WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ The Police Do a Better Job Than Heroes

Chapter 39

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Life Is Like a Railroad Track (6)

Kang Jin-ho knew the heroes of HiCiSi well. He'd played the game long enough that the characters had grown familiar, and certain information just came naturally with time.

But out of the countless heroes in the roster, there were a few Kang Jin-ho happened to know in far greater detail than the rest.

First, fire-type heroes.

Keep one of these around and they'd cause trouble sooner or later, unable to rein in their own temper. He hadn't wanted to learn their quirks, but he'd ended up knowing them anyway.

Second, heroes who had to be recruited separately.

These ones had absurdly broken, versatile abilities, yet somehow lived as ordinary civilians instead of doing hero work. Bringing them on board required sending a hero to persuade them individually, and through that recruitment process Kang Jin-ho had picked up detailed knowledge of these "reserve heroes."

Third and finally, the useful heroes.

The ones he used often. The ones he could trust. The aces he could deploy the instant something went wrong, without a second thought.

The middle-aged hero he'd seen earlier, Silver Knife, belonged to that last group. He could generate around ten silver daggers with a property that suppressed other abilities, which made him effective not just against physical-type villains but against telekinetics and pyrokinetics too.

And that wasn't all. A no-nonsense personality. An unbending streak that meant he always completed his orders. On top of a genuinely useful ability. Silver Knife was the kind of reliable man you could throw at any operation, and one of the heroes Kang Jin-ho knew best.

"..."

And right now, looking at the man in front of him, Kang Jin-ho was certain. That Silver Knife was a fake.

To begin with, the real Silver Knife had a rotten personality. He completed orders because of a stubborn, one-track mind, not because he cared about being liked. He had no hobbies outside hero work, hated talking, and had no close friends to speak of.

But thinking back on the Silver Knife he'd just met... friendly personality, a decent sense of humor, and above all, clearly well-liked by everyone around him.

That's not the cold, standoffish Silver Knife I know.

He couldn't call it confirmed yet, but one thing was certain. Out of every hero he'd observed so far, that man was by far the most suspicious.

"Hm... sunbae? Hold off on that for a sec. Don't drink it."

Kang Jin-ho finished his thought and set down the glass the fake Silver Knife had handed him. Eun-yeong grinned and pushed her own glass aside too.

"So that guy's the mole?"

"...Still just a guess for now."

"Should we go grab him right now, then? Want me to bring cuffs?"

"That'd be a little premature, wouldn't it?"

Kang Jin-ho scratched the back of his head.

"It's not like catching some regular criminal. He's an elder of the Hero Association."

Kang Jin-ho had pulled the you're-the-culprit card on pure gut instinct more than a few times before, but this was different. This person had spent years active in the Hero Association. Or was pretending to. Walking up and saying "aren't you a villain?" wasn't going to fly here.

"My guess is that's a fake Silver Knife, sure. But to convince anyone of that, I need actual grounds."

"Fair point."

"Right. So we need to gather convincing evidence. Quietly. Bit by bit."

With his target set, Kang Jin-ho started circulating through the reception, naturally slipping into conversations here and there. Bringing up Silver Knife out of nowhere would look suspicious, so he started with small talk first. Once a conversation warmed up, he'd casually steer it toward a question about Silver Knife.

The first useful testimony came from a mid-forties B-rank, a veteran hero.

"Silver Knife-sunbae? Man, his personality's really come around lately. Used to totally blank you if you tried talking to him. Never showed up to any team dinners. Honestly, nobody really knew what he was about. Maybe it's age catching up with him, but he's gotten a lot warmer these days."

"Is that right?"

"Oh yeah. Used to be the type you could stab and not get a single drop of blood out of. Nowadays he's all about looking out for the juniors, handing stuff around and such."

Next came testimony from a rookie hero.

"Silver Knife-sunbae? I went out on a field call with him not too long ago, and he was really great. Funny. Great personality too."

"You went out on a field call together?"

"Yeah. He's been training up rookies lately, so he specifically picks people who still have that fresh-off-the-street look and takes them along. He's got to be taking a hit to his performance stats only bagging small-fry, but he doesn't seem to care one bit, he's just that decent a guy."

