Of course, if you were a normal human being, there’s no way you’d keep talking after watching an ordinary sheet of paper flare up in someone else’s hand and crumble to ash.
“……”
A brief silence settled over the conference room. With a deliberate, faintly emotional flick, Cha-hyeon brushed the scraps of paper from his palm. Deputy Chief Jeong—mute with honey in his mouth a moment ago—mustered a timid protest.
“No, I mean, I was just saying. Why are you getting mad? Most teams usually run with five or six Espers and one Guide…. Except for odd cases like Esper Sung Cha-hyeon….”
Wearing the same easy smile, Cha-hyeon set down the half-burned sheet. The owner of the pitiful profile was beaming brightly from within the scorched photo. Staring at the Esper in the picture, baby-faced to an obvious degree, Cha-hyeon muttered,
“Ahh. This punk looks like a total fuckface, doesn’t he…?”
“…Hyung. You can’t say stuff like that….”
At a loss, Se-min cut in, uneasy. Even if the deputy chief’s suggestion rubbed him wrong, calling a stranger weird-looking on first sight—what kind of personality is that?
But Cha-hyeon only arched a brow as if to say, What did I do wrong? At his brazen act, Se-min’s gaze drifted back to the poor soul on the profile sheet.
…Esper Seo Su-hyeon. I’m sorry on his behalf…. Se-min sent a silent apology to the kind-looking Esper he’d never met.
Whether or not Se-min did, Cha-hyeon lifted his eyes from the paperwork and looked back at the deputy chief.
“I’ve been doing fine on my own so far, so I don’t want a team. And I’m not letting any other Esper so much as lay a finger on my pair Guide. I can keep someone like Se-min safe while I move, so whether it’s five people or fifty, I don’t need them.”
It was a complete 180 from his earlier, Are you sure you won’t be baggage in a dungeon? Deputy Chief Jeong opened his mouth, his face a mix of finally-getting-it after grinding his gears and oh for fuck’s sake…
“…Are you nuts? Context-blind? Is that it? Functionally illiterate? When there are several Espers, one noncombatant is generally safe—that’s what I meant. Who said anything about hiring Guide Se-min as the team Guide right this second…. Ugh, forget it. I extend my sincere apologies. I’m sorry.”
Pretending otherwise yet getting every word in, the deputy chief sighed, shook his head, and slipped back into his composed self.
“…For now, since Esper Sung Cha-hyeon said he won’t be joining Gate raids for a while and wants post-raid cleanup work, we’ll revisit a raid team later—when Guide Se-min is okay with Esper Sung going into dungeons.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’ll let you know.”
Refusing to concede even at the end, the deputy chief gathered the profiles spread across the desk into a neat stack. With a sympathetic look, he placed the half-charred sheet on top and continued,
“Still, Esper Sung Cha-hyeon, as you’ve been doing so far—if a high-grade dungeon pops up that only you have a strong chance of clearing, you’ll have to go in. That’s your duty as an S-class Esper.”
Slouched in his chair, Cha-hyeon only cut a sidelong glance at Se-min. After a moment’s pitying look in his direction, the deputy chief checked the conference room clock.
“Anyway… I think that’s everything. Could you two show me the items you got as Clear Rewards, as requested?”
He meant the haul from the last time Cha-hyeon spun through a string of dungeons. They’d been about to toss it all for hogging inventory space, but at the deputy chief’s request, they’d held onto it.
Cha-hyeon focused on a point in the air. A moment later, the conference table was deluged with items.
Mana stones, Dungeon by-products, and all sorts of knickknacks tumbled down like a trash heap—thunk, clatter-clatter…. Last of all, a rock-hard black loaf rolled down the mountain of items, bumping along. Catching the well-timed falling bread, the deputy chief blurted, Huh? and spoke.
“Why bread?”
Black Bread
Grade: C?
A black loaf that’s dried out and hardened. It might stave off hunger for the moment, but it doesn’t look suitable for eating.
“Huh?”
The deputy chief let out another incredulous noise. See? said Cha-hyeon with a shrug.
“Told you there wouldn’t be much to see. I get lazy and just take rewards in bulk without sorting, so it’s mostly junk drops.”
With a low hum, the deputy chief’s gaze moved across the table. As Cha-hyeon had said, the unsorted rewards ranged from things that gleamed to others caked with dust.
“No, even so….”
At his disappointed look, the corners of Cha-hyeon’s mouth tilted up, pleased. He savored the deputy chief’s discomfort at his leisure, then paused as something occurred to him.
…Was there something like that?
He’d skimmed the list when he bagged everything at once, sure. But he didn’t remember anything like a shriveled, dried-out loaf of bread.
He soon shook the thought off. How eye-catching could that item have been for him to remember it one by one? No matter how sharp his memory, he didn’t have the bandwidth to retain every trivial detail that flashed by.
“And the Gates weren’t anything special either?”
Still unwilling to abandon hope, the deputy chief kept probing. Cha-hyeon answered, bored.
