Panthera

— Creeeak— Ka-chunk.

The front door of apartment 813 swung shut with a heavy sound. A life of working late at the Media PR Office and only just managing to clock out. Outside the car window¹, darkness had already settled in.

“Phew…”

With the sigh I managed to strip off my suit jacket and fling it aside, and that used up whatever was left of me. Then I buried myself deep in the leather sofa. The words Director Narci had thrown at me back at the office a short while ago were still ringing in my ears.

“I’ll give you as much information as you want on the Association’s money line and its illegal acts. But how you weave it together and set it off — that part is entirely yours.”
“Mine, you mean?”
“That’s right. I’ll be expecting good things from you this time too.”

Narci had kneaded my shoulder and handed me a major piece of business. Was it because I’d succeeded, some time back, in spinning my own narrative and steering community opinion completely? He had left even this one entirely under my command.

The pressure on this is no joke.

Listing information and posting it is something anyone can do. But raising the public’s rage to its critical point. Drawing up an operation that sets opinion alight. That was a problem of a different order.

I switched on the tablet lying on the table and skimmed the Association’s ugly records one more time.

Honestly, with this much, it feels like I could just scatter it and be done.

The information Director Narci had given me was, in a word, quite the spectacle. The Hero Association had built close relationships with the patrons who donated to it: sending exceptionally good-looking Heroes to entertain them, dispatching psychic-type Heroes to deliver pleasure, and squeezing donations out of them for it. Filth on a scale that had me wondering whether this really was the Hero Association. And the problem didn’t stop there.

I knew the Hero Association was serious about the merchandise business, but… ugh.

The Hero Association’s main sources of income are sponsorship, merchandise, and government subsidies. Merchandise takes the largest share of the three. They make and sell figures of popular Heroes, along with stationery and toys for children. A Hero is, near enough, a hero who saves the citizens, so naturally a great many children look up to them.

But there was a problem with how that merchandise got made. Making Hero merchandise meant throwing their weight around: threatening the subcontractors and beating the unit price down. Conduct no different from a street gang’s, plain and simple. And even if a subcontractor brought mobsters or thugs along with them, how were they supposed to go up against a Hero with a Gift?

And it doesn’t end here. City priority, of all things… how does anyone even come up with an idea like this?

What caught my eye above all was a document called the ‘City Priority Manual’. The Hero Association assigns Heroes their areas of responsibility, and ordinarily, factoring in response time, placing them somewhere close to where they live is the realistic move.

But according to the City Priority Manual, this is where a gap opens up between the rich neighborhoods and the dirt-poor ones. The richer the neighborhood, the stronger the Hero placed there first, and the faster the response time. The dirt-poor neighborhoods, on the other hand, get comparatively weak Heroes, and slow response times.

What would happen if it came out that the Association allotted Heroes on a sliding scale according to the neighborhood? Ordinary citizens would no longer call the Association heroes and sing its praises.

These are sources that would catch fire if I just scattered them. But… I can’t settle for that much.

How was I supposed to piece these sources together so they’d bring down the enormous fortress wall of the Hero Association in a single stroke? An approach anyone could think of wasn’t going to get it done. And yet going in by an approach nobody would think of could just as easily backfire.

…My head feels like it’s splitting. It’d be nice if Future Observation would go off at a time like this, at least.

I pressed my throbbing temple and let my head fall back against the sofa. Why did Future Observation refuse to fire at a time like this, of all times?

Just as the frustration was eating at me, the sound of the doorbell broke the silence and rang through the living room.

— Ding-dong—

“…The hell?”

There was no guest due at this hour, long after I’d clocked out. I hadn’t ordered delivery or a parcel, and on top of that there wasn’t a soul who knew I lived here.

I got up and put my eye to the peephole in the front door.

“…?”

Nothing but pitch-black darkness. Somebody must have been covering it with a hand.

— Ding-dong— Ding-dong—

After the bell had gone a couple more times, in the end I had no choice but to ask.

