WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Chen
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◈ Incarnation of the Malevolent Star ◈
Chapter 70: Part 1 - Whispers of the Dark Brother (70)
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#70.
Once again, the boy crossed a line.
A police station was a building that symbolized social order.
Into this building, which embodied society's shared compact, into a space where only authorized personnel were allowed... the extraordinary boy had trespassed.
He had flouted society's ordinary rules in an extraordinary way.
The police uncles had done wrong first... That was no excuse.
Onik was not such a thoughtless child that he would justify himself with such shallow logic.
He admired the righteous assassin and patriot Jo Yang-jin, yet he knew that an assassin like him should not exist in an ordinary society.
“If everyone in the world tried to stop other people's wrongdoing with wrongdoing of their own, like me, this world would be filled with nothing but wrongdoing...”
That could not be allowed.
He should not do it, yet he was doing it knowingly.
‘...What else could I do? I don't want to lose Teacher, not even by the smallest chance!’
Onik thought he was terribly selfish.
The frightening yet lonely boy once again carved the fact that he was a bad child into his heart.
No matter how diligently he pretended to be a good child every day, his true nature could only be that of a bad child.
As a bad child, Onik steadied his troubled heart. What was the point of being troubled now?
Then he listened closely to the sounds inside the place he had broken into.
‘Two uncles are asleep!’
It was late for a boy in his first year of middle school to be wandering about, but far too early for adults to be asleep.
If an elementary school child were sleeping at this hour, people would call them a good child who went to bed early and rose early.
‘Hmm, they're sleeping really early. Is it because they have to go out again tonight?’
Onik did not know the exact details, but this police substation operated on a day and night shift system.
Four officers worked days. Four worked nights. Another four were off duty.
Twelve police officers in total rotated through two day shifts, two night shifts, and two days off.
The four assigned to the night shift divided their roles again.
Two worked the situation desk on the first floor, while the other two rested on standby for dispatch.
That did not mean they were actually allowed to lie down and sleep in the duty room.
In principle, they had to keep all their basic gear on and remain ready to respond at any moment.
Of course, every high school girl in this country who had completed military service would know that rules like that were never followed exactly in the field.
If both officers working the first-floor desk were awake, that was exemplary service.
The officers who had removed all their equipment and sprawled out asleep had something to say for themselves too.
「This is ridiculous, seriously. If you're going to criticize us, at least guarantee the days off we're supposed to get first!」
Police officers stationed in remote areas rarely had their days off fully guaranteed.
It had been the same during the stalking incident involving the fake fifty-six-year-old youth.
Where did the extra personnel summoned because of Eun-jeong's complaint come from?
The nearby substations responsible for neighboring areas suffered from the same chronic staff shortages, so in the end, people on their days off had no choice but to come in and work.
Police personnel would also have to be sent to the joint sports day tied to the local festival, which would be held again soon, at the end of September.
That, too, was an event that could only be handled by calling in people on their days off.
Besides, officers could not always leave work on time every day they were on duty.
Police work often did not wrap up neatly according to the clock.
Sometimes their shifts ended several hours late.
Sadly, that did not mean they were paid for every bit of overtime.
Allowances were only paid for overtime performed under a formal work order or approved afterward.
Naturally, the people above almost never issued formal orders.
They created conditions where overtime was unavoidable, then issued the astonishing instruction, “There's no money to pay you, so don't work overtime.”
Prrrr, prrrr...
The sleeping breaths of the exhausted police uncles had an oddly cute quality to them.
Onik muffled his footsteps as he searched the second floor.
He had already checked with the dental mirror, but there were no CCTV cameras in the second-floor hallway.
Perhaps because it was a substation in an isolated town, they did not seem to monitor spaces used only by staff.
Peek.
Whenever he opened another door, the boy peered inside through the narrow crack.
Then he slipped in the dental mirror and carefully scanned every corner.
He was checking for CCTV cameras and finding out what each room was for.
Then the boy's eyes lit up.
‘This is where I should put the desk-clock camcorder!’
The room he entered was something like a lounge, pantry, and meeting room all at once. It was the sort of place where people would have plenty of everyday conversations.
A long table stood in the middle of the room, which still carried the spicy scent of ramyeon mingled with instant coffee. At one end of the table sat a commercial rice warmer that looked as though it had been picked up from somewhere, a portable gas stove, and an old electric kettle.
Other noticeable furnishings included a refrigerator, sink, counter, microwave, water purifier, a clock on the wall, and a long horizontal storage cabinet with a television and Wi-Fi router on top.
