Losing time is a pretty fucked-up experience. Who’d enjoy suddenly losing control of themselves? So when Cha-hyeon unexpectedly lost his grip without warning, he could only murmur low.
“What the fuck… is this?”
He stared at how his posture had changed in the blink of an eye: one knee down on ground so cold it seeped up through him. He was sure that right up until he’d been talking with his Guide, they’d been sitting side by side.
Cha-hyeon rose slowly. Maybe he’d been frozen in that pose for a while; a strange stiffness crawled up his thighs.
A second blackout, and a Clear Reward that didn’t even feel like a reward. Cracking his neck side to side, unable to hide the sour twist to his face, he turned his gaze to Se-min.
Soft hair rippled in the wind. With his head bowed and his fists clenched, Se-min was breathing quietly but hard enough to make his chest rise and fall.
Listening to that thin, wheezy sound, the tangle of interest and displeasure inside Cha-hyeon tipped further toward displeasure. His words came out with a bite.
“What’s wrong?”
Se-min kept staring at the ground. Seeing his Guide refuse to look at him, Cha-hyeon felt a peculiar prickle of irritation. He pressed at the corner of his mouth, and when he spoke again his voice noticeably gentled.
“What’s wrong, Se-min?”
“…Sorry. Give me a minute.”
Se-min got to his feet and, still avoiding his eyes to the end, turned and headed for the thick brush.
With dense trees, wild grasses brushing his calves, and the sky darkening by the minute, Se-min’s back—now a short ways off—was half sunk in shadow. As Cha-hyeon watched him without blinking, his dissatisfaction swelled and swelled.
He was already annoyed by that random blackout, and in the meantime something had clearly happened with Se-min. What the hell was it that left him all limp and on the verge of tears…?
Watching with sharpened eyes, he saw his Guide—back still turned—swipe at the corners of his eyes, and that finally pushed him to move, irritated. He closed the distance in long strides, grabbed Se-min by the shoulder, and turned him toward him.
“…Hik…!”
Startled, eyes going rabbit-wide, Se-min sucked in a sharp breath. He looked up at Cha-hyeon with those round eyes, his gaze lingering around Cha-hyeon’s eyes as if checking for something.
But after watching for a long beat, Se-min’s eyes lowered, his face tinged with faint disappointment. With his chest already bubbling, Cha-hyeon couldn’t hide his displeasure.
“What’s got you about to bawl?”
Se-min’s Adam’s apple bobbed; a walnut-shaped knot flickered at his jaw and vanished. His Guide crying in bed had been hot, but tears like this didn’t sit right with him. He held his breath once and softened the wording.
“Why are you about to cry?”
“…I’m sorry, Hyung, but can we talk a little later?”
“Say it. Now.”
That walnut knot deepened again in Se-min’s jaw. Jaw clenched, he finally couldn’t hold back the surge.
“I asked you to wait a minute! You always do whatever you want—why ignore what I say? You weren’t like this befo—!”
Cha-hyeon’s mouth flattened into a perfect line. Seeing the unmistakable oh-shit look cross his face, Se-min clamped his lips shut.
A prickly silence settled between them. Drowning in a wave of inexplicable sadness, Se-min now looked full of regret for saying something he shouldn’t have. As Cha-hyeon’s eyes, soured by the sight, drifted toward nowhere in particular—
“…I’m sorry.”
A small apology reached him. Head bowed low enough to show the crown whorl, Se-min wetted his lips a few times, then continued, hesitant.
“Hyung, just… go back to how you were. A moment ago.”
The muttered excuse pressed into his ear. Cha-hyeon’s eyes, which had been fixed somewhere in the air with the whites showing beneath the irises, came back to focus. How he was originally.
“You were talking about the quest rewards, and then suddenly… So I thought you’d received the Unclaimed Rewards and gotten your memory back. But then it disappeared again, and I felt sad, and disappointed, and scared. And I just… felt sorry to you, Hyung….”
With that, Cha-hyeon’s mood hit rock bottom.
For some reason, his heart throbbed.
***
The drive home was saturated with deathly silence. Of all times, it had to be rush hour, so the discomfort dragged on and on.
It was the first time they’d ever argued, and the first time Se-min had truly gotten angry at him, so the ride felt excruciating.
Back in their familiar neighborhood, they parked, took the elevator, and entered the apartment with a strange awkwardness between them.
Once the front door shut and they were fully back in a space that belonged to just the two of them, the awkwardness became almost unbearable. As the swelling around his eyes went down until he almost looked monolid, Se-min carefully watched Cha-hyeon’s face.
After arching a brow once on hearing he’d briefly gotten his memory back, Cha-hyeon had kept quiet the whole time. Was his head a mess? Or did he just have a lot to think about?
He didn’t look happy, but he didn’t look upset either. If anything… it felt like he’d run into an unwelcome guest by surprise.
