WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ The Police Do a Better Job Than Heroes

Chapter 50

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Even a Sparrow's Steps Are Steps (6)

Following the path Lethe had taken.

"It's this way, but..."

The narrow alley suddenly widened, and a crowd of people carrying briefcases brushed past.

What came into view was one of Light City's main streets. Rush hour had hit, and the crowd wasn't just thick, it overflowed.

"Hmm..."

Once she'd hidden herself in that sea of humanity, finding Lethe with the naked eye was next to impossible. Even tracking her through Afterimage's ability wouldn't work, not with so many other traces layered on top of hers.

"So, what exactly do you want me to do?"

Faced with that dead end, Mind Reader adjusted his glasses and asked. Honestly, he still hadn't grasped the connection between reading minds and chasing Lethe.

"Simple. Use your ability, Mind Reader-nim, and sweep through the emotions of everyone in that crowd."

Kang Jin-ho said it lightly, in a tone like, "you can manage that much, right?"

"...Sorry?"

Mind Reader startled and waved his hands.

"You want me to read that many people's emotions all at once? That's rough! If I push myself, maybe once or twice, but..."

"You just need to find one person."

Kang Jin-ho pressed on, firm.

"There'll be one person whose emotions are obviously off, no matter who looks. Just find that one person. You can do that much, can't you?"

"...Just one person, you said?"

Honestly, it sounded impossible, but something about Kang Jin-ho's confidence made it seem like he had a plan. Mind Reader clicked his tongue quietly, then slowly began drawing up his ether.

"When you write the report later, make sure you put this in."

Mind Reader's eyes flashed blue.

"I'm pulling my weight too!"

The wave of ether radiating from his body swept across the hundreds, thousands of people walking the main street all at once.

Joy, irritation, exhaustion, excitement, boredom... countless raw emotions poured into Mind Reader's brain. His brow furrowed instantly, and cold sweat beaded on his forehead.

Blood trickled from his nose. One of the officers startled and reached to wipe it away, but Mind Reader waved a hand to show he was fine.

"Ugh... too many people, just like I thought... huh?"

Then his gaze locked onto the back of a woman's figure.

"Found her?"

"...Yeah. That woman, her emotions are wrong. Not happy, not sad, I'm not even sure it counts as human emotion at all. It's like everything's tangled together..."

If you compared ordinary human emotion to a shape, that woman's emotion was closer to a scribble, no rules, just a child dragging a pencil wherever their hand wanted to go.

"That woman is Lethe. No doubt about it. Go after her."

Kang Jin-ho nodded and started walking briskly toward the woman Mind Reader had pointed out.

Kang Jin-ho knew about Lethe's ability. More precisely, he knew about the side effects of her ability.

'Lethe's emotional state is broken.'

No matter how many people crowded the streets, if there was a hero who could read emotions, tracking Lethe down was possible. Of course, the reason they'd gotten this far in the first place was precisely because such a hero happened to exist.

'The order's backward. It's because a hero like that exists that we came after her.'

Kang Jin-ho smiled, at ease.

This was the field Kang Jin-ho could call his greatest strength, back when he was playing HiCiSi. Clearly grasping the compatibility between villains and heroes, and sorting out which villains could be caught with the current hero roster and which couldn't.

Well... once he'd gotten set in his ways, he'd stopped going out to find villains at all, just waited for incidents to happen instead.

"Over there, this way!"

Anyway, guided by Mind Reader, the group chased after Lethe.

Pushing through the dense crowd wasn't easy, but with several officers along for the ride.

"Trace, it's Trace!"

"Is there a villain around? Move aside for her!"

Citizens recognized the heroes and cleared the way, which made things go a lot smoother.

"...Aren't the officers kind of pointless here?"

"Let's just say they're not."

Meanwhile, mixed into the crowd and fleeing, Lethe was starting to sense something was off. All those people were an obstacle for her too. Clearly they had some means of tracking her. If this kept up, the odds of getting caught were high.

'Can't be helped.'

Lethe pulled a small communicator from inside her coat and pressed down hard.

Flash!

At the same instant, a violent storm of ether tore through the space within a radius of several dozen meters. It wasn't a sealing power, this was Lethe's ability to temporarily scramble people's memories into chaos.