“They were all ordinary. You’ve been into plenty of the standard dungeons that show up when you fail to block a Rift, Deputy Chief—you know the type. They were those.”
“…To Esper Sung Cha-hyeon, they’re all standard dungeons.”
The deputy chief grumbled. In truth, Cha-hyeon sorted dungeons into three types: ones you beat to death with brute force, ones you beat to death with a bit of thought, and ones you beat to death by grinding your brain to dust.
But since he was so strong his brain never had to suffer, Cha-hyeon just smashed everything. Stuck in the middle, Se-min could only tug his collar and try to rein him in, timidly.
“Anyway, got it….”
The deputy chief’s voice drooped, damp and heavy. Knowing how maddening it is when a lead seems about to show itself and still stays vague, Se-min deeply sympathized. Setting down the black bread, the deputy chief braced a hand on the table’s edge and stood.
“Thanks for making time to come in today. Shall we wrap up? I’ll see you to the front.”
As the mood lightened, both Cha-hyeon and Se-min rose, gathering themselves. The pile of dungeon items filling the oddly stark conference table lent the room a strange sense of dissonance.
The conference room they’d used was tucked away, so the elevator was a bit of a walk. Used to dealing with people, the deputy chief smoothed the awkward silence with easy small talk.
“Got plans after this? Weather’s nice—going anywhere?”
“Ah… no. Nothing in mind.”
“Yeah? It’s such a nice day—maybe at least a walk….”
His words suddenly thinned out. Following his incredulous stare, Se-min finally understood why.
“Hand.”
Palm out, Cha-hyeon was telling him to hold hands on the way. Startled out of his skin, Se-min shook his head fast. So instead of his hand, Cha-hyeon grabbed his collar.
Watching the deputy chief, who was starting to glare, Se-min felt the long hallway—already a stretch—turn endless. A step behind, the deputy chief pulled out his phone. From his intense tapping, heat prickled at Se-min’s ears.
Bzzzt—Se-min’s phone vibrated. Since it was already in his hand, a flick of his wrist showed the notification on the lock screen.
Deputy Chief Jeong Jeong-ho
Guide Se-min, I’m honestly curious, so I’m asking:
Are you being threatened into dating him?
Like, he blurted it on a live broadcast and now you can’t take it back or something?
If you just cough once, I’ll catch on right away
5
4
3
At the unexpected text (and the bit of truth in it), Se-min almost let out a cough-like croak.
When he turned to the deputy chief, the man gave him a teary-eyed thumbs-up—then flipped the finger over with an even more about-to-cry face.
The gesture asked: under duress or not? Whether he and Hyung really looked that mismatched or the deputy chief just didn’t want to believe they were dating, Se-min didn’t know. He was about to shake his head, helpless, when—
“We’re going on a date.”
The answer came out of nowhere. Letting go of Se-min’s collar, Cha-hyeon wrapped an arm around his shoulder and said,
“We’re going on a date, the two of us.”
The deputy chief’s jaw dropped—like some rake at least thirty years older and thrice divorced had just been told his precious, late-born youngest daughter was spending the night out.
Just then, they reached the elevator. Cha-hyeon pressed the Down button. Since the car was already on their floor, the doors opened at once.
He couldn’t lift his head. Mortified and embarrassed, Se-min still had to keep gesturing apologies to the deputy chief until they stepped into the elevator and the doors slid shut.
Even after they’d gone down, the deputy chief stayed frozen for a long beat, mouth hanging open.
“What’s wrong with him?”
I’m going to puke…. With a shuddering ugh, the deputy chief trembled. Especially when he replayed that damn Sung Cha-hyeon, goosebumps rippled over his skin.
He shook his head like a man who’d seen something he shouldn’t, trying to shake off Cha-hyeon’s afterimage. He loses his memory and coddles him like a cherished kid brother, and now he goes and snatches him up and pulls that kind of bullshit….
Hold on.
A flicker of puzzlement crossed the deputy chief’s face. Come to think of it, except for today, the last place he’d seen Cha-hyeon was the hospital room.
Back then, for sure…. Even toward Se-min—whom he’d adored and couldn’t live without—he looked at him like everybody else, the way you look at a mannequin, an extra, a backdrop. But today, he was looking at him differently.
What do you even call it—like looking at something cute…?
…Ugh.
Of course, whether Sung Cha-hyeon looked at Se-min like he was cute or with the eyes of a man in love wasn’t any of his business.
What’s he going to do when his memory comes back?
It wasn’t just Sung Cha-hyeon he worried about; he worried about Se-min too. Unlike Cha-hyeon—who’d lost his memory and flipped his attitude in an instant—Se-min seemed to treat him with the same steady demeanor as always.
And that was exactly why the deputy chief feared that maybe Se-min had been forced into dating him. If you’re lovers, then when you look at your partner, your eyes, your behavior—something changes, right? But with Se-min, nothing seemed different from before.
The kid’s so nice he might’ve just let it slide when the guy insisted they date…. Clicking his tongue in concern, the deputy chief fretted.
