Chapter 107
Translator : M.N 1391
Chapter: 107
But no matter how loudly he screamed, the black smoke paid him no heed. It coiled around his legs and crack! snapped them. They say broken bones reattach stronger than before, but before Graphite’s telekinesis, it was no different from snapping a drinking straw.
“Aaaagh!”
Trying to maximize guard efficiency and concentrate arrest personnel, they had gathered the victims in one place as much as possible, only to cause even greater damage.
There had been an intention to lure Graphite in with concentrated force and apprehend him, but in the end the capture operation failed, producing nothing but more victims. The officials who had confidently drafted the plan were all reprimanded.
There was no humiliation like it.
Disgusted not only with public authority but also with the incompetence of Korean superhuman protection, Heo Dong-se and his colleagues decided to send their children and grandchildren abroad.
“This can’t be allowed!”
“What do you mean it can’t! You incompetent bastards!”
A brief scuffle broke out between those trying to protect the police’s prestige and the powerful figures whose children and grandchildren had ended up hospitalized because they couldn’t catch a single villain.
Naturally, this short conflict ended with the powerful figures’ victory.
Even if military dictatorship had ended, the massive wealth amassed during that era, combined with a capitalism where money begets money, still granted them formidable influence.
Wasn’t the period when they held power precisely the starting point of every kind of collusion and elite cartel, politics–business collusion, politics–media collusion, prosecution–media collusion, construction-speculator development cartels, judicial cartels, and more?
They showed no hesitation in trampling on the police’s dignity and sent all their children to the United States to avoid Graphite. In America, there were superhuman PMCs; they planned to hire them to protect their children and grandchildren.
But there was one thing they had overlooked. Because of their murder plot and execution against the former dictator, Graphite had decided to join Vigilance, and Vigilance was not confined to Korea.
“Hi~”
“Wh-who are you?!”
“Vigilance.”
“W-why?!”
The man called Hulkman, who had appeared when Manny Face died in the past, and a mysterious superhuman wearing the mask of a former U.S. president appeared once again.
To those who had fled from Korea to the United States, the two asked whether they bore any grudges.
“I’m sorry.”
But unlike their words, their hands mercilessly snapped the limbs of the refugees.
This incident caused a huge stir not only in the United States but also in Korea. It was evidence that Graphite had joined hands with Vigilance.
The shock was greater in Korea than in America. What, there was no point even fleeing to the U.S. to escape a Korean villain?!
To restore their shattered prestige, the police announced the following.
[It appears Graphite has joined hands with Vigilance because it would be difficult for him to go to the United States.]
As if to say the trouble had been unnecessarily provoked by those who fled to America.
It was a statement unimaginable during the era of military dictatorship, but times were different now. The United States, keenly interested in the organization called Vigilance, had stepped in.
Why did the U.S. give the Korean police the courage to confront powerful figures who had survived since the military-dictatorship era?
It wasn’t hard to see. They intended to use those figures as bait to lure Graphite and catch Vigilance by the tail.
But these issues soon died down. Another superhuman had caused a major incident.
---
Kim Seok-cheol.
If his life could be summed up in one word, it would be abuse and exploitation.
An orphan adopted by a couple, he spent a childhood stained with violence and abuse.
Falsely registered as intellectually disabled by his adoptive parents, he received no proper education. In the blind spots of Korea’s disability-education system, Kim Seok-cheol was raised as a slave ignorant of the world. Confinement was routine.
When he grew older, the adoptive parents made the child work part-time and extorted his earnings.
One day, sick of being confined and beaten, he escaped and told the police everything, but the police scoffed that such movie-like things didn’t happen…and sent him home.
“You little bastard! You trying to screw me over?!”
In front of the police, the adoptive parents nodded obediently, pretending to be decent people. The moment they got home, they became demons.
Kim Seok-cheol desperately wished the demons before his eyes would disappear...
And that wish was granted.
“H-heek! G-gaahk!”
The adoptive parents’ bodies changed in bizarre ways.
Their skin sagged like melted candle wax that had hardened, and their bones twisted grotesquely. They became freakish, as if they had been mutants from the start.
Not only the two of them, objects nearby also warped as though melting.
Kim Seok-cheol realized that he was the one who had done this. And that what enabled such horror-SF-movie scenes was his own ability.
He adapted quickly. He was not stupid. Like an elephant chained when young that, even after growing strong enough to snap the chain, never thinks to do so, no, even while being abused and extorted by his adoptive parents, he had possessed enough self-awareness and reasoning to go to the police and report them.
It was only that public authority, the police, had turned their backs on him.
First, he tested what his ability was and what it could do. The many household items, and the grotesquely transformed adoptive parents, made excellent test subjects.
After days of fervent experimentation, once he understood exactly what his power was, he could turn the beings called “adoptive parents” into plastic blocks and toss them into the trash.
