Top Secret

— Rattle.

The VIP ward’s heavy door swung open under my hand, and the harsh reek of disinfectant stung my nose.

“Been a while.”
“Im Taeseung. So you have come.”

Belia was standing at the window. She looked over at me and smiled. Scorpion lay in the bed beside her. And oddly enough, a young woman stood at Belia’s side.

“Who is… this, beside you?”

A silhouette unlike anything I had ever seen hijacked my gaze. Twin-tails in a strange blend of pink and red. On top of that, a black mask covering her face, and a black dress in the jirai kei style, hung with an excess of lace and frills.¹ I could not begin to work out why a woman dressed in the sort of fashion you would commonly see in Japan was standing here.

“Ah, you mean this one? Well… it would be best for her to introduce herself.”

Belia grinned and gave her shoulder a light tap. The woman fixed me with a stare hard enough to bore straight through me, and behind the mask her mouth did not move in the slightest.

The very moment I found myself wondering why she wasn’t saying a word when she was supposed to be introducing herself.

“!”

The sensation of someone hammering a voice directly into my brain. The voice felt like it was scraping straight down my brain cells, and a chill ran through me for no reason I could name. Startled, I looked around, but there was nobody behind me or beside me. Belia took in the state of me and let out a short laugh.

“Kokines is unable to speak. Instead, she can interfere with a person’s mind.”
“Interfere with a person’s mind…”
“It is a formidable ability. Which is why she stands at Director level even within our building.”

She tossed it off as though it were nothing, but those awakened with a psychic-type Gift were rare. Whether at the Hero Association or in a Villain organization, they were normally classified as talent of the very highest importance. No wonder, then, that she reigned at Director level inside Beyond Villain.

Especially since a psychic-type awakened’s Gift stays behind a veil…

Ordinarily a Hero’s Gift was written up somewhere like a wiki, but for those awakened with a psychic-type Gift, Hero and Villain alike, next to nothing was known. If word of the Gift got out, the awakened could end up in danger, or the Gift itself rendered useless. Something along those lines.

Anyway, a Director is a Director, which means I had better make a good impression.

Her outfit and her hair were excessively unusual, granted. But that title of Director put her at the very top of Beyond Villain, the same as Belia, Amos and Narci. I bent at the waist to Kokines.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. Im Taeseung, of the Strategic Analysis Office.”
“…”

Instead of answering, Kokines narrowed her eyes behind the mask and studied me. Everywhere her gaze landed, my nerves stood on end. …Somehow it felt like I had gotten off on the wrong foot from the moment this started.

Belatedly her voice sounded through my head again.

“…Sorry?”

I blinked blankly. Why was I using casual speech with Belia? …Because I had been using casual speech with her since the day we first met?

“Kokines. What are you doing. Im Taeseung is thrown, is he not.”

Belia, who could not hear her voice, chided her. At that, Kokines’s gaze turned toward Belia, and a moment later a smile spread across Belia’s lips.

“Casual speech… well, I do not mind it. Once one has climbed as far as a Director’s seat, there is hardly anyone left who uses casual speech at all.”
“…”
“Even if it does not sit well with you, it is no matter to me, so let us have an end to that talk.”

Kokines’s gaze turned to me once more. From the furrow in her brow, she must have been deeply displeased with the way things stood. Whether she was close to Belia, or simply sensitive about manners.

Either way, I am firmly on somebody’s bad side now.

Every Director-level figure so far had thought well of me, so having one of them disapprove now was uncomfortable. Working to keep my composure, I looked at old man Scorpion, asleep on the bed with an oxygen mask over his face. At times like this, a change of subject is the thing.

“How’s Scorpion doing?”
“In a month or so he should be able to leave the hospital.”
“A month?”
“It has been considerably delayed. On account of every bone in his body being crushed.”

Inwardly I could not hold back my astonishment at her answer.

I didn’t ask because it was slow — I asked because it’s absurdly fast…

Belia seemed to have taken it for a complaint, as though I were asking why the treatment was so slow. A critical injury with every bone in his body shattered, fully healed in a mere month. The VIP ward of one of the three great Villain organizations really was in a different class. Around the next month-end evaluation, I would probably be hearing the old man’s booming laugh again.

“So what happens to Scorpion after he’s discharged?”

The next thing on my mind was how the old man would be treated from here on. The company dormitory he managed had been half destroyed. Belia stroked her chin and gazed out the window, sunk for a moment in thought.

“Let me see. Handing him a walk-up as before and employing him as dormitory warden would be one way… but whether the man wants it himself comes first.”
“…I see.”

I nodded shortly and took in the old man’s sleeping face.

What choice will the old man make?

After this Speedgirl business, he might wash his hands of Villain work altogether. Leaving Villain Special City would be better for him, but honestly, I didn’t want him to go. And when I thought about how he had nearly died because of me, I could hardly talk him out of leaving either…

About the time my mood had gone tangled and strange, Belia gestured quietly to Kokines.

“Have you asked everything you were curious about by now?”
“Thanks to you.”
“Then, before we come to the main business… someone may possibly overhear, so let us move to another place.”
“Move? Where to?”

At my question, Kokines’s cool voice drove itself into my head again like a nail.

“!”

The instant after her voice reached me, my vision blacked out like a screen filling with noise. Before I could even scream in shock, my eyes were open again…

This place — surely not?

A private office set with antique furniture and a heavy desk. The very room where I had first met Belia. I braced a trembling hand on the corner of the desk and looked around. So this uncanny space I had taken all along for Belia’s Gift was in fact a mental world created by Kokines, the Director of Wrath.

