MAEPG: Episode 23

Episode 23 Hahoe Mask (1)

Hans moved stealthily through the shadows to where the commotion had occurred.

Guardians were already there, cleaning up the scene.

“Damn it, how many times has it been? How come there’s never a day that goes by peacefully?”

“…Incidents keep happening, but we’re so short-staffed. I can’t even remember the last time I went home.”

They grumbled as they talked.

Looking around, my favorite chicken place didn’t seem to have suffered much damage, other than the broken windows and the messy interior.

‘It must be because of the aftereffects of the terrorist attack that happened nearby. It’ll reopen soon.’

Anyway, there had been a lot of incidents lately.

The Guardians were also talking about that.

“Public order is becoming chaotic because of those guys who are systematically carrying out terrorist attacks, so other riffraff are also acting up.”

“We’re already struggling to catch those guys… This is dangerous if it continues like this.”

I listened to their conversation for a while and then left.

‘So there’s a cause. Did the villains form a group?’

Of course, they had been forming criminal organizations before.

But unlike other countries, Korea had been responding quite well…

It seemed like they had failed to control them this time and couldn’t even catch their tail.

I hid in the deepening darkness and quickly traversed the city.

I activated the detection magic, which had become more stealthy as I grew, and scanned the surroundings.

‘It’s a bit awkward to go back empty-handed after making a grand entrance, saying I’m going to hunt villains.’

It was already past midnight, and I had plenty of time.

Then, a small commotion was detected by my enhanced senses.

‘Hmm… this is…’

I paused and assessed the situation, then hesitated for a moment before changing direction.

The reason I hesitated.

It wasn’t because it was dangerous, nor was it because there was a risk of my identity being exposed.

“Hey, are you ignoring me? Are you ignoring me, you bastard?”

“N… no, it’s not like that…”

“Speak properly. You want to get beaten up, you little shit?”

A back alley where a group of boys in school uniforms were gathered.

A group surrounding one boy, with a cigarette in their mouths.

It was a scene of school violence.

‘…I came out to hunt villains, but is it right to deal with these punks?’

That was the biggest reason I hesitated.

If you drew your sword, you had to cut something, but wasn’t it too much to use this power to discipline kids?

“Hey! I have a great idea. Take off his shirt.”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

As I was assessing the situation for a moment, one of the delinquents who was smoking in the back approached the boy who was being bullied.

“Let’s carve the Big Dipper on his chest. Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

“Hehehe, you crazy bastard… That’s fucking awesome. Let’s do it.”

The delinquents grabbed the boy in the center and ripped off his buttons.

His exposed body was already covered in bruises and wounds.

“S… stop it! Stop!”

“You’re funny. Do we have to stop just because you tell us to?”

“You still haven’t learned your lesson? Let’s carve Orion on his back.”

“Oh! Do you even know what Orion looks like? That’s awesome.”

“I don’t know. We can just search it on the internet. Just grab that guy. He keeps resisting.”

The boy crying and resisting, and the guys beating him up to subdue him.

The guy approaching with a lit cigarette and the group giggling and filming it with their smartphones.

I watched until then and made up my mind.

Why were they called villains?

If they harmed others and committed crimes, weren’t they villains?

And they were already perfect villains.

Once I made up my mind, acting was instantaneous.

“…Huh?”

The guy who was about to burn him with the cigarette stopped moving.

Not only him, but the boy who was resisting, the delinquents who were giggling, everyone froze in place.

A sudden silence fell over the entire alley.

“Uh… my body suddenly, why is it like this…?”

“Uh, uh, me, me too. I, I can’t move…”

I just lightly released my energy without revealing myself, and they all froze like frogs in front of a snake.

Crackle!

Then, the smartphone of the guy who was filming shattered.

There were no CCTV cameras in this alley either.

That’s why those delinquents were acting so recklessly here.

“Uh… I’m suddenly, sleepy…”

Thud!

I cast a sleep spell on the victim and slowly revealed myself in front of the delinquents.

“…Gasp!”

“Ah, uh… Aaah…”

Drip—

They all started to wet themselves as soon as they made eye contact with me.

I set the mood and slowly approached them.

Clatter…

Their teeth chattered, and their bodies trembled like aspen leaves.

Their eyes, fixed on me, unable to turn away or even blink, became bloodshot.

The weaker ones already had their pupils dilated.

‘The effect is no joke.’

I deliberately released my energy to scare them, but this seemed a bit excessive.

Well, they were just minors who thought they were invincible.

They could suffer mental breakdowns just from this.

I moderately adjusted my energy and pointed my finger at them, casting a spell.

‘I was wondering how severe the punishment should be…’

No matter how bad they were, I couldn’t kill them.

And if I just gave them a light punishment, they wouldn’t have done this in the first place if they were the type to learn their lesson.

So I chose this method.

[Seeds of evil. Remember this moment. When you are completely consumed by darkness and sprout, you will meet me again.]

It was a curse, not exactly magic.

The overwhelming fear engraved in them from facing me.

I planted a trigger in their minds, embedding it in their psyche.

Thud!

The delinquents, who had been frozen stiff, all collapsed at the same time, their eyes rolling back.

Some of them even foamed at the mouth and fainted.

‘Hmm, is it okay to just leave them like this?’

