50.
Lee Han-seo’s laughter filled the restaurant as he held his stomach. Fortunately, they had rented the entire place to talk comfortably. At times like this, both Choi Jae-won and Lee Han-seo showed signs of having grown up in excessively affluent environments.
Ryu Ho-yeon cooled his flushed cheeks with a can of soda. Though he didn’t want to admit it, even the lukewarm beverage felt cool against his skin, confirming Lee Han-seo’s observation that his face was indeed flushed.
Park Woo-jun and Choi Jae-won returned together not long after. They weren’t complete strangers, but neither were they close enough to be comfortable with each other, so they walked at a suitable distance from one another, appearing unbearably awkward even from afar. Ideally, they might have preferred to arrive separately, but if Park Woo-jun hadn’t accompanied him, Choi Jae-won wouldn’t have known the location of this restaurant that Lee Han-seo had designated as their meeting place.
Ding-a-ling.
“Honey!”
The small bell on the door rang clearly as Park Woo-jun burst in first. Though Lee Han-seo, the one addressed as “honey,” responded with a drawn-out “Oh, my boyfriend is here” and a fond smile, Ryu Ho-yeon immediately frowned, still unable to get used to it despite hearing it repeatedly.
“It’s been a long time since I had to subdue a rampage. Are you okay? Let me see. You’re not hurt anywhere, are you?”
“Mmm, I’m not hurt, but I was a little scared. Give me a kiss.”
They’re playing around. Really, they’re PLAYING around. If Lee Han-seo hadn’t been one of the participants in this conversation that Ryu Ho-yeon didn’t want to hear even by chance, he would have gladly voiced his contempt.
“Hey. Ho-yeon and Jae-won are here too.”
“Don’t care.”
“You’re going too far.”
“Tsk.”
How can there be an Esper like that…? Ryu Ho-yeon’s astonishment seemed endless. He couldn’t get used to it no matter how many times he saw it. Even recalling Park Woo-jun’s brutal combat style from when he had entered dungeons with him as his combat training supervisor, it was impossible to believe that was the same person as the one before him now. An insufferable weirdo. Truly, he disliked him so much.
(Fortunately, Park Woo-jun’s impression of Ryu Ho-yeon wasn’t much different, so the surface conflict between the two was relatively minimal compared to the magnitude of negative feelings they harbored for each other. This was because both knew they were parallel lines that would never intersect except for the exception that was Lee Han-seo.)
“Hyung.”
“You’re here?”
“Yes…”
“Good work. Why don’t you eat something?”
Choi Jae-won entered the restaurant a beat later. His complexion wasn’t good at all. Since he had been practically dragged away before breakfast, Ryu Ho-yeon thought he should feed him something, but Choi Jae-won just shook his head and ordered a glass of cold water filled with ice.
This must have been his first time directly witnessing a rampaging Esper, so the shock would be immense. Even Ryu Ho-yeon had only heard rumors and had never actually seen a rampaging Esper.
Lee Han-seo, who was sitting across the table with his Esper doing all sorts of annoying things, must have been concerned about his younger cousin because he rummaged through his pocket, took out a jelly, and unceremoniously shoved it into Choi Jae-won’s mouth.
“Ugh! What are you doing all of a sudden?”
It must have been an extremely sour jelly because Choi Jae-won immediately spat it into a napkin and rinsed his mouth with water several times. Lee Han-seo asked with a playful laugh how it was.
“How is it? My tongue is practically numb. I know I like sour things, but this is too much. This is absolutely not at a level that can be eaten as something tasty. Why on earth do you carry such things around?”
“There’s nothing better than this for snapping someone’s attention. See? You’re wide awake now.”
“Sigh… it’s frustrating that I can’t argue with that.”
Lee Han-seo burst into mischievous laughter again as his cousin irritably ruffled his hair. He said it was an item recommended by a fellow Guide from the U-class dedicated team.
“Jae-won. Now that you’re fully alert, listen carefully to what I have to say. I know how horrific what you saw must have been, and how anxious you must be wondering if the Esper you’re in charge of might someday meet the same fate. I’ve been through it all too.”
