Seo Eui-woo reached out silently, his fingers brushing against Kwon Jae-jin’s neck, where they remained still for a moment. Normally, he would have wrapped his arms around Jae-jin’s waist right away, but this was an oddly restrained touch for him.
After a few seconds, however, the reason for it became clear.
Seo Eui-woo’s fingers pressed lightly against the base of Jae-jin’s throat before withdrawing. This time, his hand moved upward, fingers hovering just beneath Jae-jin’s nose.
He was checking whether Jae-jin was alive.
First, he had felt for a pulse. Now, he was making sure he was breathing.
Only after confirming that Jae-jin’s breath was steady did his hand move down, pressing his palm against the left side of his chest to feel for his heartbeat.
Even that didn’t seem to be enough. Seo Eui-woo peeled back the blanket, lowering his head until his ear rested directly over Jae-jin’s chest.
The steady, rhythmic thudding of his heart filled his ears.
Seo Eui-woo let out a deep, almost soundless sigh.
A quiet exhalation—low, drawn-out, and cold as the winter night.
Something about him was undeniably off.
His anxiety had become excessive.
Jae-jin wasn’t lying there covered in blood. He wasn’t injured or unconscious. He was simply sleeping, perfectly fine—and yet Seo Eui-woo had felt the need to check his condition multiple times, as if compelled by some obsessive fear.
Jae-jin had seen him completely pale and shaken the day he had gone missing. But when they had agreed to start dating, he had seemed to calm down somewhat.
He had assumed Seo Eui-woo’s constant messages during combat and his wariness of the search unit were just precautions. He thought that, given time, things would settle.
Even though he had messaged in advance to say he was going to sleep, Seo Eui-woo still needed to check if his pulse was strong, if his breathing was steady, if his heart was still beating—over and over again.
Jae-jin could feel it now—Seo Eui-woo was far more unstable than he had thought.
He blinked groggily, his vision barely registering the faintest shadows in the dark as he reached out for Seo Eui-woo’s arm.
“…Eui-woo.”
Jae-jin murmured his name, tugging at his forearm.
Then, he pulled him close, wrapping himself around the heat of his solid, rigid body, pressing his sleep-heavy face against the broad plane of his chest.
“…Jae-jin. Did I wake you? I wasn’t trying to.”
“Mm…”
“I just wanted to check on you and leave. I couldn’t take it.”
“…Did you desert your post?”
“No. It’s my shift change.”
“That is desertion, you know.”
“It’s fine as long as I don’t get caught. I’ll go back on time. Today… today was really fucking hard.”
Seo Eui-woo, still in his combat gear, pulled Kwon Jae-jin into a crushing embrace. The way his body pressed down, caging him in, felt strangely reassuring. There was something undeniably comforting about being held like this.
“Everyone’s trying to kill you. Capture you. Talk about throwing you into a lab for experiments… It’s nothing but one disgusting thing after another.”
“…What?”
“Do you know who Lieutenant Colonel Jang Tae-san is? Commander of the 1st Special Operations Unit. My superior. He ordered me to kill you and bring back your corpse.”
“…….”
“And on top of that, I spent all day tangled up with the search unit trying to hunt you down. When I go back, I’ll be surrounded by them again. I have to see Mateo’s face again. I really want to kill him…”
In the pitch-black bedroom, Seo Eui-woo clung to Kwon Jae-jin desperately, his voice an urgent whisper against the silence.
Listening to him, the last remnants of Jae-jin’s drowsiness faded, replaced by a slow, aching sensation in his chest.
It felt like something was tearing—bit by bit, piece by piece.
Like someone was taking a needle and stabbing it into his exposed wounds, again and again and again.
“If I kill him—if I go back and really kill that bastard, it should be fine, shouldn’t it? I can make it look like a Creature attack. As long as I don’t get caught… right?”
Seo Eui-woo pulled off his gloves and traced Jae-jin’s face with his bare fingers, slowly, deliberately.
He mapped out the soft curve of Jae-jin’s cheek, brushed over the slight part of his lips.
His touch was gentle, but his fingers trembled faintly.
“Those fuckers are all trying to kill you… So why is it that they get to live, but you don’t? Why the fuck should I accept that? I’m already a criminal anyway.”
“Eui-woo. Eui-woo, wait—no matter how much you—”
But Seo Eui-woo cut him off, his voice filled with raw frustration.
“No matter how much, it’s still unjust.”
And just like that—
Seo Eui-woo had reached the root of the corruption.
“The idea that you’re the only one who has to die… that your death is somehow inevitable… Am I insane for thinking that’s fucked up? Am I the only one who’s lost his mind?”
“There’s no such thing as a life that deserves to be lost.”