Stacks of red cup noodles were piled on top of the refrigerator, while a round straw basket filled with coffee mix and Choco Pies sat on the water purifier.
Finally, beside the small window stood a tiny round table and two chairs where two people could sit facing each other.
The frightening boy took the desk-clock spy camera from his bag and placed it beside the television.
‘Found the outlet... and the Wi-Fi password...’
Onik picked up the Wi-Fi router and looked at its underside.
Routers supplied by a particular telecommunications company, which had once been a state-run telecommunications corporation before being privatized, almost always had their default passwords printed on the bottom.
Onik knew this because he had often helped the village elders with problems involving their televisions and internet.
Onik's grandfather was a twenty-first-century elder who was comfortable with IT, but not every elder in the village could be like him.
The elderly people in the remote mountain village had trouble dealing with their televisions and Wi-Fi whenever something went wrong.
Eight or nine times out of ten, the cause was a simple mistake with the controls or a missing power connection or cable.
But the elders always assumed the machine itself had broken.
For example, they might accidentally press the external input button on the remote, then decide the television was broken.
Yet Onik's village was far too remote to send a repair technician out for such minor problems.
「Oh, dear... I don't understand what this thing is saying, so Onik, answer it for me.」
Customer-service calls that left both the representatives and the elders frustrated.
When the village's only child, who was clever, stepped in, those calls had a high chance of being resolved neatly.
Those experiences as a “good child” now nourished him as he acted like a bad child.
On the underside of the Wi-Fi router, a type familiar from seeing so many around the village, the default password was printed alongside security warnings.
「The password key may be exposed, so we recommend changing it before use.」
「This device has weak security and may allow wiretapping when internet phones from other companies are used.」
Whenever Onik saw warnings like these, he wondered how many people actually followed them.
‘Did the police uncles follow them?’
They had not.
As soon as he entered the Wi-Fi password into the spy camera's app, the current time appeared on the display that had shown only 「--: --」.
Onik could view the camera feed on his smartphone.
“Ah, ah. Microphone test.”
When he spoke as a test, the same sound played from his phone a moment later.
Because it was connected to Wi-Fi, he could also check and download the footage from the computer at home.
Pleased by the police uncles' high level of security awareness, Onik smiled brightly.
‘It'll be fine, right?’
Someone might find it strange that a clock had suddenly appeared where there had not been one before.
But Onik did not think that suspicion would amount to much.
He did not know the exact details, but he knew the police uncles took turns working and resting.
Even if someone wondered who had put it there, they probably would not call every person who had gone home or was off duty to check.
It would be even less suspicious if he removed the other clock on the wall.
‘Hmm, maybe they'll just think the old clock broke, so someone bought a new one... Wouldn't they accept it like that and move on?’
The round wall clock hung too high for Onik to reach.
But though he had not finished growing yet, if he used a little strength, Onik could easily perform a standing 360-degree spinning dunk.
For the bad child who had already run straight up a wall to enter through a second-floor window, the height of the wall clock was nothing much.
“Yah!”
Onik jumped and lightly removed the clock.
His landing was soft as a whisper. The police uncles downstairs would not have noticed any noise from above.
Now the only things left in his bag were the hand drill, two spare recorders, and two power banks.
After hesitating, Onik cautiously went downstairs.
‘My heart's pounding...’
Every nerve in the frightening boy's body was taut.
This was a very tense moment.
The landing window was blocked by security bars, so if the police uncles on the second floor woke up and entered the hallway, there was a high chance his escape route would be cut off.
If that happened, he would have to run up the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible, then escape through the roof.
If the police uncles reached the stairs before then, the boy would have no choice but to force his way through.
He was confident he could get away.
But if he were truly discovered and had to flee, everything afterward would become horribly tangled.
“Yaaawn...”
A long yawn came from the direction of the first-floor desk.
Onik pressed himself flat against the wall beside the first-floor stairs and slipped out the tip of his dental mirror.
As he turned the tiny mirror this way and that, he saw the police uncles on duty staring at their phones with tired expressions.
One officer was playing a game that made little popping sounds at low volume, while the other was reading an adult web novel with particularly explicit content.
The boy squeezed his eyes shut without meaning to.
His eyesight was too good, and he read too well. He had ended up reading the obscene descriptions reflected in the little mirror.
‘Licking a hairy armpit, spurting... The thick smell of sweat stinging the nose... Ugh, they like things like that...’
Opening his eyes again, the boy quickly scanned the monitors in front of the two officers.
