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“Oh, and regarding the Anti-Coalition members we’ve been holding, we’ve decided to bleach their brains since it seems we won’t be able to dig out any more information. Permission has been granted. Well, I don’t know if they’ll be useful for anything. They’ll probably just be made to do simple manual labor.”

“Right. Those guys existed. Are they still in the basement?”

I had completely forgotten about them because I was pouring all my attention into Kang Juha.

I ran my fingertips along the line of document files stuck in the desk and picked one out. How far did I shake them down…

“Yes. Shall I prepare for an interview?”

“Yeah.”

They were Anti-Coalition members recently caught near a Gate under the jurisdiction of the South Korean Center. Whether they were rookies who hadn’t joined that side long ago, there wasn’t much information that could be dug out, and to make matters worse, their mental-type Esper had blocked supernatural access, causing fake memories to run rampant.

Because of that, it was beyond annoying since I had to go beyond just rummaging through memories and actually classify whether those memories were false or true.

The last thing I did was call them all in and organize only the parts where they testified differently during cross-examination.

As I quickly scanned the interrogation records, a piece of information I had previously passed over as insignificant caught my eye.

“Sonora?”

One of the guys who had been caught possessed a memory of the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. According to the records, he was a guy who only did miscellaneous labor at the Anti-Coalition base, so I thought there was nothing much to gain…

What if, by some chance, he had encountered Kang Juha there?

Maybe I could obtain new information. And knowing that information might make it easier to access Kang Juha’s broken memories.

With swelling expectations, I quickly went down to the basement.

I crossed the hallway lined with firmly locked iron doors and arrived in front of the door labeled “Interview Room.”

Upon opening the door and entering, I saw a man with a completely exhausted, dying appearance, the venomous glint I’d seen before having vanished. Both his hands, fitted with handcuffs-like restraints, were firmly fixed to the desk.

Still, perhaps thanks to eating well since coming here, he looked ten years younger than when he was first captured. At the time, he looked like someone well over forty, but I was appalled to find out he was only around his twenties after digging through his memories.

“Long time no see.”

The advantage of a mental-type Esper is that no translator is needed. I could transmit my desires directly to the brain without going through the method of language.

“Life must be worth living for you. Seeing as your face has filled out. You’ve got it easy.”

The man was thinking in his head, ‘He’s come to turn my stomach inside out again.’

“To be precise, it’s not the stomach, it’s the head.”

After giving a kind reply, I took a seat at the opposite table. I heard him pouring out curses toward me inside his mind.

“Do you know a guy named Kang Juha? Part of the South Korean Esper Unit.”

The man kept his mouth tightly shut with a determination never to answer, but such things were all meaningless.

Just as a human immediately thinks of a red, round image when hearing the word apple, there are bound to be memories that reflect uncontrollably.

If he had heard a story about Kang Juha even once in his life, he would have reflexively pulled that memory out. Regardless of the owner’s will, that is. Because our brains are both smart and stupid.

Furthermore, since the man was currently thinking that he would not answer my question, paradoxically, it was no different from confessing to me. The more he tried not to think about it, the more he would think about it.

The man avoided my gaze, but his head was faithfully thinking about Kang Juha. I caught a clue of a memory related to him and pulled it out.

Kang Juha. S-Class combat Esper belonging to South Korea.

The information the man knew began to be entered quickly into my head, and soon it was organized neatly.

‘Dangerous.’

‘If you encounter him, don’t face him, just run.’

‘It’s best not to get involved.’

After clearing away all the fragmentary information like military helicopters, combat uniforms, and the Coalition forces that rose along with the evaluations of Kang Juha, one scene remained that looked as if it were intensely engraved in his mind.

A pitch-black Gate pierced in the air, dusty winds, the sound of gunfire… I heard the man’s wailing voice.

At someone’s shout to charge, the man moved his heavy body and feet and sprinted through the desert where he couldn’t even see ahead. Soon, he gritted his teeth, broke away from the ranks, and began to flee.

While other Anti-Coalition members charged toward the Gate and the Coalition forces like moths to a flame, he rolled on the ground alone, tripping over his own feet as he fled and fled again.

When he got away from the sound of gunfire, the man barely looked back…

And Kang Juha was there.

Wearing a pitch-black combat uniform, looking like he was covered in blood—not knowing whose it was—he looked exactly at the man even though it was quite a long distance.

Recognizing Kang Juha, the man trembled all over, sensing his end. However, Kang Juha did not kill him but turned around and disappeared into the Gate.

Thus, only a devastated scene, piles of sprawled corpses, and puddles of blood that had soaked all the desert sand remained in front of the Gate.

