Results Of Training

Scorpion’s training carried on even after I made Assistant Manager. At first I genuinely wondered whether he was just working off his own stress on me. It took about a week of getting pounded to learn that wasn’t it. He would calmly do the thing no man should ever do to another man, and then say something like this.

“Urgh…! Th-that’s a vital spot…”
“That’s lesson one, Squirt. In a fight with a Villain there’s no such thing as fighting dirty. Commit it to memory.”

I had taken a kick square in the groin, and I sprawled on the floor leaking a few tears. Future Observation hadn’t triggered, so the hit landed clean. …No. Thinking about it now, maybe he really was just beating me for the stress relief.

“You… you fucking bastard…!”
“Ah.”

The Villain staggering back to his feet dragged my mind into the present. One Villain, blood running down his head, glaring at me like he meant to kill. That’s right. A fight had just broken out at the barbecue place.

“T-Taeseung…”
“It’s fine. Stay behind me.”

Yang Hayun couldn’t keep still at the table. She had her phone gripped in one hand, working at something. Calling the company’s security robots, maybe. The company sat close enough to the barbecue place that one of them might arrive at any moment.

“Hah, showing off in front of your girl…! Gaah! Fuck!!”

— Crash.

One more bottle burst over his head. He’d seen it coming and ducked, but my accelerated body wasn’t about to miss him. Not even professional fighters could move like this. Scorpion’s voice echoed in my ears.

“Lesson two! Hitting the same spot twice works!”

The Villain, clutching his head, down on the floor again. Surely that was more than enough to sober him up. Again I set down what was left of the bottle, no more than the neck now, and picked up a fresh one.

For the record, lesson three was ‘first punch wins’ and lesson four was ‘use the objects and the environment around you’. Cheap lessons, but practical ones, and they came pouring out of him. The catch was that I had to take every one of them with my own body.

“Oh! Nice moves!”
“Guhaha! First fight I’ve watched in a while — this is getting me going!”
“Losing to some pen-pushing office worker? You’re disqualified as a Villain, you dumbass!”
“He picked a fight with Beyond Villain with skills like that? That guy’s dying tonight.”
“I’m putting fifty thousand won on ‘the suit wins’!”

The other Villains around the barbecue place were enjoying the fight like a live show. Proof that in this damned city a brawl on this scale is an everyday thing. There was even one bastard taking money on the winner, like it was Hero Gamble.

Right then, with the WD-401 and the thrill of the fight bursting in my brain like fireworks.

“You… you bastard. I was going to take you alive, but I’ve changed my mind.”

The Villain hauled himself up once more. I should have cracked another bottle over his skull while he was still writhing on the ground. Clearly I hadn’t learned to fight the way a Villain fights yet.

“I’ll kill you!”
“!”

The fingers of his left hand drew together into one and became a long blade. Long and thin, it looked vicious at a glance. With a Gift like that, he had every right to talk big.

— Bzzzt—!!

My vision blurred and the footage raced past. The Villain’s left hand danced, carving sharp arcs through the air. I thrashed about trying somehow to dodge them, and then my body came apart, sliced clean into pieces. Finally my vision dropped to the floor with a thunk, and Future Observation ended.

…Insane.

The tipsy fuzz from the drink I’d had with Yang Hayun burned off in an instant. The moment that brief Future Observation ended, he swung his left hand. I fired up the WD-401 and dodged with everything I had.

— Snick.

I’d bent backwards at the waist to let it slip past by a hair, and the tip of my necktie came away with it. Without Future Observation, what got cut might not have been the necktie but my fingers. I poured every scrap of concentration into evading his attacks, and at last he swung one great arc through empty air. His center of gravity was gone. This was the moment.

— Crash!

“Gyaaaaaaagh!!”

The third bottle burst apart and he went down. I grabbed for a fourth in case he got up again, but his eyes had already rolled back in his head. His left hand had gone back to normal too, so he must have lost consciousness entirely. I wiped the cold sweat off my forehead with one hand, and a cheer went up across the barbecue place.

“Thought I was watching a movie. Those moves, I mean, whew.”
“Unreal. That guy’s actually a Villain, isn’t he?”
“They said he’s a B-rank Villain. Don’t you watch the news?”
“I don’t think I could dodge all those attacks either…”
“Watching this has me itching. Reckon I could take him right now?”
“Oh, I was thinking the same thing.”

The sticky eyes of the Villains around the barbecue place clung to me. Plenty of them were purely impressed by the ridiculous evasion I’d shown. But no small number were burning to test themselves against me.

Not good…

The WD-401 is a three-hundred-million-won Artifact, but it isn’t all-powerful. It has functional limits like anything else, and it heats up the more you use it, so you can’t keep it running for long. Even now the sweat streaming off me from that heat was not a good sign.

Just as I was thinking I had to grab Yang Hayun and run, somehow.

— Thuuud.

A hulking black robot showed itself in the barbecue place. A security robot, the Beyond Villain company logo painted across it. Every head turned at its arrival, as if on cue. The one Yang Hayun had called had finally reached the bar.

“I— I called it.”

“Over there…”

Yang Hayun pointed at the fallen Villain with a trembling finger. He lay sprawled and motionless on a floor strewn with shards of glass. The robot seized him in one brutish hand, bound him with an odd sort of rope, then swept the barbecue place with emotionless eyes.