Lee Han-seo, whose innate guiding purity was incomparably higher than other Guides, could inject guiding in a very unique way using the characteristics of that energy. It was a so-called miracle guiding where he would absorb another Guide’s guiding energy accumulated in an Esper’s body, assimilate its purity to the level of his own energy, and then re-emit it. (This childish naming, as if it were a finishing move of a cartoon protagonist, was the work of a foreign news outlet reporting on Lee Han-seo’s special guiding. For several years now, Lee Han-seo had been grinding his teeth, vowing to confront the person who came up with this name someday.)
In any case, thanks to this guiding method that he had coincidentally developed, Lee Han-seo had completely broken through the limitations of being a Guide with an imprinted partner. Once a Guide performs imprinting, more than 80% of their energy becomes bound to their partner, regardless of the total amount of guiding they possess. It’s not that they can’t guide other Espers at all, but since the amount of energy they can divert is reduced, it becomes an extremely inefficient act.
Lee Han-seo, who maintained the same purity while supplementing the lacking total amount by absorbing guiding from other Guides, could now inject a certain level of guiding into any Esper, not just Park Woo-jun. Of course, there would be some difference in transmission efficiency depending on the matching rate.
In conclusion, being an incomparably competent Guide meant that Lee Han-seo was the most frequently dispatched Guide in the headquarters for calming or subduing Espers experiencing pre-rampage or actual rampage. However, since Lee Han-seo needed direct physical contact with an Esper to use this guiding method, he wouldn’t be called in situations like today where it was impossible to approach the Esper’s body.
When he first experienced something similar, he felt sorry for the unknown Esper who ended up being killed, and also worried if Park Woo-jun might suffer the same fate, feeling anxious and restless all day to the point of nearly going crazy. How well such stimulating scenes are remembered. No matter how desperately he tried to forget, he simply couldn’t.
Moreover, it wasn’t just a one-time occurrence; it happened periodically just when he was about to forget. As the number and frequency of dungeons erupting worldwide increased uncontrollably, and more ability users were being dispatched to control them, the number of Espers who could no longer endure and met their end also gradually increased.
Now his childhood seemed like a mere dream. Around the time Lee Han-seo officially entered the facility, S-class dungeons were said to have erupted only once several decades ago in a distant country, but now S-class dungeons were popping up everywhere almost every month. Fortunately, U-class dungeons had not yet appeared in two places simultaneously, but the intervals between appearances were gradually narrowing.
At times like this, one had to maintain a clear mind and endure. It was a luxury to dwell on the misfortune right in front of them. No matter how horrific the scene they had just witnessed, they had to consider it just a passing event, not attach too much significance to it, and quickly refresh their minds.
Because the moment they focused on each individual tragedy, they would fully realize just how heavy the burden placed on their shoulders was. And once they knew, they would find it unbearable to resist the urge to run away.
“Still, you have to turn off your concerns. Pretend it’s not a big deal. I know it can’t possibly be nothing. But somehow you have to act like it’s not significant, like you’re not concerned at all. You have to deceive yourself first to endure.”
His smiling face was light, and his soft-spoken voice still showed hints of playfulness, but strangely, Lee Han-seo’s shadow seemed mountain-high. One might think he was excessively scaring Ryu Ho-yeon and Choi Jae-won about something that doesn’t occur often in South Korea, something they could just forget once they returned, but it wasn’t entirely like that.
“Here, I mean the Association headquarters… is like the peak of a wave.”
“Peak? You mean the highest point?”
“Yes, that’s right. The highest and also the first to break. Once the peak starts to plummet, there’s no wave that can withstand and not break.”
It was an uncharacteristically metaphorical expression from Lee Han-seo, but no one here was too slow to understand the true meaning of his words. The Association here was the peak of all centers leading the efforts to control dungeons and prevent the end of the world. And the fact that this Association had already begun to crumble was as good as a prophecy that the Ability Management Agency of South Korea, which had seemed capable of maintaining some semblance of normalcy even if not entirely peaceful, would soon break apart into white foam.
