“Look who finally decided to show up. The superstars are here, huh?”
“Don’t tease.”
“Tease? Please, I’m just impressed. You and Park Woo-jun—total legends now, right? Right?”
Kim Joon-young claimed he wasn’t teasing, but the grin tugging at his lips said otherwise. All the gratitude for holding down the fort while Woo-jun was gone, all the warmth of seeing old friends again—he managed to brush it off in one breath like it was nothing. A real talent, honestly. Han-seo narrowed his eyes and called out, “Hyung! Jung-hyuk!” From just outside the office, where he’d been talking with another staffer, Lee Jung-hyuk hurried in.
“What now? What did he say this time?”
Even after being apart for three months, Jung-hyuk was as calm and collected as ever. He gave Han-seo a soft pat on the back and a warm “good job,” and just like that, the irritation that had flared up inside Han-seo fizzled out. “It’s nothing,” he muttered, then started unloading souvenir bags onto the table.
“Seriously, look at Lee Han-seo playing favorites. How are the rest of us supposed to survive like this?”
“Joon-young hyung.”
“Okay, okay—kidding. Just kidding.”
Kim Joon-young, who’d clearly been revving up for another round of jokes, immediately backed off when Jung-hyuk called his name in that quiet voice of his. He tossed his hands up by his head, all innocence. Across from them, Park Woo-jun, who’d been leaning into Han-seo’s shoulder without saying a word, finally opened his mouth.
“Joon-young sunbae really hasn’t changed a bit, has he?”
Han-seo gently tapped Woo-jun’s soft cheek with his fingers in agreement.
While Woo-jun had been away, Kim Joon-young had stepped in as Acting Chief of Espers, covering all the administrative gaps. Handling S-Class dungeon oversight solo—a task the two of them used to share—must’ve been absolute hell.
Which probably explained why, even though it’d been nearly three weeks since Han-seo and Woo-jun returned, they were only now seeing Joon-young face-to-face. It was half gratitude, half guilt.
Han-seo, who firmly believed that nothing said “thank you” quite like cold, hard goods, had gone overboard at the duty-free shops, stuffing his luggage with an absurd amount of souvenirs. The pile on the table looked like it had been ripped straight out of a department store catalog. The only thing that felt remotely foreign was a box of chocolates with French writing on the packaging.
“Well, well. This is it? After all the crap we went through thanks to you two, you’re trying to get off with this?”
Han-seo knew Joon-young didn’t actually want anything. His griping was just his way of easing the mood. But still, out of habit, the old annoyance started to bubble up. His fists clenched, and just before it spilled over, Woo-jun reached out and gave his hand a gentle squeeze. Across the table, Jung-hyuk gave Joon-young a quick flick to the lips—cut it out. With how often these two butted heads, their Bonded Pairs had basically become pros at pulling them apart.
Jung-hyuk, who had no real attachment to expensive gifts, simply offered a quiet thank-you and shoved the pile of bags to one corner of the table. Then he turned his attention to Woo-jun and Han-seo, quietly assessing their condition. The dungeon might’ve seemed like a breeze after the fact, but at the time, with no news coming out, the worry had been endless.
“Neither of you got hurt, right?”
“Nope. We’re totally fine.”
“Thanks for worrying, sunbae.”
“Good to hear. But Han-seo, I heard you’ve been hanging around the lab a lot lately. That true? You really okay?”
It wasn’t surprising that Jung-hyuk was extra touchy about anything involving the lab. Joon-young had been through hell there during his awakening. If Ryu Ho-yeon had been around, maybe he’d have asked himself. But as another S-Class Esper, Ho-yeon had been running nonstop in Woo-jun’s absence, clearing dungeons across the southern coast ahead of a major typhoon. He wouldn’t be back at Central Branch until early next month at the earliest.
“Oh, that? It’s not a big deal…”
No reason to hide it. Han-seo began explaining honestly.
While he and Woo-jun had been lying low, enjoying some much-needed downtime, the other Espers who’d entered the dungeon with them had been flooded with interview requests. Magazines, news stations, streaming platforms—you name it. They accepted everything.
Each interview focused on the accomplishments of specific Espers or Bonded Pairs, but one event kept coming up in every single one: Han-seo’s bizarre guiding at the end of the dungeon.