“…”

The Villains nodded without so much as looking at the robot. Nothing was left of the bravado they’d had only moments before. They bare their teeth at the weak and roll over for the strong. That was their way of surviving as Villains.

“…Hayun, let’s go.”
“Yes…”

I settled the bill at the barbecue place, gathered up the still-trembling Yang Hayun, and stepped outside. With a security robot walking alongside us, the sidewalk parted like the Red Sea. It made for a comfortable walk.

— Smack!

Without warning, someone gave my shoulder a light smack.

“Taeseung, why did you do that? It was dangerous…! I was worried.”
“I won, though.”
“It’s not about winning… he was swinging his arm around like that… I thought you were going to die. If you had, I really would have…”

The end of Yang Hayun’s sentence went damp. Unlike me, who took Scorpion’s combat training day in and day out, she was an ordinary person, a long way from any kind of fighting.

“Sorry. For scaring you.”
“…No. When you get down to it, you’re the one who stepped in and protected me.”
“If anything, it’s your call that saved me.”
“That was the least I could do… But have you been working out or something?”
“I do exercise every day, yes.”
“I was so surprised watching you move. I’d have just stood there shaking… Honestly, I’m seeing you in a new light.”

At Yang Hayun’s words, a snort of laughter escaped me. Fair enough. Even I wouldn’t look at myself and think ‘good in a fight’. I’d fought a Villain and won without a single injury, a result that surprised me too.

Still, it was close. If it hadn’t been for Future Observation…

I fiddled with the severed end of my necktie. What Future Observation had shown me as my own future flickered through my head. A future where I was cut apart starting from the extremities until finally even my head dropped clean off. This fight had made one thing clear to me.

There are probably two conditions for Future Observation to appear.

I had never gone through the Hero Association’s systematic Gift verification. My Gift’s trigger conditions and its limits are mine to verify, nobody else’s. Future Observation, which until now I’d thought simply fired at ‘random’, had definite conditions.

First: when danger at the level of serious injury or death comes at me.

The combat training with Scorpion is the same. A simple jab he threw, or a threatening feint, never triggered Future Observation. But a fatal blow set it off most of the time: a liver shot, an uppercut driving into the jaw.

Second: when something stirs a huge emotional disturbance in me.

That’s the reason I can predict Hero Gamble results. The same goes for the day I saw Cha Huigyeong’s true face and ended up coming to the Villain Special City. The memory of that day brought me a huge emotional disturbance.

…It might not be right, but for now those two were the strongest candidates. There were also cases that fell into neither of those two categories, so perhaps there was some other condition I hadn’t thought of.

“Taeseung, what are you thinking so hard about? The security robot’s gone.”
“Huh?”

I came to and found myself in front of the company. The security robot had taken the Villain off somewhere and vanished. And Yang Hayun was hailing a taxi on her phone.

“You’re taking a taxi?”
“Yes, it’s called a Villain-proof taxi. Pretty expensive, but it’s safe.”
“I see…”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to ask someone I know for a ride.”

I sent Scorpion a text. I’d given him advance warning that I’d be drinking with Yang Hayun and getting back late, so the reply came straight away.

“…”
“Why the strange look on your face?”
“Ah— it’s nothing.”

— Tap!

I shoved the phone away fast in case she happened to see Scorpion’s message. Yang Hayun’s eyes narrowed, but I exercised my right to remain silent. A short silence passed, and then she burst out with a pfft of laughter.

“What? Laughing all of a sudden.”
“Hehe. Actually, back there? It was terrifying, but… you looked kind of cool, you know?”
“R-really?”
“Obviously. I bet everyone else sitting in there felt exactly the same.”

At the word ‘cool’ my face went hot for no reason at all. I made a point of looking away, and off in the distance a taxi slid up in front of the company. Plainly the one Yang Hayun had called.

“…Your taxi’s here, so off you go.”
“So there are things that embarrass you too?”
“Quiet, you.”
“Hehehe. I’ll head off first, then.”

Yang Hayun waved at me as she opened the taxi door.

“Get home safe. And if any other Villains start something, call a security robot.”
“Ah, now that you mention it, there was something I was wondering about.”
“Yes?”
“You reported it to the security robot back there. How did you do that?”
“You got the training when you joined too, didn’t you? I called the company Security Office.”
“…Huh?”
“?”

Maybe it was because I’d gotten the job as a parachute hire. I had never once received the onboarding training Yang Hayun was talking about. Her face twisted into something stranger and stranger.

“There was something like that? I don’t remember… If you don’t mind, could you give me the number?”
“…”
“The Security Office number.”
“…Taeseung, come here a second.”
“Hm?”

— Smack.

Yang Hayun stopped halfway into the taxi and administered a light beating to my shoulder. Plus a scolding, thrown in free, about how the onboarding instructor had stressed that this above all was to be remembered, so why had I forgotten it. She went so far as to take my phone from me and enter the Security Office number herself.

“You’re good at your job, but every so often you’ve got a screw loose like this. Here’s your phone.”
“Anyone can forget… But there are two numbers saved here?”

Instead of answering, Yang Hayun hopped straight into the taxi and rolled the window down.

“While you’re at it, keep that one saved.”
“Huh?”
“It’s important, so don’t delete the stars. I’ll be checking later, all right?”
“No, wait…”
“Off we go, please!”

— Vroom!

The taxi pulled away the instant the words left her mouth, and I stood staring blankly at the back of it.