WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Arsène
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How an A-Rank Hunter Lives ◈
Chapter 93: Ice Crystal Ability Users - [1]
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In Korea, crimes committed by ice ability users are discovered remarkably easily and often. That is true even though, if they put their minds to it, they could commit the perfect crime.
In most cases, ice ability users are caught before they commit the actual crime.
This is especially common when an ice ability user accepts a murder-for-hire job through some website.
The police no longer investigate every ordinary cybercrime, but that does not mean they have lost interest in the internet.
A considerable number of cybercrime unit officers now devote themselves to tracking down aspiring superpowered contract killers online.
So an ice ability user, probably having a hard time making a living and believing they could murder someone without leaving evidence if they used their ability, accepts a contract through some website and heads out to meet the client. Nine times out of ten, the client waiting at the scene turns out to be a police officer.
That was exactly the kind of paranormal crime Jin Beom handled.
Whenever an attempted contract killing by an ice ability user was detected online, Jin Beom would head out with his fellow officers.
Jin Beom usually handled subduing the ice ability user head-on. If a cornered ice ability user made a desperate last stand with their ability, it would not work against Jin Beom, another ice ability user.
And now Jin Beom, who had done that kind of work, had been accused of murder himself.
“It’s a setup!”
I repeated Jin Beom's words.
“A setup.”
“Yeah, a setup! Those bastards at the station never liked me in the first place! Not long after the Gates opened, I was specially recruited into the police force at my age because I was awakened, you know?”
“Yes. I think you mentioned that before. So?”
Jin Beom raised his voice as he complained.
“Those cop bastards started disliking me around then! They were interested at first because I was specially recruited, but once they found out an icehead was completely useless, they gradually started treating me like I didn't exist...”
I frowned at the word icehead. Jin Beom continued complaining.
“After that, they hated that I kept missing night duty because my health was bad! They got irritated because I had no stamina and no driver's license, so they couldn't make me do anything! You get what I'm saying, right?”
“So you were the station outcast?”
“That’s right! Paranormal crime work was the only job I was even suited for. I worked hard at that, too, but apparently they didn't like even that. Those fucking bastards are openly trying to bury me now...”
Come to think of it, the way the police had treated Jin Beom during the suicide incident was not how colleagues treated one another.
If they had trusted that Jin Beom would not harm a fellow officer, they would have gone up to the building right away to stop or persuade him. Instead, until I reached the scene, every officer had been hiding behind the wall. Judging by that, Jin Beom must have had the worst possible relationship with his fellow officers from the start.
“So what exactly are you accused of?”
“They say I killed the officer who went out with me!”
Jin Beom shouted, then began explaining in a rambling mess.
His explanation was disorganized, but the summary went something like this.
“So you and another officer went out to catch an ice ability user who had accepted a murder contract... Then the other officer suddenly died, and they accused you of being the culprit?”
“Yeah!”
“What evidence do they have?”
“None! They say the only evidence is that no ice ability user other than me appeared on the CCTV near the scene. Does that make any sense?”
Jin Beom pleaded, and I answered.
“It doesn't. Of course it doesn't.”
“Right? They already didn't like me, then something suspicious happened and they saw their chance to bury me, right? So, will you help me?”
“Of course. Leave everything to me, whether that means hiring a lawyer or anything else.”
Jin Beom looked at me with desperate eyes. Fat tears dripped from them like chicken droppings.
“If this had happened a few months later, things might have been different. They promised they would introduce the Awakened-Person Anti-Discrimination Act soon...”
I added that the law, which was soon to be proposed, might have an effect even before it was introduced.
After all, ice ability users were not being convicted without physical evidence because of some special law. Courts were handing down those verdicts simply because that was national policy. If national policy changed because of a law that might soon be introduced, it was impossible to know what effect that might have before the law even existed.
Jin Beom objected in a voice thick with tears.
“But as far as I know, people are still convicted without physical evidence in awakened-person crimes these days...”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah... I work in that field, so I know...”
I sighed again.
“Either way, trust me. I don't know what the verdict will be, but I won't let them investigate and judge this case comfortably.”
Jin Beom repeatedly thanked me and said he would never forget this kindness for the rest of his life.
Leaving the lockup where another round of thanks echoed behind me, I walked down the police station corridor.
My meeting with Jin Beom had not been approved by the police station. I had used Spatial Teleportation to enter the lockup where he was being held and spoken with him on my own.
They could have found any number of reasons to make an issue of it, yet none of the officers at the station would even meet my eyes.
I hated the sight of that. I started walking with deliberate weight behind every step.
I now weighed about six times as much as an ordinary adult man. Each step cracked the tiles in the police station corridor with a loud noise, and one officer muttered,
“Man, that's loud. What the hell is that...”
Got you, you bastard.
I immediately stomped toward the voice and grabbed the head of the officer who had said it in one hand.
“Were you running your mouth so I could hear it?”
When I shouted at him, the officer finally seemed to understand the situation and opened his eyes wide.
Looking at his terrified face, it seemed he had not been trying to pick a fight with me. He had probably just muttered because the noise was loud and he had no idea what was happening. I gave him no chance to explain.
Just as he opened his mouth to say something, I lifted the officer I was holding by the head into the air.
I made sure every officer there could see him clearly and hear his pained choking gasps.
“That’s what you meant, right?”