Whoosh—

A smartphone flew out of one of the delinquent’s pockets and was sucked into my hand.

I called 911 with it and then threw it back on top of him.

I had done enough.

‘Don’t do bad things anymore and live a good life. Not that you can.’

Feeling proud of myself for doing a good deed, I hid myself in the darkness again.

The night was still long, and I had plenty of time.

_____________________

‘Ugh… my head hurts.’

Choi Ho-sik opened his eyes with difficulty.

His head was pounding, and he couldn’t think straight.

“Hey! Ho-sik! Are you awake? Over here, over here! Honey, come quickly! Our son is awake!”

The loud voice ringing right next to him made his headache worse.

He wanted to yell at her to be quiet, but his throat was parched and no sound came out.

“Sir, are you awake?”

In the meantime, a nurse approached him and started checking on him.

After moistening his throat with water and regaining some strength, Choi Ho-sik finally looked around.

“This is… a hospital? Why am I here?”

His mind was confused, and he couldn’t grasp the situation.

“Oh my god, Ho-sik! Do you know how surprised I was when I suddenly got the call? What happened! Who did this? Which bastard did this to my precious son?!”

Choi Ho-sik frowned at his mother’s fussing next to him.

But thanks to that, he was able to grasp the situation.

The call to 911, the unresponsive caller, the paramedics dispatched using GPS.

The students lying unconscious together in a back alley.

And himself, transported to the hospital unconscious and now awake.

“…I was watching a drama when I got the call that you were hospitalized, and I rushed over here in a panic. But what is this! What are the police doing? They take our taxes but…”

Choi Ho-sik ignored his mother’s complaints and held his head, as memories came flooding back.

‘Right, we were smoking in the back alley, and we were about to teach that nerd a lesson…’

The moment his thoughts reached that point,

He froze, unable to even breathe.

The flapping black robes. The blue ghost fire burning in the narrowed eyes. The approaching black hand. And…

[Seeds of evil. Remember this moment. When you are completely consumed by darkness and sprout, you will meet me again.]

“Aaaagh!”

“Eek! Ho, Ho-sik? Ho-sik! What’s wrong?!”

“Sir? Sir, come back to your senses!”

The overwhelming fear engraved in his soul.

Medical personnel, who had approached him at some point, restrained his convulsing body and injected him with a sedative.

“Ah… Aaah…”

As his consciousness faded, Choi Ho-sik wished he had stayed asleep.

__________________

The punishment was basically a curse that implanted trauma.

The effect was simple: it replayed the fear he felt when he faced me.

The trigger was having evil thoughts.

The insidious thing was that it activated even if he only thought about it, without acting on it.

Circumventing it through self-hypnosis was also impossible.

I had mixed my thoughts into the curse in preparation for those with twisted morals.

Even if he didn’t consider it an evil act, the curse would activate according to my standards.

‘But I made it so that it would manifest weakly as a warning when he only thought about it, so he would try to have good thoughts.’

As he was repeatedly exposed to it, his survival instincts would automatically reject evil thoughts.

The curse, when fully activated, could even cause a collapse of the ego.

Anyway…

“Hmm, this is too inefficient.”

I muttered softly after waking up from a good night’s sleep and grasping the situation.

Of course, I was talking about Hans, who had been roaming the city all night.

‘No matter how fast his movement speed and wide his detection range are, it’s not efficient to just wander around like this.’

It was true that he had resolved many incidents last night.

From school bullies to thieves, gangsters, and even rapists.

He had implanted curses, drained the life force of gangsters to make them weak, castrated rapists, and made many other contributions, but…

‘There’s too much wasted time.’

Even though he was doing volunteer work like sorting trash, Hans was a top-tier personnel.

‘And I can’t just unleash the undead in the city.’

As I was staring blankly out the window, lost in thought, I saw a flock of birds flying across the sky.

‘Wait? There’s no need to turn them into undead.’

I didn’t need to go as far as undead to create subordinates.

I could also turn them into Familiars.

And I knew that magic through “Forbidden Knowledge”.

I started to focus my thoughts on Hans as the main.

Pigeons and other birds that were common in the city, and stray cats that roamed the streets at night.

‘I can’t turn them all into Familiars. I need to modify the magic a bit.’

So that they would move around normally and only transmit information under certain conditions.

‘Let’s simplify the spell formula and take only the necessary parts. And minimize the activation magic power through optimization.’

Stealth was also important to avoid being detected by other returnees.

‘Curses are the best when it comes to stealth. Should I use that as the base? It’ll be easier to hide if the activation magic power is also reduced.’

It would also be good to make the effect contagious, spreading to other animals through contact, so I wouldn’t have to cast the spell on each one individually.

‘I think I can do it if I mix plague spell formulas into the curse.’

Hans combined new magic using the synergy between “Forbidden Knowledge” and “Wicked Wisdom”.

I even mobilized the avatar I could summon with “Persona” and focused all my resources on Hans.

[If this body were in Auterica, I could use the resource of time more efficiently… It’s a shame.]

But my regret was short-lived.

I could use the interdimensional transfer formation again in a few hours.

‘Heinz is also traveling smoothly, so let’s use this transfer for Hans’s magic research.’

And when the transfer formation’s cooldown ended, Hans moved to Auterica.

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