[WP] You are just a normal office guy; until you published the government names of all top villains including the address of their hideout and their weaknesses. You gave a deadline to the hero association, or their list comes next.

The list has shaken up the country. Some of the villains are famous people. I don’t know why people are surprised. It’s usually the wealthy that have the spare time to cause havoc for no reason. Some of them are normal people, with nine to five jobs and two-point-five kids, living in suburbia. For the moment, they have only been ostracized by their neighbors. Those villains whose families did not know of their hidden lives have left them, and they’ve lost their jobs.

I go to my computer. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, because in case they try to trace me, they’ll only get to this place, which is five miles away from my apartment. I’m wearing a surgical mask, coughing frequently to show that I’m just a good person, trying to not spread my cold to other people. They probably won’t be able to match my face from the occasional seconds I lower the mask to drink my coffee, but I’m not the only one here who’s wearing one.

The whole shop is filled with people and their laptops, some getting their work done, some not. A few of them look far more like criminals than I do. I’ve realized that now, that criminality does not have any defining physical trait. One of the villains was a swimsuit model, another a beloved childrens’ TV show narrator. Evil comes in all shapes and forms, whatever will get it through the door.

It has been a few days since the list has been announced. There is no proof, true. The villains were very good at covering their tracks. I suppose they had some headquarters I wasn’t aware of, and decided to all collectively deny their villainy. Some of them own media organizations, and the news has been stifled.

Now, I’m onto the second step of my plan. I release the letter. It’s a letter I drafted carefully, that took hours to perfect. I wanted no loose threads, no loopholes for them to exploit.

Every time the villains wreak havoc, people get hurt. Sometimes, people die. They return to their hideouts and plan their next as if they haven’t destroyed a family, sent someone into crippling medical debt. The heroes, too, in their chases cause damage. They destroy entire buildings in their game of cat and mouse, and for some reason, we all cheer for the lesser of two evils.

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I hit send, and the letter uploads onto the website. I’m clear. They have one week to eliminate all the villains on the list. No innocents can die in the process. It doesn’t matter if the villains are outside of the city, or even if they escape to the international space station. By the end of the week, midnight at the IDLW time zone, every one of them must be dead.

Over the next week, I wait and watch. The news channels not financed by the villains start airing the news of deaths. Eventually, other news sources follow. After a certain amount of time, they too realize that it is useless swimming against the tide. The news dominates everything else. People see the heroes and the villains for what they truly are. Monsters. They realize the thing I knew for months. Some things are too dangerous to be allowed to exist freely. Debates begin, from politicians and philosophers, questioning curtailing the power of heroes. The only difference between a hero and a villain is their intention, and intentions can change.

On the last day, the heroes search frantically for the last person on the list. A small, almost inconsequential villain who had mostly done mischief more than harm. She robbed banks, she stole paintings and precious jewels from art exhibits, and otherwise lived an unobtrusive life. She wasn’t the type to have many resources to hide, and despite her thieving, she wasn’t extremely rich. But they could not find her.

The clock ticked towards midnight in the IDLW time zone, the last time zone on earth, and the heroes grew desperate. Finally, they found her death certificate. Dead during a fight between a hero and villain a few months before, her apartment torn apart brick by brick by the impact of both of them crashing into it. The news uploaded her obituary. Her face was splashed all over the internet.

See? The heroes were saying. She’s dead already. The list has been cleared.

I’m in a train station when my phone rings with the alarm, on my way to work. I ignore the TV screens showing my late girlfriend’s smiling face. Lucia was a villain, a criminal, but she should have been caught, not killed. The news spoke of her death almost compassionately. She was almost a Robin Hood. She had stolen from the rich, and gave some portion of it to the poor. In a sane world, she would be in jail.

I stopped the alarm on my phone and moved to another app. The new list was filled with names, addresses, and even more details. I hit send. The government would take care of the rest.