The Foreigner on the Periphery

Chapter 2: Burnout Syndrome (2)

Minjun received a brief about personal information of their target, who was currently barking at the police from within the bank.

He was Noh Kyeonggu, 21, unemployed, and was registered as a talented person last year because of the Awakening of his abilities. With that as an advantage, he turned his resume to get a job at a private security company, but the results did not go as well as he expected.

What could be spotted here was the fact that his ability was not at all on an outstanding level. It was the most important checkpoint for Minjun.

Nothing needed to be known more than that.

Swoosh!

When the automatic door opened, he saw a man holding on to the hostage. The young face covered with pimples was revealed because it was not covered with a mask. Having pocketed a small amount of money from the safe, he was holding on to it, begging the police to put a car that already has its engines turned on in front of the building.

"Hey, you son of a bitch! Who told you to come in?"

Whoops!

Dozens of kilograms of a woman's flowerpot floated in the air and flew to Minjun.

He had a psychic ability. Minjun did not waver.

Tok!

He calmly raised one of his hands to block the flowerpot and twisted its direction.

Bang!

The robber's intention to crush Minjun's head failed. As if the pot bounced from his hand, it crashed into an empty desk and shattered from there. Broken pieces of pottery and piles of dirt were scattered in the dust.

"?!"

The robber's expression became distorted.

"You!"

However, thinking that he simply could not be fooled, he began to give threats in a louder tone of voice.

"I would have warned you already! If you don't want to see this old lady's skull crack, then get out of here!"

He didn't have a gun in his hand. He wrapped his left forearm around the little old woman's neck and was strangling it as well, and his right hand slightly opened and aimed at her temple, threatening to break her skull with a sprain if any stunt on Minjun's part was pulled.

Looking from the way he threw the pot earlier, he did not have a stable hold on his ability, but Minjun knew that it was enough to blow one person's brain out.

Nevertheless, Noh Kyeonggu would never break that old woman's head here today. Never.

"Oh, my God, my God!"

The old woman, whose neck was being strangled by his forearm, grunted with a bluish expression, almost as if she couldn't breathe properly. Except for her and Noh Kyeonggu, everyone had collapsed and fainted.

"Fuck, can't you hear me?!"

Minjun calmly threw his eyes at the two and opened his mouth.

"Let the hostage go, will you?"

"Don't be so ridiculous!" Noh Kyeonggu shouted out in a tone similar to one that was suffering through a seizure.  

Noh Kyeonggu had noticed that Minjun was a wizard. By looking at the strange fog, he knew that he had no chance of getting out of this situation. His best bet was to hold onto the hostage. This was considered a wise choice rather than stepping into the unidentified fog.

The situation where the wizard was soothing himself instead of making spells with his tongue only served to strengthen Noh Kyeonggu's conviction further.

"It's my last chance to pick up the pieces. I promise, if you surrender, I won't kill you. But the moment you touch the hostage"

"That's why if you want to save the old woman, do as I say!"

"from then on, I won't have a choice anymore. You won't be able to step on your homeland even if you live."

"Don't make a fool of yourself!"

Minjun didn't care what Noh Kyeonggu said and continued to say what he had to.

In fact, he wasn't even listening properly.

"I'm warning you for the last time. Let the hostage go."

"For the love of Christ, you son of a bitch!"

Forgetting his vigilance and fear of the wizard, Noh Kyeonggu tried to throw things with his psychic powers once again.

Minjun kept his eyes straight and grabbed a dagger from under his sleeve.

At that moment, a low voice rang with a shallow sigh.

".Were you a dog of the Immigration office?"

A heavy silence was surrounding the bank.

The one word that induced sudden silence did not flow out from Noh Kyeonggu's mouth.

Feeling embarrassed he looked at her, thinking he had complete control over the old woman.

"?!"

The bluish face had returned to its serene complexion. Only then did Noh-Kyung-gu thought it was strange. His arms were numb due to how hard he was strangling in tension and excitement. It was quite surprising that the old woman didn't die.

The old woman's voice was fine even though her airway was being weighed down and her jugular vein was blocked. Noh Kyeonggu felt a terrible sense of unrealism at the scene.

"I don't believe it. How did you recognize me at once?

"This is the very last warning. Let the hostage go."

Only then did Noh Kyeonggu realize the reason why Minjun's eyes which had been on him so far, had been strangely missed. After seeing him when he first came in, Minjun did not look at Noh Kyeonggu twice again.

Instead, all this time, he was looking at the old woman who had been held hostage.

"Hahaha!"

The old woman was having a grumpy laugh, suddenly adapting a change in attitude.

Noh Kyeonggu stared at her blankly. It was a completely different impression from the first time he saw it.

"Oh, wait, come to think of it'

Terrible dizziness and motion sickness shook his bones.

Why did he even come to the bank in the first place? Yeah, he had come here to get a job support benefit, and then this old lady approached him and said that he had something on his clothes Things became blurry from there.

He remembered a sudden rush of fury coursing through his veins. How was he supposed to live this month with only 65,000 won? Should he join the Civil-Military Office? No, his life was not that much

The next thing he then remembered was him crushing the security guard's gun, overpowering him, and yelling at the bank staff to open the safe. From then on, his arms were already wrapped around the old woman's neck.

"Uh?"

For the first time, his eyes got bigger when he loosened his hands.