There was noise here and there in the unearthed memories. It was a trace of someone intentionally damaging them. It was a relief that the skill was very crude and poor; if they had decided to bleach it properly, I wouldn’t have been able to find out.

After some time passed, the moment Kang Juha appeared again in the man’s memory was when he was brought as a prisoner to the Anti-Coalition base.

The man, who had betrayed his comrades during an operational mission, was locked in a dungeon, and it just so happened that the prisoner brought in across from him was Kang Juha.

But something was strange. For a prisoner who had been captured, Kang Juha already looked like he had lost his reason. It looked less like the Anti-Coalition had subdued and brought him, and more like they had picked him up after he’d collapsed on the street somewhere.

For days on end, Kang Juha showed faint symptoms of a rampage. The man was terrified that Kang Juha might blow up the dungeon by any chance.

Skipping time again to a week later. Kang Juha regained consciousness, and as soon as he realized he was trapped, he resisted violently.

However, his internal guiding was completely exhausted, and due to the restraints he was fitted with, he couldn’t control his supernatural power properly either.

Before long, the embers that had been burning with his supernatural ability died out, and Kang Juha repeatedly fainted and woke up. It was a situation so miserable it was hard to watch.

When Kang Juha fell into a lull after a seizure, guys who looked like Anti-Coalition members would come and stick unknown needles into his body. It was obvious they were low-grade guiding drugs distributed illegally.

Only now did I understand why Kang Juha couldn’t feel anything even after being injected with guiding medication.

Most low-end guiding drugs are narcotic and highly addictive, and they break the hormone balance entirely, turning the whole body into a rag. Since they abused such drugs like that, it was natural for the body to become insensitive to other medications.

“Gurgle… Gurgle gurgle!”

As I rummaged through the ruined memories, the man writhed his entire body in agony.

I quickly withdrew my supernatural power, but the man’s death had already begun. Although the skill in erasing memories was poor, it seemed they had certainly taken measures for when the memories were plundered.

The man, who was shaking like an aspen tree, had a seizure and eventually collapsed backward, foaming at the mouth.

I hurriedly laid the struggling man flat and tilted his head back to secure his airway.

“The Anti-Coalition bastards really have no business ethics.”

Then I quickly rummaged through the man’s head. It was do-or-die. At the inconsiderate use of supernatural power, the man’s resistance grew even stronger.

It’s a method not used in any country now, but in the past, detonators were planted inside the brains of combat Espers to maintain confidentiality. A mechanism was configured so that the brain would self-destruct the moment the Esper exposed specific information.

The inside of the man’s head became a mess in an instant. Just by being connected inside, the pain was transferred, making my head ache as if it were splitting.

Information scattered as if crushed into fragments, and I began to delete unnecessary things among the disappearing memories, picking out only information related to the Sonora operation where Kang Juha had gone missing.

“Kang Juha… Kang Juha, Kang Juha…”

I absorbed the man’s memories haphazardly while constantly chanting Kang Juha’s name.

It wasn’t a method I used often, but since the man was right on the verge of passing out from hyperventilation, there was no choice. Even this much was only holding out thanks to me continuously gripping his brain; the man had already completely lost consciousness.

“Ha.”

As I withdrew my supernatural power with a short exhale, the man’s body went limp thud. The blood flowing from his nose and ears was sticky, and water pooled heavily on the floor. I stepped out of the interview room at the sickening smell that stung my nose.

I recorded every single thing about what I saw in the memories without omitting a bit. And in the report, I wrote only the content I had filtered and filtered as much as possible.

Since I had only seen the memories of one person, more information would have to be collected, but anyway, with this, there was a very high probability that it was the Anti-Coalition’s doing that Kang Juha ended up in that state.

Several days passed while I agonized over whether to erase the unpleasant and horrific memories of Kang Juha or to keep holding onto them. During that time, my stomach was uncomfortable, and I couldn’t even eat properly.

Meanwhile, a thought like this kept occurring to me.

Is it truly right for Kang Juha to regain the memories of that time?

Undoing the brainwashing was obviously something that had to be done, but if those were memories his brain had intentionally erased for self-defense as part of PTSD, just pulling them out again might cause him immense pain. No, it definitely would.

“Um… Team Leader. They say Esper Kang Juha is continuously refusing meals and guiding.”

In the midst of this, I could only sigh at the news I heard. It was absurd that they were failing to properly care for the patient’s meals and physical condition when they were the ones who had made a fuss about treating him themselves.

“Senior Researcher Kim Kunwoo sent a page. He says Esper Kang Juha is looking for Teacher. So he thinks it would be best if you go down now.”

“They’re the ones breaking the schedule they set themselves.”

Today was exactly the 6th day since I had been unable to go down to the Special Treatment Room.

“Should I refuse?”

“No, I’m going now.”