Standing quietly behind him, Se-min waited while he unthreaded the laces of his combat boots one by one. When Cha-hyeon, shoes off, turned around, he met Se-min’s eyes and just stared with an unreadable face. Without his usual hint of a smile, he looked like a stranger.
Truthfully, it was probably his eyes that felt unfamiliar. Se-min deliberately looked away from the cooling emotion in the gaze aimed at him. Something ached in a corner of his chest, but he pretended not to notice and turned his head, mumbling,
“Are you gonna wash up?”
“Guess I should.”
“…Hey, Hyung.”
Hesitant, Se-min spoke up. On the way home, he’d managed to corral his wandering, roiling feelings into some kind of order.
Even if Cha-hyeon’s memory had reverted, it had only been for an instant. That brief taste of hope summoned a long stretch of despair and sadness, but he couldn’t keep flailing, clutching at what had already passed.
For Hyung to get his memories of him back again—for him to pull Hyung out of the Dungeon Gate where he’d left part of his memory behind—he had to do what he could.
And the thread to pull was this, exactly.
“After you wash up… can we talk about the Unclaimed Rewards?”
It seemed most likely that the reason his memory had flickered back was connected to the “Unclaimed Rewards” they’d been discussing just before.
What on earth had those unreceived rewards been? Had the rewards that used to show up only as question marks finally been replaced by text? If he heard what had happened in the Dungeon Hyung had cleared, maybe he could fit the clues together to help him recover his memories.
And there was also the Conditional Reward he’d mentioned in passing.
“Condition” implied some kind of restriction, right? It felt related to why Hyung’s memories had vanished again.
An unreadable gaze swept over Se-min. That snake-like look—as if it might coil around its prey any second—made Se-min avert his eyes a little more.
But that enigmatic look fell away quickly. With a tired-looking shrug, Cha-hyeon started in a tone much like usual.
“It’s not a long story. I can tell you now.”
“…Okay!”
When Se-min’s face brightened visibly, Cha-hyeon’s eyebrow twitched for an instant. But the change was so slight that, standing in the dim entryway, Se-min couldn’t notice.
They moved to the living room. Walking ahead, Cha-hyeon undid the top button of his black uniform, loosening it, then sat on the sofa first. When Se-min took the couch beside him, he flicked a glance over and gave one corner of his mouth the briefest tug.
Pitch-black eyes drifted toward something to the left. Aside from his usually neat bangs being a bit mussed, he didn’t look like someone who’d abruptly applied to deploy to seven Dungeons in a single day.
For a second, the sheer anger that made him forget everything had Se-min on the verge of tears again, but he forced himself to settle. Anyway, Hyung was safe, and in the end they’d dug up a lead on the amnesia. …Even if the original Cha-hyeon hadn’t come back. He pushed that recurring thought down again.
Oh, and also… he’d actually booked seven Dungeons, but canceled the last four. If he thought of it as only three runs, he looked almost saintly.
With a bored look, Cha-hyeon held out his hand. Knowing the drill by now, Se-min took it and slowly began infusing Guiding energy.
Maybe because he’d wrung every drop of Se-min’s energy out of him all day, Cha-hyeon’s wavelength was fairly stable even after all those Dungeons. Aside from spiking fast as if he’d been sprinting, nothing was drastically off. Se-min tried to smooth his wavelengths into a gentle round.
“Baby. Why are you here? Go back, now!”
“……”
For a moment, Se-min’s grip tightened. He was holding Cha-hyeon’s hand right this second, and yet he felt, for an instant, as if an image of Hyung shoving his hand away hard enough to hurt had been laid over the real man.
While he let out a long, silent sigh so it wouldn’t be noticed, Cha-hyeon’s eyes fixed on a point in the air. As if checking something, he moved the hand that wasn’t clasped with Se-min’s.
Crash!
Out of nowhere, items came tumbling from midair. Se-min was so startled he half lifted off the couch.
Mana stones, Dungeon by-products, gemstones, all kinds of junk, a worn-out little pouch, unidentifiable bone fragments, rocks, and then…
Thunk, thud… With a final roll of a black loaf of bread, Cha-hyeon stopped emptying his inventory. Se-min, who’d been staring blankly, turned to him as if to ask what all this was.
“The rewards you asked about. I claimed them this time.”
In the tone of someone saying he’d grabbed them at the mart on the way home, Cha-hyeon pointed lazily. Thanks to his temperament—too lazy to appraise each one—about half of the mountain of items was trash.
The shock of the absurd scene only lasted a moment before Se-min pulled himself together. These were indeed rewards he’d picked up this time, but they still didn’t answer what, exactly, those Unclaimed Rewards he cared about had been.
“I… see. But Hyung, what about the Unclaimed Rewards besides these? The ones you said were just question marks.”
Even with Se-min’s careful prompting, Cha-hyeon let it go in one ear and out the other. His head tilted to the side and, brazenly, he asked back,
“When did I ever say that?”
