You Have Been Defended [EN]: Chapter 511

I had expected Kang Min-jae to bring up something serious, but I never imagined it would be in this context.

Over the past while, Kang Min-jae had been making various claims, such as me being an alien who could traverse parallel universes or a time traveler, but they weren’t serious enough for me to take to heart.

However, Kang Min-jae’s tone was different this time.

“What are you talking about?”

I feigned ignorance and asked back.

Usually, when I said that, he would playfully retort, ‘Why are you pretending not to know again! You do know!’ and I would just deny his long-winded speeches. That’s how things usually unfolded.

I hoped it would be the same this time.

“I’ve been thinking, and it seems like you have anxiety about crisis situations that you didn’t foresee. Of course, everyone tries to prepare because no one can know the future, and some people seem to be obsessed with it. But in your case, it feels different.”

“You called me a neat freak. Neat freak is a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder, so isn’t that how you felt? In the end, you’re arbitrarily labeling me as an obsessive-compulsive patient and seeing me through that lens, so that’s all you see…”

“No. It wasn’t like that from the beginning.”

Kang Min-jae cut me off with a serious expression, dismissing my words.

“Even when I first met you, when I was your intern, I didn’t feel that way. Even when you started your own office… before you really settled in. I didn’t feel that way then either. Of course, you tried to prepare for a lot, but rather than blaming yourself for situations you didn’t prepare for, you were the type to come up with solutions quickly.”

“And?”

“And you were indifferent to crisis situations. Indifferent to your own crises, indifferent to others’ crises. Not that you’re a psychopath, but it felt like it was an unavoidable situation?”

I never thought Kang Min-jae was an idiot.

Far from it, he was quite sharp and quick-witted.

He had been by my side throughout this life, so he had plenty of opportunities to figure me out.

Even so, I didn’t expect him to be analyzing me this accurately.

“But from some point on, you changed. You still seem indifferent to your own crises, but you’ve become very sensitive to others’ crises. And it’s gotten a bit extreme, the way you think you have to prepare for other people’s crises. So I wondered why.”

Kang Min-jae continued slowly in a calm tone.

It was different from his usual childish attempts to get a confession out of me by spouting nonsense about relativity theory, special relativity theory, and the fourth dimension.

So I had been timing my escape, ready to dismiss his nonsense and get up, but I was still sitting here.

“You remember what I said before, right? It’s not just me. Jong-hyun and Bong-joon also jokingly said you had a general’s spirit. You predict future events with surprising ease and aren’t surprised. You explained the reasons for your predictions, and they made logical sense, so I didn’t think much of it. I just thought you had an incredibly fraudulent intelligence. Oh, even so, not being surprised was a bit strange… Anyway, now that I think about it, I wonder if you knew the future? I think I mentioned it to you in passing before.”

I couldn’t really refute Kang Min-jae’s words.

I didn’t want anyone to notice that I knew the future, so I had been making up plausible reasons to explain it.

But I’m not a prophet, and I make so many predictions, shouldn’t I be wrong at least once?

But I haven’t been wrong, so he must have figured it out to some extent.

“Anyway, the reason I’m saying all this is because I’ve been thinking about why you, who were like that, suddenly became so sensitive to other people’s crises, and why you couldn’t prevent them in advance if you could predict them. I’m not saying you should have predicted them or prevented them, you know? It’s only natural that people can’t do that.”

“Keep going.”

“Then I became curious about something. I don’t know how to express it, so if I mix it with my previous claims, when did you cross over from a parallel universe to this universe? Because, based on what you told me at the National Cemetery, you seemed to feel guilty about the Antrozol Alpha issue… You say it’s not your story, but anyway.”

“You don’t have to refute everything I’m about to say in advance. Just speak comfortably.”

“…Anyway, you came from a universe where Antrozol Alpha was released without a hitch and your father died, and you came here to stop it, right? But when I hear that story, it sounds like you were a prosecutor back then? So, when you came to this universe, you must have been thinking about preventing the thing that tormented you the most, right? So you had to jump into the Myunghwa Pharmaceuticals case, and to do that, you had to get rid of your prosecutor status, right?”

Kang Min-jae’s reasoning was quite accurate.

I had nothing to add.

“So, the time you left the prosecution seems to be the time you came to this universe. You remember me asking you why you left the prosecution, right? That was when I went down to the provinces to meet Yoo Min-hyuk because of Antrozol Alpha.”

