***
The ceiling that entered his vision was hazy and stark white, unlike the black scenery he’d seen last.
Even after regaining consciousness, Choi Tae-hoon couldn’t immediately get up. He simply blinked blankly for a long while before finally trying to speak through the burning thirst that came crashing over him late.
But what escaped his lips was a cracked groan unpleasant even to his own ears. Tae-hoon himself looked slightly startled by the sound he made.
“You’re awake. Shall I call a doctor?”
At the pleasant low voice beside his head, Choi Tae-hoon flinched in surprise. He hadn’t even realized someone had been watching over him. The man, still difficult to see clearly, smiled faintly and lightly supported the struggling Tae-hoon.
“…W-water, please.”
“Ah, yes. Here.”
The unidentified man carefully helped Tae-hoon sit up before personally assisting him in drinking water. The man’s body heat covering his weak hand was extremely warm.
And also, just slightly…
Strange.
Unconsciously, Choi Tae-hoon subtly pulled away from the touch that felt like it was tracing every line of his skin. It never even crossed his mind that another man could possibly be feeling him up, so he acted without the slightest suspicion.
Only after swallowing the water, still carrying a pleasantly cool chill, did his mind finally begin to clear. Blankly, Tae-hoon started piecing together his fragmented memories.
What happened again?
Right. He’d been waiting for a friend, and then…
The terrorist attack. Right, the building collapsed.
And after that…
“…Ah.”
Choi Tae-hoon’s eyes slowly widened.
The figure of the man sitting beside him gradually overlapped into focus, becoming clearer and clearer. Black hair. A handsome pale face. Features so perfect they looked painted. Even the relaxed smile hanging from them.
Tae-hoon knew the man’s name all too well.
His slightly wrinkled shirt and jeans didn’t suit the always immaculate image he usually showed the public, but somehow, even that looked good on him.
“Hello.”
It was Ji Gwan-young.
For some reason, Tae-hoon thought his back stung.
***
Sex. Fucking. Screwing. …Fuck?
Choi Tae-hoon took a long drag from his cigarette before exhaling, letting out a strange sound halfway between a bitter laugh and a sigh.
It was completely unlike the image of the eldest brother who constantly scolded his younger sibling Choi Seungyu to watch their language.
“Holy fucking creeps…”
The vulgar phrase—something he had never once said aloud in his life—perfectly expressed Choi Tae-hoon’s current state of mind.
Ever since waking up in a hospital room at The Center, he had been slowly replaying everything that happened afterward.
The man drifting through his thoughts made him uncomfortable.
No, honestly, he irritated him.
Never in his life had Choi Tae-hoon imagined he would think so intensely about another man.
Ji Gwan-young. Ji Gwan-young.
At the center of this entire situation was Ji Gwan-young.
The moment Tae-hoon woke up in the hospital room, he’d been dragged straight into an examination room together with the man smiling lazily at him. Most people at The Center were familiar faces, so Tae-hoon had tried to ask them to postpone the sudden testing for later. His pounding headache still hadn’t fully gone away.
But that had been utterly impossible.
The researchers who usually greeted him with easy smiles and comments like “You worked hard again today” all wore unusually grave expressions.
In the end, it wasn’t until he encountered Oh Yeon—one of the Esper researchers he was closest to at The Center—that Tae-hoon managed to quietly ask, “Did something happen?”
Ever since waking up in that hospital room, nothing but incomprehensible things had happened one after another.
Of course, the strangest part was having to enter the matching test room again—a place he’d thought he would never see for the rest of his life.
And with that Ji Gwan-young, the one you only saw on TV or movie screens, no less!
Even Oh Yeon, whom he trusted, avoided giving a proper explanation beyond saying, “I’ll explain later.”
So even after being half-dragged into the testing room and forced to sit down, Choi Tae-hoon still looked dazed, wondering if he was somehow still dreaming.
Honestly, it was fairly convincing.
The man sitting across from him looked so unreal staring back at him that Tae-hoon could only blink awkwardly. A troubled smile lingered on the beautifully sculpted face before him.
Not once—not even in low-grade gossip circulating through messenger chats as a joke—had Tae-hoon ever heard anyone claim Ji Gwan-young was an Esper.
Swept along by the researchers attaching countless machine cables to him, Tae-hoon simply let himself be handled.
Matching tests with Espers were notoriously exhausting, usually taking at least five hours. Once, he’d even sat through nearly twenty hours straight. For Espers with naturally superior physical abilities, that much time was nothing.
But for Choi Tae-hoon—who aside from being a Guide was basically no different from an average Mid-level citizen—such prolonged examinations were torture.
But today, the goddess of luck had clearly taken pity on him.
She generously gave him a reason to finish early and go rest.
Of course, in the exact way he never wanted.
The moment the matching test machine activated, the screen displaying the analysis results rapidly began spitting out numbers.
Tae-hoon’s hand, which had been about to ask someone for snacks or something, froze mid-motion.
98.72 99.10 -121.3-97.2 -99.8 -100-…
Choi Tae-hoon stared blankly at the numbers flooding across the giant screen before roughly shaking his head.
He was certain he simply hadn’t fully woken up yet.
In over ten years, he had never once seen numbers like those appear on a screen. So this had to be a dream.
But no matter how many times he squeezed his eyes shut, reopened them, or shook his head, the glowing blue numbers remained crystal clear.
Are those numbers even possible?
And immediately, too?
Only then did Choi Tae-hoon realize this was reality—and he froze cold.
The back of his neck even felt like it was tightening painfully.