His ability was,
‘Temporarily altering the physical properties of surrounding objects.’
He named his power All-Phase Metamorphosis. For now, it was merely the ability to turn solids into liquids for a short time, but he named it with the hope that one day he could change anything at will.
After disposing of his adoptive parents, he savored his sudden freedom.
Yet at the same time, he didn’t know how to live.
Living well and prospering?
Just escaping the abuse of his adoptive parents was satisfaction enough; he didn’t yet think about a higher standard of life.
For a while, he lived off the money his adoptive parents had extorted and hoarded. Afraid of the world outside, he naturally fell into computers, the internet, and TV.
Pleasures that had never been permitted to him.
Then he encountered heroes. Heroes who saved citizens from disasters, heroes who saved citizens from crime, heroes who volunteered for neighbors in need, heroes who donated their talents.
Kim Seok-cheol became captivated by the word “hero.” How long had he waited, as a child being beaten by his adoptive parents, for a hero to come save him?
At first, when child-protection officials came to check for abuse; second, when the police came, he had hoped they would become his heroes. But there were no heroes.
So perhaps that was why,
A thought suddenly crossed Kim Seok-cheol’s mind.
‘Then I’ll become a hero!’
Hero companies were already training heroes, but his experience of being abandoned by public authority led him to believe that those belonging to such grand institutions were not real heroes.
When he was abused as a child and child-protection workers visited, they asked about abuse while his adoptive parents watched, listened, and stood guard. Terrified, he could only nod to whatever his adoptive parents said.
Later, when neighbors suspected child abuse and reported it, the police called his adoptive parents in advance before coming. That was the first time in his life he had worn clean clothes. Naturally, no measures were taken.
And finally, when he went to the police station to ask for help, he was ignored and sent home.
Being deceived three times was enough.
Kim Seok-cheol refused to recognize the heroes touted by hero companies as heroes. Instead, he decided to become a hero for those everyone else ignored.
Not long after he made that decision, mysterious phenomena seemingly caused by superhuman abilities began occurring across the country.
Objects twisted and melted like remnants of cosmic horror. Stones, steel, wood, scraps of cloth fused together.
What left the police aghast were masses with people fused into them.
Grotesque, monstrous forms that looked as if human flesh, stone, wood, and rebar had been fused together, like abominations spawned by end-of-the-world cosmic horror.
Bones of arms and legs grew out of bodies like tree branches and tangled together; spines fused into massive boulders; entire bodies melted so that synthetic fabric covered them head to toe in place of skin, forms beyond human imagination.
What shocked people even more was that the humans used as material were still alive.
“P-please… k-kill… me...”
They begged.
This was clearly a superhuman crime.
At first, people assumed the culprit was a perverted psychopath who had awakened a special superpower, given the victims’ grotesque state. But as the victims’ pasts were revealed one by one, the crimes were defined as retaliatory crimes, illegal vigilantism.
Every target of the crimes turned out to be notorious repeat offenders who had even made the news.
Con artists, assailants who caused death, child sex offenders, rapists, those who became victims of the bizarre superpower shared a common trait: they had received sentences far too light to match public sentiment.
As these incidents became known, the public began calling the criminal “Twister,” because of the distinctive spiral patterns found in the fused masses.
Naturally, Twister was classified as a villain. No matter how lightly the victims had been punished in the eyes of the public, what Twister did to them was undeniably criminal.
While the investigation and pursuit of Twister were underway, there came a time when Twister appeared in person.
And that incident was not unrelated to Kyung-wan.
Having fallen asleep while watching the latest popular titles on an OTT service he’d gotten from Director Maria, Kyung-wan frowned at a sudden cold draft. Had they rushed this cell’s construction and botched the insulation?
Tomorrow morning, he’d definitely give that woman a piece of his mind.
As Kyung-wan thought that, an unfamiliar voice reached him.
“E-excuse me...”
Kyung-wan slowly turned his head, scowling, toward the source of the voice. Under dim light stood a young man with his face covered by a mask, a large burlap sack at his feet, looking at Kyung-wan with fearful eyes.
No, what kind of novel character was this now? A guy bold enough to infiltrate a prison, yet scared to boot?
Kyung-wan spoke irritably.
“What is it?”
“...You’re Lee Kyung-wan, right?”
“That’s right. Get to the point.”
“Could you do me one favor? It’s not that difficult.”
“What is it?”
“Please use the Truth Twenty Questions on this person.”
As the young man said this and untied the sack, a man’s face appeared.
The slightly chubby-faced man was hardened stiff as stone, only his eyeballs rolling.
Kyung-wan sat down with an annoyed expression.
“Why?”
“Well, you see...”
The young man explained the circumstances to Kyung-wan. The story of two sisters who, after being raped and ignored by society, had made their injustice known through suicide, and that the man he had brought was suspected to be one of the men who had raped those sisters.