“I remember.”

“Then do you remember what you answered?”

Of course, I remember.

It was different from the truth, so I could have forgotten, but Kang Min-jae was someone I had to deceive thoroughly, so I made sure to remember the lies I told him.

“I said I hated the prosecution organization where you have to do whatever they tell you to do.”

“That’s right. I don’t think that was a lie. But it didn’t feel like that was the only reason. How should I put it… You’re the type to feel disgusted with the organizational system, but I don’t think you’d be that uncomfortable… You’re basically an FM [field manual; someone who strictly follows rules and regulations] personality, and you just ignore anything that’s not rational, right? You don’t care who criticizes you. But why would you be uncomfortable with the prosecution organization?”

That’s also true.

Throughout this conversation, I felt like I was standing naked in front of Kang Min-jae.

I had never thought I had been figured out this much.

“So you left the prosecution because you had to resolve the Antrozol Alpha issue. And you remember me asking you what your purpose was in targeting Wooshin after that, right?”

“I remember.”

“At that time, you said that Wooshin had done something really bad to you. Of course, Wooshin is doing bad things by spreading money around the prosecution and muddying the waters. But when I hear about your life when you were in the prosecution, there was no way you could have had trouble with Wooshin. The only trouble I can think of is that Wooshin’s side made too many scouting offers to the legal team, which was annoying?”

Wooshin’s legal team had made scouting offers.

Of course, after I refused, they didn’t bother me much.

Rather, it was Taekwang, Wooshin’s defense force, that bothered me.

But you can’t call that trouble.

If they held a grudge against me for repeatedly rejecting their offers, the worst they could do was spread bad rumors about me in this industry and block my path to success.

But I’m not the type to care about that, and even if my case judge disliked me because of Taekwang’s slander, it wouldn’t cause any problems with my trial, right?

So, considering my personality, if Wooshin did something ‘bad’ to me that made me decide to take revenge, it couldn’t have been a trivial matter.

“Besides, do you know what’s most important? When I asked you when they did such a bad thing, you said, ‘I’m living my second life. They did it in my first life.'”

I didn’t forget that I said that.

But there’s a reason why I brought up the second life story so easily.

I had blurted out that I was living my second life while drunk, and to resolve this, I went on the offensive, asking if he believed it.

Kang Min-jae didn’t even think I was really living a second life.

So after that, I sometimes joked about the second life story…

I didn’t think I would get this close to Kang Min-jae, so I never thought I would seriously confess the truth while talking about parallel universes.

Now, that statement had become a confession.

“At this point, you feel like you can’t deny it anymore, right?”

“…”

“It’s not over yet. This might be a sensitive issue… But if I mention it, it’s about the day you had your first seizure.”

Ha, I thought that day’s events would be a hint to someone someday.

“The day you had a seizure after seeing the shoulder-to-shoulder photo, what you said to me then. You said that there used to be someone digging into Wooshin, and that person was killed by President Shin. You said that the investigation didn’t proceed at that time, and that it was related to why you left the prosecution. So I came to think that the statement that you hated the organizational system where you had to do whatever they told you to do was a smokescreen to deceive me, who wasn’t very close to you. And… it also connects with what you said at the National Cemetery. You said you eventually died in that parallel universe. Then everything connects.”

Kang Min-jae lowered his gaze and continued.

“You lost your parents because of Antrozol Alpha in a parallel universe, and you started digging into Wooshin because of that. So you started the Wooshin special investigation, but you were killed by President Shin, who received orders from Wooshin, before you could see the end of it.”

The word [Truth] constantly floating above his head told me how confident Kang Min-jae was in what he was saying.

But strangely, at this moment, that word read a little differently.

Not the truth based on the speaker, but as if it were speaking of absolute truth.

I couldn’t refute any of his words.

The words I had leaked little by little to make myself comfortable had become puzzle pieces for Kang Min-jae.

So all he had to do was use his thinking skills to move those puzzle pieces around and figure out what the overall picture was.

And Kang Min-jae willingly put in the effort to understand me, who was full of questions.

Since all of his words were true, I didn’t even know how to refute those words and get out of this situation.

Even now, my desire to escape has faded.

I’m too tired.

And he made me want to tell him everything.

So, checkmate.