Chapter 44: Man-childs

Katherine Skye

A second-year university student at Diare University.

She is normal for the most part, except for the dark purple hair and deep dark eyes she has. Most people think that the hair is not real, that it’s colored to be that way. She usually draws attention to herself most of the time because, apart from her purple hair, she also has a beautiful face to go along with it. People argue about what’s real about her, like they don’t have something better to do, and she, being who she is, didn’t bother arguing the fact with them.

She knows if her hair is real or not. Whatever people say is not really her cup of tea. She has more better things to do than to focus on what people think.

Anyway, she has only some few friends that know of her other identity.

Her identity of being a hero.

And most of those friends are in the heroes association located in Ireland.

Her secret was kept tightly secretive. After all, they too have a secret identity that must remain a secret, either for themselves or for their families.

It wouldn’t be that hard for the secret to be exposed. After all is said and done, it is still a business transaction. A transaction of scratching each other’s backs, nothing more, nothing less.

With the secret held tightly guarded, she was able to enjoy a somewhat normal life.

Of course, if we didn’t count some of her recent absences. But would being absent be that bad? A lot of normal people are always absent from class for different reasons, so she was still normal, right?

Not just that. She missed every single party that the school evented. From the matriculation party, to the student week party, freshers party hosted by the students, faculty party hosted by the faculty, even the school festival party. We can just say she is not a party kind of girl, that she doesn’t like to mingle, right?

Since she hardly participates in any event, we can hardly say she had one close friend with anyone.

Of course, she also deliberately distances herself from people on purpose. Like, if you are not close to me, you can’t know my secret.

However, she’s still friends with some seniors, juniors, or classmates she was able to interact with. But they aren’t close. They are more like friendly acquaintances.

Just like that, she had a double identity. She became the friendly neighborhood hero, Void Starr.

Terrorism rarely happens in Ireland. The villains here are fewer than the rest of the country. And any villain that even dares to show their face will be forced to participate in a live execution, for free of charge.

But now, even with the threat of the public live execution, the villains keep popping up. It was like they have decided that it’s time to rise.

But thankfully, the villains here are not plentifully strong. The villains here are very weak compared to the ones in other countries. I even heard that heroes die on a daily basis in those other countries. And I somehow find the situation funny. In my country, villains die like chickens, while in other countries, it’s the vice versa.

Maybe it’s because of the rank of the villains and heroes there. In our country, the heroes’ ranks are always higher. I even heard one time that an SSS-rank hero is located in the country. But because most people have not seen the hero yet, they consider the hero a myth. I don’t even know what’s truly true, but I know that heroes can’t die like chickens in other countries.

Although the villains are not that strong, that did not mean they are not crazy enough. Crazy heroes can overpower heroes like her sometimes, and her rank was already a B-class hero.

And it’s not that she is weak. She has strong abilities. She has super strength, she can fly, she can harness the star power, but she’s mostly adept at harnessing the power of the night stars.

"....."

She was tapping her feet on the ground in an impatient manner.

She was waiting in line. Waiting in line for her iced Americano coffee. She really needs it so bad, but the line seems very slow, and she is only two people away from the counter. She can’t give up yet. She is almost at the end of the finish line. It would just make all the time she wasted on the line feel like a waste.

You may wonder why a hero like her needs an iced Americano to keep calm. I will tell you in one word.

Lupingo.

The villain has killed his fair share of villains.

It was very infuriating at first, especially seeing him kill other villains.

In fact, she has this very belief about Lupingo.

She believes that Lupingo is a man-child, throwing an existential temper tantrum.

She believes it so, and she has even said it in a recent interview. And she will even say it now.

Lupingo is an attention seeker. I believe that as soon as he got his power, he felt that urge to play costume. I don’t truly know what he’s trying to do.

Is he trying to be a hero or a villain? He should decide.

"Oh, why don’t we just kill some villains today?" Then he got another idea, and then decided to, "Killing one villain is small. Why don’t we kill more villains? That would make it more interesting."

That was just her thought, her thought on how Lupingo’s mind process works like.

Like, if he wants to kill villains, why doesn’t he register to be a hero? He just needs to perform some tests to start. Instead of being a member of the judiciary party 🎉🎉🎉.

A literal man-child who believes that what he’s doing is always right, even if it is excessively extreme.

Literal man-child that deludes themselves as a world-chosen hero after getting some little power.

And those are the types she hates most of all.

They are extremists, and they are not much different from the inflexible heroes around.

The type she hates the most.

Unworthy people. Attention seekers. That’s what they are just are.

That thought imprinted itself into conviction. From the first crime villains like Lupingo do, they draw attention to themselves. And if they feel like what they are doing did not get the reaction they want, they just throw temper tantrums like grown-up children.

Especially when she remembered what Lupingo used to gain his attention. He wrote a message on the wall. It was literally written in blood, blood of his victims. It was the blood of a hero used to draw attention to himself.

A very brutal act. The dead deserve respect. He shouldn’t have been so brutal to the dead. Using their blood to write on the wall, how very disrespectful.

Disgusting bastards.

If she was not in a public space, she would literally spit on the floor.

She sometimes wished Sunknight had performed a live execution on him.

What she mostly wonders is how. How did he know where the heroes were living? Heroes’ secret identities are considered very confidential, so how could something that confidential be leaked out?

She is beginning to think that something bigger is at play. But if she continues her thought like this, she would only stress her own mind, and she doesn’t want to do that, so she rather stops her thought process in that direction fully.

She felt a vibration on her body. She then brought out her phone to see the reason for the vibration. She saw that a villain is out. The villain set a bomb around a large hotel. He holds everybody in the hotel hostage.

He said he won’t do anything to the hostages. He said all he wants is Lupingo, that if Lupingo did not come in the next ten minutes that he would set the explosive on.

He said he would kill everybody if Lupingo did not arrive soon.

Five minutes are already gone, yet Lupingo is nowhere to be found.

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