“Who is it?”
“Belia sent me.”

A bass voice came through from beyond the door, viciously low. Belia’s name loosened the tension a little, but I wasn’t ready to let my guard down yet. Just in case, I flipped up the WD-401 switch inside my suit and gripped the fountain pen tight.

— Ka-chunk.

I hooked the chain onto the door, released the lock, and had only just started easing it open. Then the door was yanked hard from outside.

— Krrrunch—!

“This is insane…!”

The safety chain hooked across the door screamed as it was dragged taut. The silhouette in the gap belonged to a giant of a man, an overwhelming frame well over two meters.

He was looking down at me.

“So you’re Im Taeseung.”
“…Who are you, and what do you think you’re doing?”
“Didn’t I just tell you.”

— Crrrk!

Before my answer was even out, the steel chain tore like a sheet of paper and the front door swung wide.

“I said Belia sent me.”
“…!”

Hair falling to his chest, orange shot through with black. It stirred menacingly, like a lion’s mane. A transformation in the hair is proof of an outstanding Gift awakening.

“My name is Panthera, Director of Sloth.”

— Bzzzt—!

The instant he introduced himself, Future Observation stabbed into my brain and forced itself into motion.

Why now, all of a sudden—!

One look at the footage playing across my cornea and I could only recoil in horror. In the footage, Panthera’s enormous fist was rushing straight at my face.

The moment the short observation ended.

— Whoosh!

His fist moved, and I bent at the waist on instinct. The wind off the fist as it grazed past my hair. If my body hadn’t been reinforced by Director Amos’s Gift, my face would have caved in on the spot.

“Goddamn it…!”

— Dash!

I broke away, opening the distance, and drew the fountain pen. I didn’t forget to trigger the WD-401 and haul my physical ability up, either.

Unlike me, braced for a fight, Panthera just stood there blankly. His eyes were glinting, as though my reaction had surprised him.

“Belia told me to teach you, so I came to have a look — and you’re quite the article.”
“Teach…? What are you talking about, all of a sudden?”
“Exactly what I said.”

Panthera ignored my flustered question and jerked his chin toward the door.

“Follow me. From here on, the Director of the Combat Analysis and Evaluation Office himself is going to drill you into shape, personally.”
“Teaching… drilling… don’t tell me?”

Only then did the last thing Belia had said come back to me.

“By the time I call you again, see that you have built up a little more strength. Enough to protect yourself from any threat at all. …I shall assign someone to you.”

Her parting words, in the virtual world Kokines had made. The promise that she would put someone on me and build my strength up. And to keep it she had sent me a figure of full Director rank, in person, no less.

Panthera led me down to a sealed-off section in the basement of the apartment building I lived in.

“What is this place?”
“Are you aware that a lot of our Beyond Villain people live in this building?”
“That… I think I might have heard that from Belia.”

Panthera grinned and unlocked the section’s padlock with a key.

“I live in this building myself, as it happens. Got bored, bought the basement and remodeled it a little.”

— Creeeak!

The massive steel door swung open, and when Panthera hit the lights, a basement space as spacious as a taekwondo hall was there to greet me. Cutting-edge exercise machines stood in rows along the walls. The layout closely resembled the training room in the Combat Analysis and Evaluation Office, which I’d stopped by to deliver documents back in my Team 5 days.

“Director, don’t tell me this is… a shared training room?”
“No, it’s my personal practice hall. I paid for it out of my own pocket, machines included — you think I’d stomach other people using it?”
“Well… I suppose so.”
“You talk too much.”

— Whoosh!

Panthera broke off mid-explanation and, without a word of warning, launched that enormous fist at my face. I twisted my head aside on instinct, and the fist only grazed past my ear.

This is insane… that was way too close!

This time Future Observation hadn’t fired. But was it thanks to all the trajectories of death I’d watched through it until now? I had reached the point where a twitch in an opponent’s shoulder muscle was enough to show me how he’d move. On top of that, the body Amos’s Gift had reassembled responded crisply, and the results of training with Scorpion were showing through as well. Maybe I was at a level now where I could beat your average Villain or Hero easily enough.