One displayed four different spaces in a split screen.
‘It's the CCTV feed!’
It would help a great deal if he knew exactly where each camera watched, how much it covered, which places were bright or dark, and how large the blind spots were.
Two cameras showed the outside, and the other two showed the inside.
The frightening boy's extraordinary sense of space matched the camera feeds to the surroundings and fixed them in his memory.
Once he had memorized a “hunting ground” like this, he hardly ever forgot it.
Onik took out a recorder connected to a power bank and attached double-sided tape to it.
Then he quickly crawled through the blind spots of the police uncles and the security cameras, approaching the gas heater.
He made as little noise as possible, but there was nothing he could do about the faint rustling of his black raincoat.
“!”
Fortunately, the officers on duty did not hear it.
The sound was quieter than the insects outside the closed windows and buried beneath the hum of the air conditioner.
It only sounded loud to the boy himself, whose hearing was sharp.
Whew.
Relieved, the boy quickly continued.
‘Hup!’
The large wheeled gas heater could be moved freely, and there was a gap beneath it about two and a half finger segments high.
A great deal of dust had collected there.
Onik quietly lifted the heavy underside of the long rectangular metal heater with one hand, slipped in his other arm to attach the recorder, then gently lowered the heater again.
The boy was so strong that there was almost no impact when he set it down.
‘I can collect the recording data later by getting close to the outside of the window.’
He had been able to connect by Bluetooth from nine steps away to the recorder attached inside the patrol car.
There was not much distance between the gas heater and the window, so the connection would have plenty of range, even if the window was closed.
He could not see a useful place for the one remaining recorder.
He had brought it as a spare from the start, so Onik considered that he had exceeded today's objective.
After quickly retreating, Onik pricked up his ears.
“...!”
The cute double chorus of snoring from the second floor had become a solo.
Onik immediately sprinted up the stairs.
It was the rush of a dark beast, climbing four or five steps at a time while making almost no sound.
He could not be sure whether the police uncle who had stopped snoring had actually woken up.
Even if they had, they did not seem to have stepped into the hallway yet. Onik could tell from the sounds alone.
Still, why take a risk when there was a safer route?
After unlocking the door and reaching the roof, the boy ran to the edge in the direction he had noted before entering and stepped onto the rooftop railing.
He looked down, then spun around and turned his back to the outside. Immediately afterward, with a small, springing hop, the boy surrendered himself to gravity.
That was for slowing down halfway through.
As he fell, Onik stepped on the outer frame of a darkened second-floor window and curled his body.
He planted his foot hard against the outer window frame to brake his fall. For an instant, his falling speed dropped close to zero.
In that state, Onik added the spring of his whole body to the strength of his legs and leaped backward.
Gravity caught the boy again.
The ground rushed closer.
The boy completed one graceful full rotation in the air, twisted his body the moment he landed, and rolled diagonally to break the fall.
Thump! Roll, roll, roll.
Despite dropping three stories onto hard asphalt, the extraordinary boy felt almost no pain.
After killing all his momentum, Onik got up and dusted himself off. Then he tilted his head to one side.
“I think I would've been fine even if I'd fallen without slowing down?”
Whenever he did something dangerous, whatever it was, the boy could keenly sense how likely it was to result in death.
He had already felt that he would remain unharmed even if he jumped straight down from the roof.
It was the whisper of the dark, crimson supernatural thing clinging to his soul.
But Onik followed the warning of reason first. His reason always had to come before the whispers of that strange nature.
Standing in a patch of shadow unusually deep even within the dark night, Onik looked back at the police station he had just escaped.
He felt accomplishment, guilt, and exhaustion all at once.
“Whew. I'm a little tired.”
His body was not tired at all. Mentally, though, he was quite worn out.
Bad child Jo Onik let out another deep sigh.
“I have to do this again later...”
If your tail grows long, it is bound to be stepped on someday.
Once the nasty things the frightening boy had planted today as a bad child had served their purpose, he would have to retrieve them all.
He would probably be able to retrieve the tracking devices and recorders from the two patrol cars somewhere other than the police substation.
The tracking devices would let him learn their patrol routes, the cars' current locations, and the places where the police uncles parked to rest during patrols.
He had also memorized the exact CCTV coverage and the layout of the police substation, so sneaking in again would be much easier.
Even so, Onik did not like it.
It might be easier than this time, but it would still be tense, and acting like a bad child brought its own stress.
The frightening boy turned and silently melted into the deserted alleys, shaking his head from side to side with another sigh.
Footnotes:
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