267 episodes
What James Reed was talking about was the case of the United States. Literally, the expensive lessons learned in the United States at the time of the monster’s upheaval.
After the appearance of the monster, countries with huge territories had to make a choice.
In the meantime, I had to defend the territory I had with cotton with points, and I had to actually put my hands on the places where monsters like rivers and lakes, mountains and forests, swamps and deserts are good for inhabiting.
As a result, in the case of Saudi Arabia, more than 90% of the country was lost. Naturally, in terms of choice and concentration, their grip on cities scattered across a vast territory weakened, and this increased the influence of the Awakened.
In particular, the United States, which was divided into East and West, had to pay a high price.
In the early days, before the heart of a monster was used as a full-fledged energy source, oil was necessary for human survival.
And America, the most blessed land on Earth, was a self-sufficient place to do all of this.
“The government had no choice but to join hands with those who, knowingly, committed many crimes! Thinking about it now, it was the worst decision, but at the time it was an inevitable choice.”
It wasn’t just a phenomenon in the United States. It happens in all countries where the central government has lost control, he said, and the Republic of Korea is no exception.
I’m sure you know what I mean.
“Why are you pointing out that?”
“Because Junho hates villains!”
“Is that over?”
“I wanted to help Junho. I was afraid of how the reaction would be if I later found out that the villain was involved. How will you find out if I tell you?”
To be honest. I also knew that James Reed was speaking out of goodwill, not out of any other conspiracy.
You have a brain that can understand that.
“What are you going to do?”
“You have to watch.”
“really? Is that the end?”
“Then you thought you would run away and kill everyone?”
If you thought I was the old head breaker, you are wrong. Now I know how to tell the difference between the ones I want to kill and the ones I don’t.
Of course, all villains should go.
“If you’re a dog-eater, you’re not even a villain.”
“… … .”
“why?”
“Joo, I didn’t know those words would come out of Junho’s mouth.”
Right now, I’m just a former villain who has done a lot of shit, but what do you do? I’m also a villain, but I’m not rude even to a villain who reflects on the past and wants to live a good life.
It’s just that the standards of goodness are a bit high.
[Are you saying you are kind now?]
Isn’t this good enough?
[Not at all!]
Once I realized that Yong-yong had high standards.
Either way, the world recognizes me.
[Who the hell is acknowledging this?]
Taken from https://noblemtl.com
Most people other than you.
[no it’s not!]
I pretended I didn’t hear Yong-yong’s empty cry and looked at Zola Man.
“Don’t worry, we won’t kill innocent people.”
“What is it, you were nervous for nothing!”
“Why are you nervous?”
“I knew Junho was going to kill everyone right away. It hurts when a massacre happens because of me.”
“… It’s useful to know how you’re looking at me before then.”
“Hey!”
The guy who made eye contact with me freaked out. He was looking at me that way, but I had no intention of changing my perception. After all, he’s that kind of guy.
Instead, I’ll have to roll it up a bit so I can come to my senses.
“Come to the training room. Let’s check our skills.”
“Oh, no. Am I an American superman?”
“So you say you’re rejecting a chance to be strong?”
“If I see what you’re doing now, I think I’ll get angry at you… … .”
Either way, I took the Zolaman into the training room. After a while, the boy’s screams began to resonate sweetly.
* * *
There was a person nearby who could ask about the information Zolaman gave him. The Director of the National Guard, who was once the core of the Awoken organization, is by my side.
I asked Jung Joo-ho, who had a happy expression on his face when Zola Man was hit, to talk.
“It is the same everywhere people live. Fat is especially prevalent.”
Jung Joo-ho meekly agreed. It is said that as local autonomy was unintentionally realized due to the demons, the province became a paradise for the awakened, where the boundary between public officials and villains is blurred.
If you’re vague, they’re actually committing a crime.
Shouldn’t it all be removed? Why were you standing still and watching?
As if he had read my thoughts, Joo-ho Jung was opposed to it.