“Well now. I heard ‘ordinary office worker’ and figured this’d be dull… but you’re a lot more fun than I expected.”

Panthera drew the fist back and let a savage smile settle at the corner of his mouth. That smile brought Scorpion to mind. The old man had trained me like he was dying to eat me alive, too…

While I was thinking about Scorpion, Panthera asked out of nowhere.

“You — your Gift’s in the physical-boost or reflex-enhancement line, isn’t it?”
“Sorry?”

I didn’t answer rashly; I kept my mouth shut. I had never let Future Observation slip to anyone, Belia included. It was my own secret, and it could never be allowed to get out.

“Don’t worry. I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone else.”
“…”
“In fact, eight in ten Gift awakened are the body-enhancement type, like you. It’s everything else that’s the rarity.”

Panthera must have judged that I’d shut up because he’d hit the mark; he waved a hand to say it was fine. That wasn’t really why I’d shut up, though… Well, if he wanted to guess as he pleased, it cost me nothing.

Panthera’s right — most Gifts are the physical type.

Those who have awakened a Gift come to about five percent of all humanity. Call it many and it’s many; call it few and it’s few. But analyze a sample of that number and…

More than half of them would surely be the body-enhancement type. Just look at how the Hero Association and the Villain organizations both hoard their psychic-type Heroes. If the supply of them were plentiful, would anyone really coddle them the way they do?

As I was turning that over, Panthera fetched a pair of gloves from somewhere.

“Put them on.”
“I’m putting them on too?”
“Safer than going bare-fisted. For both of us.”

Panthera pulled on a pair himself as he said it.

“There are plenty of awakened with a body-enhancement-type Gift in our building too. And the training method for them is standardized.”
“A training method…”
“Think about it. How do you suppose they train?”

I sank into thought for a moment. Back when I was going to and from the Villain Planning and Management Office with Assistant Manager Ko Hyeonsik, I’d seen a document drawn up by the Combat Analysis and Evaluation Office. What that document had said was…

“The answer is simple.”
“!”

— Whooosh!

Before I could think it through and answer, his fist came rushing in again. I dodged it by a hair this time too, but Panthera didn’t stop. The heavy blow that followed slammed into my chest, and I felt every scrap of air leave my lungs as I went sprawling backward.

“Cough, ngh…!”
“Grasping exactly where the limit of your newly improved physical ability lies, and using it down to the marrow.”
“What on earth…”
“That is the training method for an awakened with a body-enhancement-type Gift. No other shortcut exists.”

Before I even had time to cry out, that enormous shadow fell over my vision once more. On instinct I got my guard up and blocked his follow-up, but… I heard the bones of my forearms screaming, loud and clear.

“Tonight, I will test exactly how far your limit goes!”
“You’re insane…! Wait! I have work again tomorrow, you know!”

Training with old man Scorpion alone had been enough to get in the way of the next day’s work. A ‘limit test’ with a Director-rank man personally pounding on my body? I wouldn’t have been surprised to end up back in the VIP ward I’d only just escaped.

At my scream of protest, Panthera answered with a sneering little laugh.

“Don’t worry. Our Combat Analysis and Evaluation Office has mountains of special recovery agents refined with a Gift.”
“What did you say…?”
“They’re not officially approved medicine, but the effect is out of this world. Muscle pain, fatigue, and light bruising and fractures on top of that! So long as you don’t die, I’ll have you at work tomorrow morning right as rain. Hahaha!”
“This is insane…”

There was no way out of it. In despair, I clenched my fists again.

“Right, then. Let’s pick up where we left off. The night is still long.”
“…”

Against the overwhelming violence pouring off Panthera, all I could do was keep my guard up and dodge for all I was worth. Through the basement practice hall, nothing rang out but the dull sound of bone and flesh colliding, on and on.

…I never dreamed the day would come when training with Scorpion would feel like a blessing.