Chapter 63
Chapter 63
-------------------------------------------------
Translator : M.N 1391
Chapter: 63
-------------------------------------------------
The conclusion of his deduction was this: the reason they isolated him alone and didn’t give him food was probably because, despite not even being an ability user, he had overpowered Kawaguchi, a super-strength ability officer.
So unless their real intention was to weaken him by starving him, there was no reasonable explanation. Otherwise, they were simply pissed at Kyung-wan for beating the crap out of Japan’s proud Superpower Police No.1.
Either way, truly, Japan and its “Lost 30 Years”! It seemed their level of handling people hadn’t evolved much in three decades.
Kyung-wan knocked on the bars. He couldn’t starve like this. Even a scholar, if starved for three days, would climb over another family’s wall. And Kyung-wan, who had no intention whatsoever of being a scholar, found Japan’s Metropolitan Police, or the Japanese government, starving him for two meals to be perfectly sufficient justification for a jailbreak.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
Kyung-wan’s hand struck the bars at a steady tempo. The speed increased, then converged into a precise rhythm.
His gaze toward the bars narrowed. Though his eyes were open, he wasn’t “looking” at the world.
This wasn’t some nonsense like “I drank but wasn’t drunk driving.”
He felt the vibrations of the air traveling through his skin, tasted the sound of the lock responding to them, and smelled the metallic scent leaking from the keyhole as friction built from the shaking.
His intuition, awakened by senses pushed to the extreme, pierced through the internal structure of the lock as though seeing it.
The resonant frequency he produced made the bars tremble intensely, and that vibration stimulated the lock’s delicate internal components.
Tiny parts rattled, caught, shifted. Making them all move exactly as he wanted was incredibly difficult, but the transcendental time-sense granted by his intuition allowed dozens of trial-and-error cycles per second.
When those attempts surpassed two thousand and approached three thousand, every component was finally in its precise required position.
And so, the bars opened.
“What… what the hell?!”
A Japanese police officer who had been ignoring Kyung-wan after finishing lunch distribution turned around, saw him stepping out of the open cell, and shouted in horror.
“What do you mean ‘what’?! Rice!! You damn Jap bastard!”
The single most petty thing in the world is messing with someone’s food. To Kyung-wan, such an act was equivalent to declaring, I’m holding your lifeline, a direct threat to his instinct for survival.
Therefore, everything he was about to do now was a struggle to reclaim his right to live.
[Hands up!]
When the officer hurried to draw his gun, Kyung-wan shouted and charged forward.
“Rice!”
Give me food! Give me food, you Jap bastards!
As he recognized his own fury, Kyung-wan was faintly surprised. Was his Korean instinct of being “dead serious about food” still preserved somewhere in the brain? To be this angry from missing just two meals?
Perhaps the influence came from the body’s original owner, who must have often been hungry and poorly fed.
The officer pulled out his gun as Kyung-wan sprinted toward him, but with his sloppy shooting skills, he couldn’t even properly aim at the enraged man rushing him.
Even though the Metropolitan Police were supposedly an elite track, the so-called “career path” for Japan’s upper-tier officers, how could they possibly imagine Kyung-wan running up walls, kicking off ceilings, and moving in three dimensions?
“Gah!”
Kyung-wan’s falling knee smashed into the officer’s face with a sharp thud. He caught the falling gun, checked the bullets, then glanced toward the food cart.
Seeing that the food wasn’t missing nor insufficient only made him angrier.
Kyung-wan, about to scoop rice onto the tray out of starvation, paused. The rice and side dishes looked miserable. Truly the mark of a human-rights backwater, Japan.
Having gone as far as a jailbreak, he refused to eat something on the level of low-grade military slop.
He rummaged through the dazed officer’s uniform and found handcuffs. Then he cuffed the officer’s wrists, grabbed him by the back of the neck, and dragged him out of the holding area.
Naturally, chaos erupted. Police officers immediately rushed in and surrounded Kyung-wan holding the hostage.
But none dared to get careless. One officer had tried sneaking up behind him with a restraint tool, only to get shot in the leg without Kyung-wan even turning his head.
As if he had eyes on the back of his skull, he hit a man he never even looked at. The atmosphere was, undeniably, his.
[Release the hostage at once!]
“I don’t speak Japanese. Japanese language wakarimasen. Okay?”
Does he really not speak Japanese?
While everyone hesitated at his response, a female officer who spoke Korean rushed forward.
“Please release the hostage.”
Kyung-wan looked at her.
“You speak Korean?”
“To some extent…”
“Then the first thing you should do isn’t demanding I release the hostage but asking why I’m doing this, isn’t it?”
“.. Why are you doing this?”
“They didn’t feed me.”
“Sorry?”
The female officer tilted her head, unable to fully understand, so Kyung-wan shouted:
“You don’t give me food! I’m very hungry! Do you understand?!”
The officers murmured anxiously.
Trying to regain composure, the female officer attempted persuasion.
“There must’ve been some mistake. So please release the hostage, ”
“Mistake? I personally saw you giving lunch to everyone except me this morning and noon! Even if it were a mistake, what about this bastard?! I yelled that I was hungry! Asked for food! And he ignored me! And it’s not like you didn’t even have food!”
Kyung-wan grabbed the hostage’s collar and shook him violently. Terrified by the barrel pressed between his brows, the hostage trembled helplessly.
His crotch was… beginning to feel suspiciously damp.