“But right now, I know for a fact that I could kill them. And I could do it well. Because you’ve been Guiding me this whole time.”
Seo Eui-woo had spent four months receiving exclusive S-rank Guiding.
His instability wasn’t fully resolved yet, but even as he was now, he had more than enough power to unleash absolute devastation.
“Fighting was never that hard to begin with, but after meeting you? It became effortless. Creatures are nothing to me now—I can play with them like toys. Killing Awakeners wouldn’t be any different.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“It’s simple. If I target the cores and crush them all at once, it wouldn’t matter if there were dozens, hundreds of Special Ops soldiers. I could wipe them out in the blink of an eye.”
“…….”
Seo Eui-woo’s wild, gray eyes gleamed in the dark.
They were sharp, deadly—filled with nothing but raw, murderous intent.
And yet—
Beneath that savagery, his overwhelming, uncontrollable attachment to Kwon Jae-jin burned even hotter.
His emotions had long since spiraled beyond his own limits, overturning even the deeply ingrained ideology of an Awakener.
“I want to kill every single one of the bastards trying to hurt you… and just—”
“Just have a normal relationship with you.”
“Would that really be so wrong?”
“If I do this… If I say I want this…”
“Would you break up with me?”
At that moment, it felt as if time had come to a sudden halt.
A crushing weight, like gravity multiplied tenfold, pressed down on him.
His thoughts grew heavier, his emotions deepened, and the darkness surrounding them thickened.
Only the sound of ragged breathing cut through the oppressive silence.
It was sudden, but Kwon Jae-jin knew.
He knew that Seo Eui-woo meant every word.
He could see right through him in an instant.
Seo Eui-woo might be a master of deception outside, but he had never lied to him.
Not once.
There wasn’t a single thing about Seo Eui-woo’s feelings for him that wasn’t genuine.
And for a fleeting second—
It tempted him.
Kwon Jae-jin was no saint.
“Kill them all…?”
The words left his lips in a quiet murmur.
This damn world.
This goddamn system.
Had he never once thought about escaping this cruel, unjust, contradictory fate?
Had he never cursed the very existence of mutants?
Had he never wanted to slaughter every single Awakener and official who sought to exterminate them?
If Seo Eui-woo was the one to do it, there was no doubt in his mind that the massacre, the annihilation, would be a complete success.
An omnipotent S-rank Esper. A transcendent multi-ability user.
If Seo Eui-woo unleashed the true power he had been suppressing all this time, it would be over in an instant.
Just like how the canyon had been erased that day—
All the Awakeners could be wiped out just as easily.
There wouldn’t even be a need for meticulous planning.
If they just waited until the Awakener Center was packed with personnel and then—
All in one blow…
“No.”
Kwon Jae-jin pressed a hand against Seo Eui-woo’s chest and sat up, lifting his head.
His eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness to make out Seo Eui-woo’s silhouette.
He steadied himself, forcing his voice to remain firm.
The words came out thick and heavy, as if spoken by multiple people at once.
“We can’t do that.”
Not because it was wrong.
Not because he had any moral aversion to killing.
Not because he wanted to lecture him about ethics, the sanctity of life, or some self-righteous bullshit.
Of course, all of those might be valid reasons why Seo Eui-woo shouldn’t become a mass murderer.
But there was a reason far more important than any of that.
“If you do that… I won’t be able to have a peaceful relationship with you.”
It just wasn’t possible.
To build a relationship while standing on a mountain of corpses—
It wasn’t possible.
Back in the first timeline, even when all they had shared was a muddy swamp of hostility, the idea of dating Seo Eui-woo had never even crossed his mind.
And now, in this timeline—
How could he ever hope to do it while standing in a lake of blood?
If Seo Eui-woo followed through with his words—
If he killed them all, wiped them out just as he said—
Yes, it would be revenge.
Yes, it would finally release all that bottled-up resentment, all those years of hatred.
Yes, it might even bring an end to this horrific system.
But even so…
Even then…
A relationship—real love—
Would never be possible.
That was the one line he could not cross.
“You wouldn’t walk away from that unscathed, either.”
Jae-jin’s voice was low, steady.
“You’ve fought and bled beside those people. Lived with them. Survived with them. Even if you killed them all, you wouldn’t come out of it intact.”
He wasn’t some naive child who thought the world was divided into simple good and evil. The Awakeners and the military weren’t just faceless, disposable soldiers. They were people—just like Seo Eui-woo.
Seo Eui-woo himself had been one of them once.
He had believed, just like them, that it was natural to exterminate mutants.
Until recently, he had never even questioned it.
That wasn’t Seo Eui-woo’s fault.
It wasn’t the fault of the other Awakeners, either.
And in this world, there were plenty of people far more innocent than them.