The situation had been dangerously close to a Rampage. Yet despite being a Guide already Imprinted with another Esper, Han-seo—a mere S-Class Guide—had managed to guide Julian Moore like it was nothing. It was nothing short of miraculous. Everyone who’d seen it had been blown away.
And just when the world wanted answers, Han-seo had grabbed Woo-jun and vanished before anyone could even ask how he’d done it. Naturally, interest and speculation exploded.
The International Esper Alliance had even created a new classification—U-Class—for dungeons beyond S-Class. An official announcement declared it the first-ever U-Class dungeon clear. Then came the interviews, which would’ve been enough on their own. But to top it off, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security issued a public statement, personally thanking Han-seo for saving one of their own.
Now, the entire world was waiting on edge for answers about a guiding mechanism that not even Han-seo fully understood himself.
The irony? The actual principle turned out to be ridiculously simple. So simple, in fact, that it didn’t take long at all to get experimental results, despite the massive hype.
While Woo-jun resumed handling admin work and ran solo missions through mid-tier dungeons, Han-seo had been reporting to the lab like clockwork. Hooked up to strange machines that made his head spin just looking at them, he guided, absorbed waves, guided again, absorbed again—over and over. It wasn’t hard, just a little boring and tedious.
The secret behind that so-called miracle of a guiding?
It was Lee Han-seo himself.
When they brought in other Guides to run similar experiments, they found that most could sense another person’s guiding energy within an Esper’s body—as long as their control was decent. That much wasn’t unusual.
The problem was this: could they move that energy by their own will?
That’s where Han-seo stood alone.
His guiding possessed a purity so overwhelmingly higher than anyone else’s that it caused the others’ guiding energy to flow toward his on its own.
Like osmosis between solutions of different concentrations, guiding naturally moves from areas of lower purity to higher purity. But unless the purity gap was massive, nothing shifted. With Han-seo, once the guiding was pulled toward him, it would immediately sync with his own and skyrocket in purity.
Simple principle.
But impossible to replicate—unless you were Lee Han-seo.
No one else could even attempt it.
At one point, both the U.S. and the International Esper Alliance had openly asked him to relocate to their labs and join “crucial experiments for the future of mankind.”
That was when Han-seo truly felt grateful for being born into a family that had everything.
Their obsession was borderline criminal—they hadn’t held him at knifepoint, but it wasn’t far off. At the rate they were going, it wouldn’t have been surprising if they’d tried threatening his family.
Luckily, both sides of his family had always had private security following them around 24/7.
And now, for the first time, that really felt like a relief.
“They kept hounding me. Seriously, I don’t even know how they got into the Center. Is our security really that bad? Anyway, I told them we’ve got our own research lab right here. I don’t care if they cry or scream—I’m doing everything here in Korea. I told them if they annoyed me even one more time, I’d never share a single result with them. That finally shut them up.”
“No way… Han-seo, you said all that in English? Wait, weren’t you the guy who couldn’t say anything beyond ‘How are you’ and ‘I’m fine’?”
“Oh my god, that’s what you’re focusing on right now?”
“Of course it is! I’ve spent my whole life thinking you were just a loud, clueless idiot!”
“Kim Joon-young, you insane bastard!!”
“Pfft. Listen to that mouth. Who taught this little brat to talk to his wise, sky-like sunbae like that?”
If his goal was to snap Han-seo out of the lingering disgust he felt, it worked perfectly. The bitterness on Han-seo’s face had faded, leaving behind only a flicker of his usual irritation. Everything felt normal again.
“That attitude’s exactly why you’re always in some kind of mess. Didn’t you go off on the reporters at the airport? Did you see that ‘Lee Han-seo Quote Collection’ floating around online? God, I nearly died laughing. Thanks to you, I haven’t had a moment to feel down.”
“Y-you little—!!”
Face burning red, Han-seo’s shoulders trembled with frustration. The guy who never gave up, even when he lost every argument, and the guy who secretly found it cute but still picked fights every time they met—honestly, they were two peas in a pod.
And yet, thanks to that little spat, the conversation had veered away from the very topic Han-seo had been dreading.
Neither Park Woo-jun nor Jung-hyuk stepped in. They simply let the two of them go at it.
“Hey, hey. Look—I can totally mimic you. ‘Yes, thank you for your bullshit.’”
“I did not say it like that!!”
And just like that—another blissfully normal day.
Completely unaware that, on the other side of the world, someone was still screaming about how they had to meet Lee Han-seo again.