He’d thought he barely survived the terrorist attack.
When he first opened his eyes beneath The Center’s ceiling and saw Ji Gwan-young greeting him, he’d been uncertain whether this was dream or reality, but he still remembered feeling happy just to be alive.
But seeing the values in front of him now left Tae-hoon so shaken he almost wondered if he had actually died and was wandering through some impossible nightmare.
Only then did his gaze slowly peel away from the giant screen and turn toward the man sitting opposite him.
Ji Gwan-young, covered in testing equipment just like Tae-hoon, tilted his head slightly while observing the endlessly changing numbers. He looked as though he didn’t even understand what those values meant.
Esper-Guide Pairs with matching rates between thirty and fifty percent could fully perform their roles with little more than casual skinship. They usually weren’t assigned especially difficult tasks to begin with.
The real problem began above fifty percent.
From that point onward, something as simple as hugs or handshakes could no longer soothe the hypersensitive, hyperdeveloped nerves of an Esper. The higher the matching rate, the more intimate the contact required from the Guide.
If it had only been around seventy percent, maybe petting would’ve been enough.
But the numbers on the screen mocked Tae-hoon’s hopes as they continued climbing to absurd highs.
‘151.2’
Meanwhile, the researchers outside the testing room were no less shocked than Tae-hoon.
No—“shocked” wasn’t enough. They were horrified.
Without realizing it, Oh Yeon stared toward Tae-hoon inside the testing room, where the Guide anxiously darted his eyes around.
A matching rate above 100 was literally unprecedented.
Even rates in the nineties were so rare they became research subjects.
But the one-hundreds? One-fifties?
No matter how low the number dipped, it never fell below the mid-nineties, making it abundantly clear that Ji Gwan-young and Choi Tae-hoon were a perfectly matched Pair.
Under normal circumstances, The Center probably would’ve opened champagne to celebrate a result this extraordinary.
But this involved that man, Ji Gwan-young.
If it had merely been the gentlemanly, courteous actor Ji Gwan-young they knew, the atmosphere wouldn’t have become this funeral-like.
The problem was “Esper Ji Gwan-young,” whose true nature no one understood.
His body itself rejected all mechanical and ability-based scans, making it impossible to analyze not only his weaknesses, but even his strengths. He also showed no cooperative attitude toward The Center.
And beyond that, he possessed no aversion to killing—and his methods were brutal.
They couldn’t grasp his abilities.
They couldn’t even grasp the way he thought.
If that Esper’s power were used for The Center and national security, he would become an unrivaled ally.
But if a man who had now found his perfect Pair Guide turned into a terrorist instead, there would be no possible way to stop him.
And even if they somehow managed to…The scale of the damage would be…They didn’t even want to imagine it.
“Um. Isn’t this result wrong? There’s no way these numbers are… possible.”
Tae-hoon’s voice, trying to sound cheerful as he abruptly opened the testing room door, gradually weakened as though he were reading the room.
The instant their eyes met, the researchers visibly startled in waves, and instinctively, he understood.
Wrong result my ass!
He should’ve realized something was terribly wrong the moment they shoved a Guide rescued from a terrorist scene into a testing room without a single explanation.
A crushing dizziness overtook Tae-hoon as he felt the life he’d long stopped considering—that of a Guide—suddenly drop onto him like his primary duty in life again.
Do you know how many résumés I wrote? How hard it was to get into that company? I only just started adjusting… No, more importantly—
“So, is it all finished now? It’s my first time, so I’m not really sure.”
He’s a male Esper!
Watching Ji Gwan-young remove the countless machines attached to him while straightening his clothes, Choi Tae-hoon swallowed dryly.
When their eyes met, Ji Gwan-young smiled gently at his Guide, but Tae-hoon immediately whipped his head away as though pretending not to notice.
Then, unnecessarily raising his voice, he asked Oh Yeon,
“Yeon-ssi, those numbers over there. What’s going on with them? Something has to be wrong.”
“……”
“There’s never been a case where results came out the moment the machine started running, right? Right?”
“Is it high?”
The one who responded with another question instead of Oh Yeon was Ji Gwan-young.
As a result, Choi Tae-hoon’s shoulders trembled slightly.
And of course, Gwan-young missed none of those reactions, storing every single one behind smiling eyes.
Watching from nearby, even Oh Yeon found himself irritated at Ji Gwan-young for speaking in his place.
Even if this was his first matching test, there was no way the man hadn’t already realized from Tae-hoon’s reaction alone that the score was extremely high.
He was pretending not to know just to tease him.
And Ji Gwan-young’s next words completely confirmed Oh Yeon’s suspicion.
“…Maybe it’s because of the Name.”
Ah. So that man really did have a terrible personality.
Oh Yeon lightly pressed a hand to his forehead, feeling a headache for the first time in years. Forget Ji Gwan-young—he suddenly wanted to return to his own Guide’s arms too.
Meanwhile, the moment came when Choi Tae-hoon’s eyes slowly widened. Ji Gwan-young leisurely watched Tae-hoon turn around stiffly like a broken doll.
Just as Oh Yeon thought, this was Ji Gwan-young’s petty little revenge. After all, he had waited beside Tae-hoon for ages until he woke up, only for the Guide not to say a single word to him.
A face pale beyond shock came into view. Surprisingly, though, Ji Gwan-young didn’t feel any urge to snap that slender neck. Instead, simply meeting his gaze improved his mood slightly.
“I have one on my back too.”
‘Choi Tae-hoon.’