Since it was nothing more than a raw area-effect attack, anyone with strong mental fortitude or ether inside their body was unaffected.

"Where... was I trying to go?"

"Where is this? Where's my house? Who am I?"

Ordinary people with weak resistance to ether all froze in place at once, sinking into confusion. Those on foot were manageable enough, but the real problem was the people behind the wheel.

"What's this pedal? What am I supposed to press?"

Honk!!!

Sudden braking. Sudden acceleration. Cars slammed into each other, horns blared, and the road turned into chaos in an instant.

"Ah, ahh!!!"

Right as one car with a wildly twisted steering angle was about to plow into a crowd of people.

"What's going on?! Why is everyone acting like this all of a sudden?"

A B-rank hero on patrol nearby, 'Marathon Man,' burst in and barely managed to stop the car in time. A moment later, and it would have ended in disaster.

"Look, look over there!"

"Damn it..."

The problem was that this was only the beginning.

"Here?"

"Hit fast and pull out. The contract's for five minutes of work."

Men in black clothes appeared, summoned by the communicator's signal. They burst out from alleys all over, charging at the heroes struggling to get the situation under control.

"Mercenaries? Why now, all of a sudden?"

"Requesting backup! Direction of Sujeong Intersection! It's urgent!"

Marathon Man narrowly dodged a car a mercenary had thrown and called for backup. The mercenaries in black showed no sign of stopping. With memories scrambled and mercenaries wreaking havoc on top of it, the citizens had descended into outright panic.

Amid a scene that could only be called a total mess, Trace gritted her teeth and stepped to the front.

"Heroes, follow me! Let's join in and hold off the mercenaries first!"

She was an information-type hero, but she carried tools with her that let her fill a support role, at least. As Trace judged it, until reinforcements arrived, their current forces were at an overwhelming disadvantage.

"Officers, please control the citizens! It looks like they've been exposed to Lethe's ability, so make sure no one else gets hurt! And Jin-ho-ssi!"

"Yes! We'll go after her!"

"I'm counting on you!"

Roles were divided in an instant. Leaving the chaos of the main street behind them, Kang Jin-ho and Eun-yeong kept chasing after the Lethe they'd spotted earlier.

They couldn't afford to lose her now, not after coming this far.

**

"Hah, hah..."

Away from the glittering main street, inside a somewhat dark and damp alley.

Lethe, catching her breath as she walked, came to a stop, blocked by a massive concrete wall. A dead end.

"No place left to run."

Behind her, Eun-yeong and Kang Jin-ho stepped into view. Lethe glanced over their clothes, then twisted her mouth into a scowl.

"Two cops?"

"What's wrong with cops? And these days, we're the top-performing cops around."

Kang Jin-ho shrugged, and Lethe, expressionless, opened the bag she was holding.

Hiss.

She pulled a drug out of the bag that replenished ether and injected it into her arm.

"Are you two this relaxed just because I'm an information-type ability user?"

She didn't like the look on either of their faces. It wasn't negative emotion she sensed, and that irritated her, anticipation, enjoyment, relief, that kind of thing.

"You two look happy."

As if everything she'd used so far had just been a warmup, an enormous surge of ether began to swirl inside the alley.

There was something people misunderstood. Lethe's ability wasn't sealing memories. She "stole" them.

It was only because she returned the memories after a set period that people had convinced themselves it was some kind of seal.

"I hate people who look happy."

Having taken so many people's memories over the years, Lethe herself had been broken by it. Among the memories she'd taken, plenty were joyful and happy, but there were far more that were dark and horrific. The memories people wanted taken away from them were usually the bad kind.

Whir.

Dense ether wrapped around the two officers' feet.

An ability that temporarily took memories and returned them once the period passed. Lethe had developed this ability further and discovered one particular use for it.

"Stop smiling. Cry instead."

Injecting the memories she carried into someone else.

In other words, shoving the most horrific, most agonizing, most brutal memory straight into someone's head.

First, the woman.

Lethe's eyes flashed dull and murky. The memory of a man kidnapped and tortured to death by a 1-rank villain. That was what got injected into the female officer's mind.

"..."

"..."

Despite the massive amount of ether spent... nothing happened. Absolutely nothing happened at all.

"...Huh?"

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