinking the Villain Special City is some soft place. This is what it’s always been. That badge around your neck isn’t a master key that solves everything.”
“Then… what am I supposed to do?”
“Work that much out for yourself. What is it you need to do?”

I shut my mouth at Scorpion’s question. The Hero Association had slapped a fifty-million-won bounty on me out of nowhere, purely to screw me over. If I wasn’t going to dance to their tune…

“I want to get stronger.”

Now that the Hero Association has gone as far as posting a bounty, I truly can’t leave the Villain Special City anymore. To survive in a place where fists are closer to hand than the law… I need power enough to stand against the threats around me.

“Well said, Squirt.”
“It’s Im Taeseung, not Squirt.”
“Prickly today, aren’t you. Think you’re a hedgehog or something?”
“It’s not that…”
“When we get there, change into something comfortable and come back out.”

Scorpion knocked my shoulder and put his hand back on the wheel. The reckless driving was as bad as ever, but for some reason I found it comforting.

“You made it.”
“…Where is this?”
“The training room down in the dormitory basement. Right next door to the bar.”

So the basement didn’t just hold a bar; there was a training room down here too. Dust lay over everything, as though nobody ever used it, but what you’d expect was all there: a punching bag, jump ropes, the whole set. Scorpion, in nothing but a tank top and showing off his muscles, tapped at the punching bag.

“You said you wanted to get stronger, right?”
“Yes.”
“There are two ways to get stronger.”

— Pap-pap!

He kept knocking lightly at the punching bag with his fists.

“The first is training gains.”
“Training gains?”
“That’s right. Build your stamina through training, put on muscle, get stronger. Slow, but it’s the textbook route.”

I nodded along. Shut up in my room all that time, I couldn’t claim much in the way of physical ability. It might even be below average for an ordinary person, so improving it was non-negotiable.

“And the second.”

— Wham!

Scorpion abruptly produced an enormous hammer and brought it down on the punching bag. Where a fist had barely moved it, the bag lurched hard and creaked.

“…Gear gains?”
“Exactly what it sounds like — good equipment. Get into the Villain Special City’s black market and there’s nothing you can’t get hold of. Guns, blades, people…”
“…”
“If you want to get stronger right now, that’s the only way for you.”

Building up the body the textbook way takes a long time. A few months at the short end, possibly years at the long end. I could be killed in an ambush any day now, and I couldn’t afford to wait that long.

It comes down to gear gains, then.

Just as Yang Hayun went around carrying a self-defense spray, I needed equipment I could use against an attack from outside.

“So about that, Squirt. You got any money?”
“Money?”
“That’s right. Buying at auction on the black market is the surest way. Nothing on the open market is worth using, you hear?”

At Scorpion’s question, I broke into a grin.

“Luckily, money I have plenty of.”

I’d been wondering what to do with everything I’d made off Hero Gamble, and this was perfect timing.