#167
Hyun Dowoon was looking at the chaotic scene in the city with a cold face. Then, pointing to the place where the ice chunk had fallen with his fingertip, he asked:
“Do you know where this place is?”
Kim Sehyun nodded with a blank face. It was a famous wealthy area, and with the cafe where he worked part-time just a few stops away, he couldn’t help but know it.
“Guide me there.”
“You… you want to go there?”
Breaking news was reporting that people were seriously injured, and he wants to go there? Kim Sehyun looked at Hyun Dowoon with shaky eyes, bewildered. It seemed too dangerous no matter how he looked at it, and he couldn’t understand why Hyun Dowoon wanted to go.
“It seems dangerous there…”
Kim Sehyun tried to dissuade Hyun Dowoon with a pale face, seeing the pavement blocks cracked from the impact of the massive ice chunk. He absolutely didn’t want to go. Such scenes are only exciting when they’re not happening right in front of you. He was scared of getting hit by another hailstone if they went.
“Do you think you have a choice?”
“…I… I don’t, do I? Of course not, right?”
Kim Sehyun carefully answered after reading the mood. He had no idea what sins he must have committed in his past life to be experiencing this.
Hyun Dowoon’s appearance, which he had thought beautiful, now looked like a yaksha. The encounter he had thought might be a sign of something amazing happening like in novels only brought discomfort in many ways. His imagination that it might be the birth of a hero or a chance for a life reversal, like in the novels he enjoyed reading, had completely disappeared after talking about Jaeha all night like a jukebox.
“Um… You didn’t bring a car, right? Haha, of course not, since you were collapsed…”
Kim Sehyun muttered in a frustrated voice as he looked at Hyun Dowoon’s bright blue eyes. The thought of taking such a conspicuous person on the subway made him feel very overwhelmed.
“Hmm, let’s look at a map.”
“…A map?”
“Hurry.”
Instead of answering, Hyun Dowoon held out his hand asking for a map. When Kim Sehyun reflexively opened a map app and handed it over, Hyun Dowoon started checking something, moving the map around with his eyes lowered.
“So where is it located?”
“The… location is about here.”
After thoroughly scanning the map, Hyun Dowoon now asked about the location shown in the breaking news. When Kim Sehyun moved the map to roughly indicate the position, he nodded.
“I see roughly where it is. Fortunately, the geography here isn’t too different.”
Hyun Dowoon, who had muttered softly, suddenly got up from the bed. Then he beckoned to Kim Sehyun, who was blankly looking up at him.
“What are you doing? You need to guide me.”
“Um… aren’t you going alone…?”
“You’re asking the obvious. I looked at the map to understand the surrounding area. Or would you prefer to hand over your phone to me?”
Hyun Dowoon spoke nonchalantly and nodded. It meant to hurry up and leave.
Although the thought of going out again without even washing up and with a haggard face from lack of sleep made his head spin, Kim Sehyun had no choice.
He still had a long way to go on his phone installment plan. It seemed much better to go along and get it back than to have it forcibly taken.
Kim Sehyun sighed and got up.
After barely arriving while being scolded for not having a car, they found the scene cordoned off with police lines. Police and firefighters could be seen moving inside.
Kim Sehyun looked around in fear, terrified that the giant ice pillar might fall towards where he was standing. Seeing the bloodstains left on the ground made him shiver. The fact that only this area was covered in snow in a square shape made him feel even stranger.
As Kim Sehyun was staring in shock at the snow piled up on the trees, he noticed Hyun Dowoon looking up at a nearby building with an unpleasant face and shrank a bit as he watched his reaction.
“We need to go up.”
“Then, I’ll be going now…”
Kim Sehyun nodded with a brightened face, thinking Hyun Dowoon was letting him go.
“Wait a moment.”
However, just as he was about to feel a sense of liberation, Hyun Dowoon grabbed Kim Sehyun. Startled by the sudden grasp, Kim Sehyun’s eyes widened, and Hyun Dowoon’s large hand approached Kim Sehyun’s nape.
“Uh… uwaah!”
Kim Sehyun, surprised, tightly closed his eyes. Then Hyun Dowoon grabbed his nape as if grabbing him by the collar.
