1) say my name or whatever
Choi Tae-hoon had been identified as a Guide since he was five years old.
That was far earlier than the typical age of Guide manifestation. Tae-hoon’s parents, who were neither Espers nor Guides themselves, were secretly shocked that their son was a Guide. To ordinary people, Espers and Guides were strongly associated with being drafted into military units or police forces and standing on the front lines of combat and criminal investigations.
They worried that their eldest son—who had never once gotten into a fight outside as a child—might end up caught in such dangerous situations. But that way of thinking was heavily clouded by prejudice.
Espers could largely be divided into physical types and non-physical types.
The non-physical types referred to those whose so-called intellectual abilities—things like data analysis, calculations, and deductive reasoning—had developed to the extreme. These Espers spent most of their days in various research institutes. They were far removed from battlefields filled with flying bullets or dangerous crime scenes involving violent arrests. Their lives were little different from ordinary office workers.
Of course, the kind of Espers Tae-hoon’s parents imagined—those constantly stationed at “dangerous scenes”—did exist as well.
They were physical-type Espers, individuals who stood at the forefront of countless incidents and disasters using their own unique physical abilities. The brutal image people associated with the word Esper could largely be attributed to the violent collision of their battlefields.
<Those possessing special abilities whose genetic traits differ from ordinary humans.>
That single sentence was enough to define an Esper.
Whether non-physical or physical, regardless of any lengthy explanation, they were beings referred to as power itself. But the ironic part was that even such supreme existences had one absolute person standing above them.
That was the “Guide” Choi Tae-hoon had manifested as.
Espers paid a price for possessing power beyond what humans were meant to wield. As the flood of information received through their hyper-developed senses approached its limit, the inside of their minds slowly began collapsing—like an overloaded machine breaking down.
That was when Guides became necessary.
Guides soothed the Espers who were slowly going mad from the poison of their endless abilities, held them close, kissed them as if they were something precious, and pulled their sinking consciousness back from the swamp.
At moments like that, the strength they once proudly competed over no longer mattered.
An Esper trapped within the darkness they created could only rely on that light. That was why a Guide—someone who possessed no “power” whatsoever—could stand above an Esper.
Just as their title implied, Guides were a kind of compass who anchored unstable Esper consciousness and allowed them to breathe properly.
But not every Esper and Guide could work together.
There was such a thing as “matching” between them. The higher the compatibility rate, the easier it was for the Esper to stabilize, and the better the Guide could control the beast entrusted to them.
Once an Esper and Guide pair exceeded a certain matching percentage, they were required to register with the Center and were then assigned to public institutions. Sometimes that meant being placed in ordinary office jobs, but the more outstanding their abilities were, the more likely they were to be assigned to high-security facilities or dangerous fieldwork.
For example, there were Espers who had gone insane after losing their Guide, or Espers committing horrific acts together with their Guides. And if not that, there were the crime scenes caused by “middles”—ordinary people who were neither Espers nor Guides—just like Tae-hoon’s parents.
Tae-hoon’s parents worried he might someday be sent to one of those crime scenes, and sincerely prayed that an Esper compatible with their son would never appear.
But ironically, Choi Tae-hoon himself—the very person who had manifested as a Guide—felt no real resistance or anxiety about being one. More accurately, Tae-hoon had been far too young to form such negative feelings at all.
The title of Guide, something he had never once wished for, gradually became as natural to him as if it had been an obligation he was born carrying from the start.
Afterward, Choi Tae-hoon grew into a reasonably handsome young man. He probably would have seemed even more ordinary if he didn’t have five younger siblings trailing behind him, but regardless, he became a twenty-eight-year-old man who fit in comfortably anywhere—above average academically, slightly below average athletically, and exceptional at childcare and housework.
Of course, while all that time passed, Tae-hoon still underwent matching tests with unfamiliar Espers once every two months. It was a mandatory process for any unpaired Guide registered with the Center.
Unfortunately, despite faithfully carrying out his duty all those years, not once was a proper matching score ever recorded beside Tae-hoon’s name. He simply failed to meet the minimum standard required to function as part of a pair.
At minimum: 30 percent.
For Choi Tae-hoon, that number was impossibly high. During matching tests with countless Espers, Tae-hoon consistently scored below twenty percent. Sometimes he even ended up in the single digits.
After being diagnosed as a Guide at age five and undergoing well over a hundred matching tests over nearly twenty-five years—long enough to become familiar with the Center staff to the point of casually calling them hyung and noona—Choi Tae-hoon had still never once found any real evidence that he was actually a Guide.
Having gone through countless tests since the days he could barely toddle around, yet never once showing proper synchronization, Tae-hoon eventually became something of a celebrity at the Center.
And naturally, that notoriety exhausted him.
It couldn’t be helped. Matching tests were mind-numbingly dull: sitting motionless across from a stranger for hours while being tormented by machine noises and drowsiness.
On his twenty-eighth birthday, after yet another matching test that predictably ended in catastrophic results—
Guide Choi Tae-hoon finally exploded.
“I’m never taking another matching test again! If you keep pushing this, I’m filing a complaint!!”
“Uh, Tae-hoon-ssi……”
“They said there hasn’t been a single case like mine in the Center’s entire sixty-year history! I’m seriously sick and tired of this Esper-and-Guide bullshit! At this point, I’m basically just a middle!”
The researchers awkwardly scratched their chins.