“If you think you’re going to get rid of them all, I want to stop them. It’s practically impossible.”
“Why not?”
“Then the local security will collapse.”
As Joo-Ho Jung said, they are a necessary evil. After the appearance of monsters, city-stateization has become a global phenomenon.
Everyone wanted to get inside the city walls, and it was the young people who flocked to the city first. As a result, it is said that the marginalized regions have reached a level where security cannot be maintained unless there are people who have ambiguous boundaries whether they are civil servant hunters or villains.
“… … .”
“Do you still want to deal with it?”
“I think that’s a lot of exaggeration.”
“Well, it is not.”
Jung Joo-ho also acquiesced. But he said it is true that the situation is in the right balance.
“Are you going to remove it?”
“If it’s not a villain, I’ll leave it alone. Everyone has a past.”
I also know that my canine gland is the largest among countless canine glands in the world.
It’s also lucky to be able to get rid of that past.
“Because those guys are involved in the oil business.”
“Ah, it’s so entangled again. But it is also an unavoidable part of running a business. This is a pain in the butt.”
James Reed and Jung Joo-ho. I could see that it was regarded as a kind of necessary evil.
Can’t I think so too?
Of course, thoughts are possible.
However, seeing the villain and being able to just move on was a different matter.
It’s something I just can’t get past what caught my eye.
“It reminds me of the information I saw when I was in the National Guard.”
“what?”
“When a villain is arrested, the rate of correction is overwhelmingly high in the provinces.”
It wasn’t because I really came to my senses, it was because I was able to see and tolerate it to some extent.
At the time, I didn’t pay attention to the statistics because I was more focused on arresting the villain than rehabilitating the villain, and the guy arrested by me was so broken that he couldn’t act as a villain again.
I thought it was because of me that the rate of indoctrination of villains in the metropolitan area was low.
It’s only now that you realize that the information you’ve seen at a glance actually plays an important role.
“Do not worry. I don’t want to deal with everything. We will see and decide what to do.”
“Is that scarier?”
Jung Joo-ho was disgusted and tried to get away from me, but my mind was full of this part about how to deal with them.
I’ll have to see it myself too.
* * *
The place I wanted to go was Gunsan. At the time of the Awakened Brainwashing incident, Kang Woo-tae tried to escape to China through Gunsan, but it was supposed to become a key point if oil came in from Saudi Arabia in the future.
Busan is one of them, but the requirements are not met because the government has a strong influence on large cities.
So, the place decided was Gunsan. It’s also a pretty big city, but the villain’s conversion rate was high, and there were quite a few Awakenings with ambiguous boundaries.
But before heading to Gunsan, I decided to change my style.
In the past, there were a lot of cases where people knew my name but didn’t recognize my face, but now they recognize my face in many cases.
Since the purpose is to observe from the side, I didn’t want them to recognize me and not see my natural appearance.
“How do you do it?”
Should I be honest and have a consultation?
It seems that if you leave it alone, you can change the image properly.
But since it’s a light walk, I don’t want to bother you with this.
Normally, I combed my hair because of Sejeong Jin’s torch and tried to walk around as neatly as possible. So, I used a functional suit that was easy to move and could be formal. However, since this became a symbol of me, there was a high probability that my identity would be discovered.
Yongyong said to me as I was worried.
[Lower your bangs and put on your glasses.]
Since there was nothing to lose, Yong-yong lowered his head on his horse and put his glasses on, so his image changed.
Well, it’s a bit odd that I’m saying this to me, but you look so gentle that you can’t kill a single person?
[If I wear jeans in a white t-shirt here, people won’t notice it?]
When I followed Yong-yong’s words, I created an image that was quite different from my usual self.
If you go out in the city, you can meet more than 10 people in 10 minutes, isn’t it?
Yong-yong, since when did you have such a fashion sense?
At my admiration, his nose bridge ascended to the sky.
[Don’t ignore the skill of the gods! I can do this if I put my mind to it!]