And when he suddenly opened his eyes, feeling that the air touching his skin had changed for a moment, he had been teleported into a space he had never seen before.
‘What… what is this?’
He could see at a glance Hyun Dowoon with jewel-like eyes, Shin Haejun with similar red jewel-like eyes, and an interior in disarray from ice chunks.
Shin Haejun with jewel-like eyes got up from the sofa he was sitting on and approached Kim Sehyun.
“Meeting like this makes me feel bad all over again.”
Shin Haejun’s eyes cruelly gleamed as they scanned Kim Sehyun’s shabby appearance up and down. Kim Sehyun, unable to grasp the situation, instinctively sensed Shin Haejun’s killing intent and shrank back.
I’m going to die. I might die-.
Just as he tightly closed his eyes and grasped his head with both hands, Hyun Dowoon’s calm voice was heard.
“Wait, there’s no need to kill him here. We have things to hear anyway.”
As Hyun Dowoon finished speaking, Shin Haejun hesitated for a moment and then withdrew his killing intent.
Certainly, Kim Sehyun couldn’t be killed yet. They needed to hear about the word ‘esper’.
This world was a very peaceful world with no awakened ones at all. Naturally, there was no way there could be talk of espers. Especially if it was about an esper who looked similar to Hyun Dowoon.
Kim Sehyun instinctively realized that the Shin Haejun in front of him was the culprit who created this strange phenomenon. After all, it had actually appeared in the novel. The story of ‘an esper who handles ice, frost, and snowstorms’. Of course, that esper’s hair was as black as night, and his eyes sparkled bright red like embedded rubies. No matter how you looked at it, it was a character modeled after the man in front of him.
“Ugh…”
Suddenly, Kim Sehyun heard a small groan. Following the sound, Kim Sehyun turned his gaze and discovered a man convulsing with his leg pierced by ice shaped like a sharp spear. And since it was a face he saw every day, he immediately recognized the man’s identity.
“Uh, uwaaaaah!”
A scream involuntarily burst out when he saw the damp pool of blood on the floor and the face glistening with cold sweat. Kim Sehyun reflexively stepped back and ended up falling on his bottom.
However, he didn’t feel the pain in his buttocks at all. It was because he was stunned. He alternately looked at the severely injured Hyun Dowoon and the jewel-eyed Hyun Dowoon standing nonchalantly. Seeing Hyun Dowoon standing arrogantly without a single injury, he felt cold sweat running down his spine.
Kim Sehyun suddenly realized that he had entered a den of monsters. Although they looked like ordinary humans, according to the content of the novel, if these two people lightly squeezed his neck, his breath might be cut off.
Moreover, that Shin Haejun had even shown hostility, so if he made a wrong move, he might end up in the same state as the… real Hyun Dowoon.
‘Absolutely not!’
For Kim Sehyun, who had lived an unremarkable life as insignificant as his presence, this was absolutely not what he wanted. Even a paper cut stings and hurts, so he couldn’t even imagine how painful it would be to be pierced by an ice spear. Kim Sehyun thought the real Hyun Dowoon was amazing for enduring that pain and only letting out weak groans like “ugh”.
“Um… can’t I just leave now…? I don’t, don’t know anything… I didn’t see anything, okay? I didn’t see anything, right?”
His body, which had been drooping from sleepiness, became energized. More precisely, it was energy that barely emerged from the thought that he couldn’t die. Kim Sehyun didn’t want to die here.
“Please explain again what you said earlier. Starting from the talk about the novel.”
Hyun Dowoon spoke with a smile as if to reassure him. However, to Kim Sehyun’s eyes, it wasn’t a reassuring smile at all. That Hyun Dowoon and Shin Haejun were no different from monsters. Kim Sehyun gritted his teeth, resenting Jaeha for putting him in this situation.
As Kim Sehyun glanced alternately at Shin Haejun and the Hyun Dowoon pierced by ice, Hyun Dowoon strode towards the Hyun Dowoon pierced to the floor. The scene of two people with the same face facing each other was as alien as watching a horror movie.
“If you’re scared of this scene, I’ll resolve it.”
Hyun Dowoon said with a fierce smile as he placed his hand on the long ice chunk embedded in the floor.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