Light flesh inside the forearm that was not seen when strangling. I could see a few strands of tentacles penetrating through the skin. The long flesh stretched out from the old woman's neck and wriggled like a chubby leech, sucking something out of Noh Kyeonggu's body.

"What the what the hell!"

Only then did the terrible pain he had long since forgotten resurfaced.

"Uh, uhArgh!"

He desperately shook the woman off, but it still didn't cut off the tentacles and kept on stretching. He pulled at once to rip it off, but it still wouldn't move at all.

Then the old woman sighed.

"I've brainwashed him pretty well, and it's all broken now. I knew this would come sooner or later."

She belatedly realized that some of the sentences Minjun said after entering here were not ordinary persuasion, but powerful spells. Thanks to his confusing choice of words, Noh Kyeonggu came to his senses.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Dozens of new tentacles came out of the old woman's neck. They dug themselves further into Noh Kyeonggu's body.

"Goo-oo-oo-oo-oop! Please saveme!"

In an instant, the hostage and the hostage-taker roles were reversed.

No, this was the situation that Minjun had been aware of from the beginning.

The real name of the opponent disguised as a human being was Etrella Defini. She came from Odens and was wanted. She ran to Earth to hide the moment the High Council placed a bounty on her head.

The charges are three conspiracies to commit murder as well as 12 cases of murders, 49 cases of stealing and possession of books, and unauthorized residence in primitive dimensions. It's around this much even if we except the stuff you did after you came into Earth.'

The Korean Immigration office, which obtained the committee's request for cooperation, had since then officially launched an investigation.

"Goo-oo-oo-oop!"

Etrella's face became stiff after having the idea that she was quite the failure herself.

"My mind control got loosen so fast cause of him!'

Just like the anesthetic ingredient that mosquitoes put in when they poke their skin, mind control worked to make them forget that their opponents were being adsorbed with energy. Now that it had become useless, she decided to move things up a bit.

"Khoo-oo-oo!"

Noh Kyeonggu, whose spirit was almost all absorbed through tentacles inserted throughout his body, turned his eyes upside down and lost his consciousness.

This was the moment that Minjun had been waiting for.

Swoosh!

He immediately drew the dagger in his hand onto his left palm.

Chwa-ak!!

The shiny black stone knife harbored an amazing example. As I clenched my fist and squeezed blood, the air began to shake ominously.

"Benefits!"

Etrella tried to resist the spirit absorbed from Noh Kyeonggu. Unlike him, who used his ability as long as he didn't unconsciously destroy himself, the heterogeneous scratched the bottom of his floor and sprayed power.

Then came a range of psychotropic storms!

Whi-i-i-i-ing!

Meanwhile, however, Minjun's surroundings were calm. As all the physical and spiritual energy approached the surrounding area, it lost speed, slowed down, and eventually stopped. In a static space where not a single hair flew, Minjun quietly shouted the spell.

The heterogeneous hardened itself after realizing what species it was when it was already one beat late.

"!"

Rumble!

Black shadows continuously swarmed around Minjun's body. Tangled and swollen in the air, it created a huge shape.

"!"

Covering Minjun was a black monster whose upper body was summoned only. The torn eyes flashed with hostility, and hot mist poured out of the mouth. The pitch-black shadow covering the skin made a strange shape and then broke again and repeatedly fell apart.

Shh!

Above Minjun's head, a black forearm thicker than a troll stretches symmetrically. That sharp nails on end.

"Wai, wait! Aren't you crazy?!"

The power of black magic is the raw power that causes pain to the sacrifice and absorbs its vitality to cohere.

It was therefore outlawed in most countries, but also had exceptions. This was the case in which a magician caused himself pain for public and self-defense reasons, and then applied magic by reducing his life span and vitality.

Minjun's left hand, drooping over the rising shadow, had turned as a mummy that died thousands of years ago.

Etrella couldn't understand why he would waste decades of his life just trying to catch a small criminal!

Whaaaa!

Minjun took only one step. The shadow on his head became a black flash and flooded the front.

Chwa-ak!

It took only one second for dozens of tentacles stretching out from Etrella's neck to be cut off at once.

"Arghhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Another second went by while the shadow monster pulled out Etrella's arms and threw them.

Qua-ji-jick!

Three seconds was enough for the monster to open its mouth wide and bite her waist in one fluid bite.

"Oh, my God!"

Crrrrrr!

With both her arms and lower back missing, Etrella was back in her original alien form.

The whole body shriveled with convulsions. She felt the scent of death that rose all the way to the bottom of her neck.

"Wai, waiwait a minute!"

The opponent could execute herself here on the spot as she ignored the warning.

Agents who were in contract with the Immigration office had the authority to do so.

"I didn't expect it to be this bad!"

"It's pretty bitter after getting bitten from it, isn't it?"

As a district resident, Ye Minjun was an independent agent who signed an exclusive contract with the Korean Government Immigration Office.

His job was to investigate and suppress intellectual adult-related crimes that had not been granted global citizenship. Therefore, catching criminals who had been hiding from other worlds such as Etrella was one of them.

Crrrrrrrrr!

The shadow that stretched out from the body was pressing against the alien with only half of its body left. Minjun calmly moved and then narrowed the distance between the shadow and himself.

In the meantime, Etrella was desperately thinking of ways on how to survive. Then, hormones flooding in the brain pulled out old memories that she wouldn't normally recall.

"Wait! Save me, and I'll repay you!"