"Ah, I see..."

The last testimony came from a staff member working the event for the Hero Association.

"He used to complain constantly, honestly. Anything went even slightly wrong and it was 'why can't you do your job right,' 'if a hero dies because he got bad intel and you'll be the one responsible,' 'get it together'... to put it bluntly, kind of an old-school hardass type."

"Oh..."

"But lately he's genuinely different! Barely loses his temper anymore, and sometimes he even buys coffee when he stops by the association. It's like he's a completely different person."

"..."

So, summing up what he'd gathered so far.

First, Silver Knife's personality had unmistakably changed. And the change had gone in a positive direction.

Second, Silver Knife had recently started going out on calls with rookie heroes, supposedly to train them.

Third, since he had to bring rookies along, he was cherry-picking cases involving relatively weak villains only.

"The swap itself seems pretty confirmed at this point."

Kang Jin-ho zeroed in on the third point, that he only responded to cases involving weak villains.

When a hero got swapped out for a villain, there were generally two possible scenarios.

First, a villain with some kind of mimicry ability had infiltrated from the start.

Second, someone with a roughly similar ability had been picked out to pass themselves off as the real thing.

Looking at this Silver Knife case, Kang Jin-ho figured it fell into the second category. The signature dagger-generation fighting style could apparently be imitated well enough, but since it was still just an imitation, that would explain why the impostor stuck to weak villains only.

But as he kept collecting testimony, a thought struck him.

"People seem to like him more now, if anything."

"Wouldn't people get suspicious if someone just changed like that out of nowhere?"

"It's a change for the better, so I guess they're just taking it at face value."

If he had to put it in terms of a comparison, it was kind of like a delinquent young lord suddenly turning over a new leaf and everyone loving him for it. Most people assumed he'd just fixed his attitude. Nobody went around suspecting he'd secretly been possessed by some reader who'd been reincarnated out of a web novel.

The original Silver Knife had always been undeniably skilled but a genuine nightmare of a personality, and then all of a sudden he'd become this good-humored, charming middle-aged man. With expectations that low to begin with, his reputation had done a complete one-eighty.

"This is more of a headache than I expected..."

Whoever was disguised as Silver Knife, a serious interrogation would expose them eventually, no question. But with a reputation this solidly rebuilt, even attempting that kind of interrogation in the first place would be difficult.

What mattered was justification. Some grounds that would justify subjecting him to serious interrogation, some reasonable pretext just to make the attempt.

"No justification's going to fall out of the sky on its own... guess we have to manufacture one."

Kang Jin-ho and Eun-yeong grabbed some finger food off the table and took a breather.

"But it's not exactly easy to manufacture a pretext like that, is it? The other heroes aren't idiots. There's no way there's some obvious piece of evidence just lying around waiting to be found."

"Right. If we act rashly now and it falls apart, we're the ones who'll take the backlash. Our identities as police would come out, and Magic Muscle-nim, who invited us here, would end up in a seriously awkward spot too."

"Tricky."

Kang Jin-ho's eyes drifted toward the fake Silver Knife, still chatting away in the middle of the reception hall.

"The problem is, if we let this chance slip, that's it. When am I ever going to get another opportunity to meet with a Hero Association elder as a cop? This is probably my last shot at a natural point of contact."

"Yeah, that tracks."

"Right. So it has to happen now."

A confined space, the reception hall. A limited window of time, before the social wound down. He had to draw out clear, physical, undeniable proof, right here, right now, that this Silver Knife was a fake.

"You have any ideas?"

"Hm... actually, I do."

He'd never tried this particular method in the game, but Kang Jin-ho was fairly sure it would work without fail. And it could be pulled off naturally enough not to raise suspicion.

Pulling it off would require one person's cooperation.

"You're the key to this whole plan."

"...Me? Seriously, me?"

The collaborator Kang Jin-ho had chosen.

The one person absolutely essential to this operation, the key to exposing the truth behind Silver Knife, was none other than.

"...Ah, fuck it, I'll carry this one!"

The hero who'd racked up a noise complaint for gaming in his basement while screaming profanity at his teammates. Hell Fire!

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