Seeing you smirk, I thought I was complimenting you for nothing, but I thought that the first person I saw didn’t know, just by changing the styling as Yong-yong said.
He looks more like an ordinary job seeker than an awakened person.
That’s fine.
“Then shall we go?”
I immediately headed to Gunsan. I wanted to take the dog, but this time, I wanted to completely hide my identity, so I went alone.
Kim Yoon-gi told me that he was thinking of Gunsan and Busan as major bases in Gunsan, and that he would increase the number of bases according to the amount of imports.
The atmosphere in Gunsan was lively because their hometown was selected. There was a vibrancy that had never been seen before. However, the more I went into the construction site, the more I felt the atmosphere subsided.
there’s something
[by the way.]
“yes?”
[Isn’t disguise meaningless when we look at it like this?]
“Ah, this?”
I went into the center of Gunsan and was not mingling, but inspecting the construction site from a distant place where there were few people.
If this is the case, Yong-yong asks why he was wearing a disguise.
That’s true, but one knows and the other doesn’t.
Even if you disguise yourself like this, you will get attention because you are a stranger in the city. I try to look quietly, but entering confidently is a bad choice.
[Then why did you disguise?]
He doesn’t want his identity to be found even if he enters the city while he’s in a car, but Yong-yong doesn’t seem to like that.
There’s no point in sticking here.
“Let’s just make it feel good.”
[Wow… … .]
Yong-yong showed a sign of dissatisfaction, but I didn’t mind and quietly looked at the scene.
The place I paid attention to is a place called ‘Guan Construction’, which is in charge of construction in Gunsan.
Jung Joo-ho said that this is the place where the vague guys between the villains and the awakened would be, but when I inquired at the Office of External Relations, they replied that some of them who had a history of villains belonged to them. That is, it is ambiguous.
The ambiguity here is that it’s practically no different from a villain in a legal mask, so I chose to take a look first.
I quickly found a chance to find out.
When the guys in black suits appeared at the noisy construction site, a chilly silence was engulfed in silence. The guys, who were walking around like their own houses, started lining up the workers and began to use violence.
Is it like that originally? I just watched quietly from afar. The guys who were holding the discipline of the laborers hurriedly got into the car and moved and arrived at the beach with few people.
It was so dark that it was almost impossible to see the surroundings.
They opened the trunk, took out the sacks, put them in the drums prepared in advance, and threw the drums into the sea.
[No life reaction.]
If you see that there was no reaction from life from the beginning, it means that the body was disposed of.
The guys who dropped five drums into the sea got back in their car and started moving.
I hid in the dark and followed them. The place we arrived at was a prefabricated building a bit far from downtown.
I chose to sneak in because it felt suspicious just looking at it.
[Is there a strange smell?]
“What smell?”
[I smell what you humans call drugs.]
… It’s varied.
When I looked inside, I could see that this was a gambling hall.
Aren’t you a villain because you used legal disguise to use violence against civilians, dispose of corpses, and even gamble on drugs?
Of course, if you claim that it is legal, it will be recognized as a legal place. But is there any reason these guys aren’t villains just because the law allows them? If human trafficking is included in this, all the crimes committed by villains exist.
I’m sure these guys are villains.
[Even if it is some deviation?]
That’s a personal argument. I also think of myself as a villain in my subjective judgment.
[Isn’t that a problem?]
What’s the problem.
It doesn’t matter if you’re within the bounds of the law, it’s what you do that matters.
There’s no way legitimate guys would handle a villain’s corpse in such a secretive way.
Convinced, I jumped into the gambling room without hiding any more.
“Who are you… … !”
Aww!
I twisted the neck of the villain who asked.
Not too long ago, they boasted in themselves that they listened to wills and used their hands, but that also obscures people.
For a villain, a will is also a luxury.
If you use the few seconds of their chatter to get your hands on one, even one more villain can be dealt with.
There was no need to hide his identity, so after taking off his glasses, he hung the white tee that had been tightening his neck and looked around and said.
“If you want to live, break your arms and throw your face on the floor.”