The female officer nervously offered:
“Then if we bring food, will you release the hostage?”
“I’ll talk after I eat.”
“If you release him first, we will give you food.”
“Miss Officer, that’s not how negotiations work.”
Bang!
“Aaaagh!”
“Kyaaah!”
Kyung-wan fired at the hostage’s thigh. The hostage screamed.
“Hey, calm down. It only grazed the skin.”
It was true. The bullet had only torn the fabric and pierced the floor.
If he had actually shot the thigh, the hostage wouldn’t be able to stand on his own, and then Kyung-wan would have to support him, which would only be annoying.
Looking at the pale female officer, Kyung-wan continued:
“Miss Officer, I think you misunderstood something. Feeding a detainee is YOUR duty. Which means demanding a meal is MY right. If you treat my rightful meal like some bargaining chip, it feels like I’m negotiating with Yakuza thugs shaking down my human rights. And if that’s the case… the situation will get much uglier. Don’t you think so?”
His tone was calm, gentle, almost like a teacher explaining to a student. The female officer, flustered, raised her radio and contacted her superiors. After listening, she returned with a stiff face.
“Alright. We’ll provide food first. But please let us check the hostage’s injury.”
“Don’t worry. It’s just a scrape. You can tell from the floor, there’s no blood, right?”
She checked the floor, then nodded. Indeed, there was no bleeding. The hostage was standing on his own.
As she moved away, Kyung-wan added:
“Oh, one more thing! Make the meal KFC.”
“.. Understood.”
She stepped back and explained the situation to a higher-ranking officer.
Thus Kyung-wan waited with the police for the chicken. Before long, the female officer returned holding a box.
Kyung-wan let out a hollow sigh.
“Oh my god…”
“Is… is there a problem?”
She looked uneasy.
Of course there was a problem. Chicken had arrived,
But it was Kentucky Fried Chicken.
With an expression of utter disappointment, he said:
“When someone says KFC, it OBVIOUSLY means Korean Fried Chicken! That’s common sense!”
K-fried chicken, the proud vanguard of Hallyu, marching alongside K-pop and K-dumplings.
The female officer frowned slightly as if feeling this was unfair, but the one holding the gun and the hostage was Kyung-wan.
“I’ll exchange it. Please wait.”
“Ah! Don’t throw that away, bring it back.”
“Why?”
“He has to eat too. I’m not petty like you people, withholding food.”
Chicken deserves no blame. A prisoner must be fed, even if you’re a Japanese cop. Kyung-wan intended to teach them that lesson through the hostage.
The female officer nodded and, looking convinced, carefully handed the chicken bucket toward him.
Then,
“Yamero!”
A middle-aged officer with a very large forehead stepped forward, shouting. Judging from his uniform and his face, he seemed to be a superior officer.
“Give it!”
Kyung-wan yelled back just as forcefully.
Caught between an armed hostage-taker and her superior officer’s orders, the female officer froze.
At that moment, Kyung-wan shoved the original hostage down, stomped on his back, and snatched the chicken bucket from her hands.
Before she could react, it was gone.
He grabbed a plump chicken wing, shoved it toward the hostage’s mouth, and forced him.
“Eat. Eet. Eat, okay? What pronunciation do I need to use for you people to understand?”
As Kyung-wan shook his head at Japan’s impossible English accent, someone behind him panicked at the idea of the hostage eating the chicken,
It was the large-foreheaded superior officer.
“Don’t eat it!”
The hostage opened his mouth, then closed it.
Why would he be told not to eat it? Obvious. They had tampered with the food.
“Heh heh heh.”
Kyung-wan’s smile turned sinister. The female officer flinched. How could a human smile like that?
Kyung-wan suddenly lunged.
“Kyaaah!”
The female officer screamed and ducked, but he wasn’t aiming for her. His target was the big-foreheaded superior.
The police never imagined he would abandon the hostage and charge forward, nor did they expect him to be that fast.
In the blink of an eye, the unfortunate large-foreheaded superior was captured. Some officers did try to intervene, but Kyung-wan’s perfectly timed shots left them crippled in the legs.
Being carried out, they were probably regretting stepping forward.
The superior tried to resist, but after being struck in the chin, shin, and temple, using shoulders, toes, gun grip, rapidly, relentlessly, he quickly lost all strength.
Kyung-wan grabbed him by the crown, dragging him along. Judging from the hairline, hair loss was a clear concern, but who cared about someone else’s balding in a moment like this?
“You, get lost!”
He kicked the first hostage in the butt, sending him scrambling away. Thus the hostage was replaced.
He forced the superior to kneel and slapped his cheeks repeatedly.
“How dare you tell them to drug chicken?”
Even if it was knockoff KFC, chicken was still chicken. Who dared disgrace chicken with drugging?
“Eat. Eet. Tabe. Itadakimasu.”
A person must clean up the mess they themselves created. If he had ordered the chicken be tampered with, then he should be the one to eat it.
Kyung-wan didn’t necessarily believe this superior was the mastermind, but he would bet one of his balls that they were all in on it. Only one ball, because the odds were fifty-fifty.
The superior squeezed his eyes shut as Kyung-wan demanded, through broken Japanese, that he eat the doctored chicken.
There was no humiliation quite like this. The problem wasn’t the drugged food, it was the fact that the hostage-taker had caught them.
It was a grand display of the Japanese police’s incompetence for the whole world to see.