To be fair, there wasn’t a single thing wrong with what Tae-hoon said. A Guide with compatibility this disastrously low with Espers had never existed since the Center was founded. And to government employees, complaints filed were more terrifying than anything else.
In the end, Tae-hoon was added to the suspended matching test list that very day. Normally, only people unable to perform actual work due to illness or family circumstances could be placed on that list even if assigned a pair, but Choi Tae-hoon was treated as an unavoidable exception.
Tae-hoon was convinced that day had been one of the happiest days of his entire twenty-eight years of life.
At least until he met that Esper.
***
“Jungmin-ah, I put the lunch money into your account. Mina, your stockings have a run.”
“Okay.”
“Ah, shit, I just opened these today!”
“What kind of pretty princess says shit?”
Tae-hoon tied his necktie with one hand while tidying up the dining table with the other. And even while doing that, he didn’t forget to nag the other three siblings eating breakfast with sleepy faces.
“Woojin, don’t crawl back into bed after eating. Wash your face and go to your TOEIC academy. I didn’t pay for classes so you could skip them. Seungyu, can you handle the dishes? Jihyun, you heading to your part-time job later?”
“Yeah.”
“Be careful out there. And all of you, eat properly and study hard.”
The five younger siblings nodded absentmindedly in perfect unison, as if used to it. Well, technically four of them did.
One of Tae-hoon’s siblings, Choi Jihyun, had something she wanted to ask her eldest brother today. She quietly approached him and fussed with his clothes using deliberately affectionate hands.
At that, Tae-hoon raised one eyebrow, while the other four siblings all wore strange expressions despite still eating or packing their bags. Stroking the head of his youngest sister, who had only just turned twenty, Tae-hoon asked in a teasing yet surprisingly gentle voice,
“Need pocket money?”
“No! …Well, I mean, it’d be nice if you gave me some, but that’s not it!”
“Then what is it?”
Before Jihyun could answer, it was Choi Jungmin—the middle school third-year student—who spoke first while Tae-hoon checked the time on his wristwatch. Jungmin used honorifics with his eldest brother, who was more than ten years older than him.
“There’s a signing event today at the ○○ bookstore under your office building. At 12:30.”
“……Ji Gwan-young?”
Tae-hoon let out a deep sigh as he asked. Hearing that stiff voice, second brother Woojin giggled even with his eyes still swollen from sleep.
Ji Gwan-young. Who didn’t know him?
That ridiculously successful man was the male lead in the Wednesday-Thursday drama his younger sister was currently obsessed with, and if someone asked which actor in his thirties had the best acting skills, his name would always come up. In this tiny country, there probably wasn’t a single person who didn’t know the man dominating everything—from commercials to acting projects—with a near-perfect career impossible to criticize.
Avoiding the sparkling eyes his younger sister aimed at him, Tae-hoon hurriedly escaped the house saying, “I’ll think about it if I have time.”
But unlike his halfhearted response, he knew perfectly well what his future held: squeezing through hordes of fans during his precious lunch break and desperately trying to get an autograph from a top celebrity.
Fan signing events belonged to a distant world he’d never once cared about in his life, but he had a particular weakness for his younger sisters, so there was nothing he could do.
As he started the car, Tae-hoon’s first thought was that he needed to check the exact time and location of the signing event the moment he got to work.
Of course, without getting caught by the prickly Manager Kim.
***
Thank god for small mercies. Choi Tae-hoon had somehow ended up bonding instantly with his assistant manager mentor—someone he normally didn’t get along with very well—through a shared enthusiasm for talking about Ji Gwan-young, and before he knew it, the two of them had come out together during lunch to get autographs.
Watching the assistant manager practically fly forward in high heels faster than he could walk, Tae-hoon clicked his tongue. At the same time, he sharply realized that if he zoned out for even a moment, he’d end up going home empty-handed.
The moment lunch break began, they sprinted to the signing venue, only to find an enormous line already waiting.
Naturally, Choi Tae-hoon stood out dramatically in that space. Among the crowd of excited young women, the neatly dressed young man in a suit with an employee ID hanging around his neck looked painfully out of place. To anyone watching, Tae-hoon practically looked like the stereotype of an obsessive fan, and curious stares landed on him from every direction.
Thankfully, though, after raising five wildly different younger siblings, Choi Tae-hoon had become stubbornly tough—or, to put it more kindly, indifferent to most things. Attention from strangers wasn’t particularly important to him.
When you were the eldest of six siblings, the fact that one autograph could be exchanged for shoulder massages and garbage-sorting duty became far more important than other people’s opinions.
How long had he waited? Eventually, it was finally almost Tae-hoon’s turn.
Checking the time, Tae-hoon cheered internally.
At this rate, I can grab a triangle kimbap from the convenience store before heading back upstairs!
But as he listened to the woman in front of him nervously ramble on and on, his expression grew increasingly anxious.
That was when it happened.
Suddenly, a sharp ringing sensation filled his ears. His hearing dulled, and his brow furrowed. It felt like the pressure change during an airplane flight. The sensation came completely out of nowhere. Nothing had happened that should’ve caused this.
If he absolutely had to come up with a reason…
…the only thing that had changed was that now that the line had gotten closer, he could finally hear the low, deep voice that hadn’t reached him clearly before.
Tugging irritably at his earlobe, Tae-hoon shook his head.
What the hell is this? Did seeing a celebrity seriously make me nervous or something?