Despite the scene I was causing, the police response was strangely weak.
They hesitated as they looked at me, then an older inspector pleaded.
“Please let him go. He was in the wrong...”
It annoyed me. This was not the reaction I had wanted.
“A civilian is causing a disturbance, so why are you just talking? Don't you all have guns? This is a police station, so there should be Hunter Rifles, too. Shoot me. Go on.”
Even after I said that, the police did not move. Their frightened eyes were all that turned toward me. When I saw even an officer who looked so vicious it was impossible to tell whether he was a gangster or a detective acting like that, anger surged through me.
“I said shoot. Why aren't you shooting? If you don't think you old men can handle it, call the Special Forces or something.”
I was not provoking them for no reason. I was not doing this just to vent my anger, either.
I wanted this incident to become bigger.
What if things became serious and the Special Forces gathered in front of my house again, like last time? That would be even better. The Hunter Association would react sensitively again, and the matter might grow into a national incident.
I wanted this incident, and the current practice of convicting ice ability users without evidence, to receive major news coverage.
So resist and make this bigger already.
Make some calls, sound the emergency alarm, do something.
Unfortunately, the helplessness the police had shown while Kim Seokhee was active as the Marquess of Gyeyang-gu also applied when they faced me.
Not one officer pointed a pistol at me, even though I was just a civilian acting as if I were about to kill a police officer inside a police station. There was not even one officer who shouted at me or threatened me.
Pathetic bastards. Seeing this, being too famous was not necessarily a good thing. They must have decided bullets would not work on me, and after Kang Jun-chi had been deployed over something involving me and nearly turned the country upside down, they did not even dare try to stop me no matter how badly I behaved.
Even if they did not believe they could subdue me, someone could at least have shouted that they could not let this slide. Yet not one of them did.
“Once a suspect is detained, the police investigate first, right?”
So I had no choice but to keep growling on my own.
“I'm going to put outside pressure on this case from now on. If you investigate it like shit, every person involved will disappear! You know nobody will come looking even if I bury every one of you on some hill outside town!”
I was about to continue threatening them, saying that even if someone did come looking, the CCTV would not show where I had teleported them, when the older inspector spoke again.
I had expected him to threaten me, which would have let me make an even bigger scene, so my face brightened. But disappointingly, that was not what he did.
“I don't know what Jin Beom told you, but he is a prime suspect.”
“What?”
“Anyone can see that he's the culprit! He didn't just kill a fellow officer because they had a bad relationship...”
I did not know what else he was going to say, and I did not want to hear it. I cut him off.
“Whether Jin Beom is the culprit or not is none of my business. So where's the physical evidence?”
The inspector closed his mouth at my question. I continued.
“Did you find spiritual DNA in the dead guy's body? Did the ice crystals found in the dead guy's lungs form Jin Beom's face?”
“No...”
“Then shut up.”
After I snapped at him, no one spoke again.
It was truly disappointing.
I threw the officer I had been holding onto the floor, then kicked tables, filing cabinets, and whatever else was in the station.
The things I kicked did not simply fly away or break. They turned to powder, fine particles scattering through the air.
Each kick sent out a shockwave and devastated the surrounding area. I watched the eyes of the officers gathered there tremble and enjoyed their reaction for a while.
After causing a scene like that for some time, I left the police station.
Damn it. Looking at them, they were all clearly Seoul types. This was what happened when Seoul types mixed in with Incheon.
Anyway, even if my rampage had not achieved as much as I wanted, it would still be enough of a warning.
Awakened Kim Geuk was backing the ice ability user they had tried to turn into a murderer. If they followed their usual procedure and convicted him without physical evidence, it would not end well for them.
* * *
The next day, I searched the internet just in case, but not a single article had been posted about the scene I caused.
Considering I was famous, and famous people made the news even when they were merely caught drunk driving, it was truly strange.
Still, I was not surprised. I had learned during my time with Korean Awakened Solidarity that awakened-person issues were usually handled this way.
The government, which controlled the media, probably did not want the public to know about the ice ability user case or the fact that police officers had failed to respond at all to the rampage of a mere civilian.
Frustrated, I sat in the car wrestling with papers as I read recent precedents involving ice ability users.
Baek Dambi glanced at the documents I was reading and spoke to me.
“You're worried about Jin Beom's case, aren't you?”
I stopped reading and looked at her.
“Wait, how did you know that?”
“There's a community for ice ability users. I joined it, too. I looked through some of the posts there for the first time in a while, and people were saying Kim Geuk has been working hard on Jin Beom's case and asking ice ability users in Incheon for help... Isn't that right?”
This woman had even joined a community like that, yet she called them iceheads so casually on Huntweb.
Shocked by my ring girl's viciousness, I nodded.
“I have been doing that.”
Then the vicious Baek Dambi muttered,
“That’s really impressive... You're spending so much money and time on someone else's problem, just like with the apartment complex you're building now.”
“I'm just keeping up a habit from when I was active in Korean Awakened Solidarity.”
“That organization disbanded a long time ago, didn't it? Yet you keep doing this. It's really impressive.”
I was used to the flattery of Im Hyeongtaek and Jeong Jinyeong, but I was not used to praise from this young woman.
I was so embarrassed and awkward that I scratched my nose. Baek Dambi continued.
“So, can I help too?”
Footnotes:
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