“You have come any number of times, and still you are startled?”
“…Up till now I thought it was your Gift.”
“Hoo-hoo. That would make me altogether too all-powerful, would it not. This is Kokines’s Gift.”

Come to think of it, Belia’s ability, as far as I had seen it, specialized in manipulating space. Which meant that plucking out somebody’s mind alone and making them hold a conversation… that had to be the ability of Kokines, the Director of Wrath. The deeper I went into Beyond Villain’s heart, the more the common sense I had known crumbled away, one piece at a time.

“There is no need to be so astonished. I too am nothing more than an awakened with a Gift, the same as you.”

Belia set down an antique teacup and gazed at me with a smile more at ease than any I had seen from her.

“More to the point — how does it feel? The moment you so longed for has arrived, has it not.”
“The moment I longed for… huh.”

Her question called up the day’s news headlines in my mind.

“The promise you made the first time I came here — you kept it.”

The promise she spoke of, and the moment I had craved so badly: for the people of the world to take an interest in my father’s death. The knot that had sat clotted in my chest for ten years had turned into the public’s rage, and it was hammering at the Association’s ramparts.

Belia nodded, pleased, as though my words sat well with her.

“I do not waste a single word. You proved yourself with results, and so I merely carry out the contract.”
“Belia. Without you this would have been impossible. Thank you.”

I offered her my sincere thanks. If she had not laid the stage for me, my father’s death would never have drawn attention like this. I would have spent my whole life being kept like livestock at Cha Huigyeong’s feet, and died there.

But Belia shook her head and gave an answer I had not expected.

“Not at all. If anything, it is I who ought to be grateful. However much it was for the sake of revenge, stripping your own past bare before the world can have been no easy thing.”
“…”
“And thanks to you the Media PR Office’s advertising revenue is climbing along with it, so give it no further thought.”

Now that she mentioned it, there had been something Director Narci said in passing. The Content Production Team had YouTube accounts and websites that mass-produced fake news… and with the view counts exploding, the side income off them was apparently pretty tidy.

“On top of that, there are voices calling for the investigation into you and Hyperman to be carried out again, are there not.”
“Ah, I saw the protest too.”

Right now a demonstration was in full swing at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul. Crowds of people, demanding that the Association establish the truth. Some of them held picket signs with my face drawn on them, or my father’s. Having my tragedy on everybody’s lips was a shameful thing, but… the fact that those nameless people had taken my side became a strange sort of comfort. Complete strangers were out there acting for the sake of my family’s history.

“What say you step out of Villain Special City, even now, and meet the demonstrators? The political world might well put you forward, might it not.”

Belia’s half-joking suggestion got a snort of a laugh out of me.

“Step outside Villain Special City and I’d be hunted down on the spot.”

The moment I left this place, it was obvious the Association’s hounds would come at me with fire in their eyes, out to kill me. Ironically, the safest place for me right now was…

…nowhere but this den of Villains my father had given his whole life to fighting.

“Let us leave the jokes there. It is time now to receive the true reward I promised.”
“Exactly what I wanted.”

Belia pulled an old folder out of a drawer.

“…Haven’t I already seen that one?”

A document with a red sticker reading ‘Top Secret’ stuck crudely across it. The record I had seen once before. It set out that Hyperman and Speedgirl had discovered something inside in the course of carrying out a joint mission, and… that the Association had immediately closed the area off. That was the whole of the fragmented truth I had barely managed to dig up so far.

“Didn’t you say you couldn’t tell me any more than this, because of your Gift?”

I ran a finger down the frayed corner of the folder and looked at her.

“Before that, there is something I would ask you. Do you not think something about it is strange?”
“Something strange…?”
“Just so. What this document sets out, and what was explained officially. Are they not different?”
“!”

Two documents dealt with my father’s death: the classified file and the Association’s official statement. Laying the two of them side by side in my head, I found a difference. According to the official announcement my father had not fought a Villain at all, and had died in an accident of unknown cause. Which was why, far from a compensation payout for the bereaved family, not even funeral support had been properly provided.

“But this classified file… it said he was carrying out a mission with Speedgirl.”
“And what difference do you think that makes.”

At Belia’s question I felt, at last, the fog in my head lifting. When I first saw this document I had been buried under TF team work and the Advancement Match and had not thought it through. Now that I thought it over, the strange part stood out.

“…The official statement is nothing but an excuse to bury the incident. The odds are high that what’s in the document is the truth.”
“That is sound reasoning.”
“So the very existence of that mission had to be hidden — badly enough to stamp it Top Secret?”

Belia’s mouth pulled into a broad smile, as though my guess pleased her. She leaned in close to me and whispered, her voice dropped low.

“There is another strange thing. How did Speedgirl find your position in one go, in that maze of a Villain Special City? And how did she cut through those winding passages and escape at her leisure?”

Instead of answering, I stared hard into her eyes. One question pulled the next along behind it, and the back of my neck stiffened. Why had Cha Huigyeong been able to wander Villain Special City as easily as she walked in and out of her own house? The answer was simple.

“Speedgirl coming into Villain Special City… it wasn’t the first time?”
“Precisely.”

Belia came out with something that struck like a blow.

“Ten years ago, your father entered Villain Special City on the Association’s orders and discovered something.”
“…What?”
“And it was inside Villain Special City that he officially died.”

My father had died inside Villain Special City. At Belia’s words, my mind went blank.