73.
Even when he left the center where he had dedicated his whole life carrying the grand mission of saving the world, he had been weighed down with worry, as if he were the protagonist of a tragic hero novel whose time had long passed.
“No, no! Not like that. Again!!”
And now, a full month after ambitiously entering the place Lexy had prepared…
“You did well last time, darling. How can you not do even this much! Is it because I can’t provide guiding, can’t provide anything!”
“…”
While the faint spring energy rippled across the earth, Ryu Ho-yeon had become an unexpected outcast, spending each day in a continuous series of grueling training sessions.
“It’s a complete mess. At this rate, the world will end even faster!”
Listening to Lexy’s sharp nagging, he thought absentmindedly.
Ah, I miss Choi Jae-won.
* * *
“Get up. It’s training time.”
Ryu Ho-yeon forced his sleepy eyes open. Though the floor was warm from the electric heating pad, his nose was freezing. Even though the Beginning of Spring had passed, March mornings were still cold. Lexy stood glaring, asking briskly if he couldn’t get up. While his guiding state was unprecedentedly good, he felt constantly mentally exhausted.
Lexy often pressured Ryu Ho-yeon with reactions suggesting he couldn’t believe how lazy he was being despite perfect guiding maintenance, but he wasn’t really being particularly lazy. Looking at the clock, it had been less than three hours since he had fallen asleep after finishing night training.
“Chew this quickly.”
“…It tastes bad.”
“You’re not eating it for the taste. You’re eating it because your stomach at least needs to work.”
Spouting nonsense like “darling” and “destiny” when trying to lure someone in, Lexy now harassed Ryu Ho-yeon every minute like an evil employer who transformed immediately after a contract was signed. Ryu Ho-yeon gently warmed his still-cold nose with his palm while chewing the dry, plain bread. When his throat felt blocked, he gulped down plain water.
He missed the rich, deep espresso shots that Choi Jae-won carefully brewed. Tears almost came to his eyes thinking how nice it would be to have just a sip of clean, fragrant drip coffee. He missed Choi Jae-won, but he also desperately missed the prosperous, civilized life he had neatly arranged and provided—so, so much.
Still, they were supposedly the elite personnel trying to prevent the world’s destruction, but the support they received was extremely scarce. Lexy said this was natural. To prevent timeline errors as much as possible, Lexy’s identity had to be kept strictly secret. Moreover, officially, Ryu Ho-yeon was currently an AWOL Esper. Either way, it was difficult to receive official support from anywhere.
The place where the two had settled and were dedicating themselves to training was one of the small uninhabited islands along the chaotic coastline of the Yellow Sea. Until a few years ago, there had supposedly been about ten households left, but after an A-class dungeon burst nearby, everyone packed up and moved to the mainland.
Lexy had used the village hall, which was in the best condition on the island, as a base camp to wait for Ryu Ho-yeon. Lexy had pretended to be generous, saying farewell with instructions to take a full year if needed, but the world situation wasn’t so leisurely.
Day by day, various regions and countries were disappearing like mushrooms after rain. News that some part of Western Europe or North America had been annihilated overnight was no longer surprising.
Ryu Ho-yeon’s last indulgence was to stay until the day before Valentine’s Day. He had always just received gifts on Valentine’s Day or White Day without ever giving anything in return, so for this very last occasion, he wanted to be together until the night of February 13th.
How sweet and brief were those moments of carefree love—playfully dabbing each other’s cheeks with melted chocolate, slowly eating away at sugar-syrup-covered lips. Ryu Ho-yeon struggled with reluctant feet until the moment he left the center.
He had written and hidden letters, not knowing when they might be found. To Choi Jae-won, to his mother, to Kim Jun-young and Lee Jung-hyuk. And… to his old friend who had left Korea.
He didn’t mind being resented, but he hoped those left behind wouldn’t grieve for long. Until he came to Lexy, he had thought that, like countless movie protagonists, he might overcome the trials easily and return, but once he arrived and began training, he knew for certain.
He could not return.
There was no royal road to saving the world. If Ryu Ho-yeon’s life were categorized by genre, it wasn’t Hollywood sci-fi but traditional heroic narrative—closer to the baby warrior who dies by an arrow or Prometheus, who received the punishment of having his liver eaten eternally.
“Are you fully awake? Come out to the yard.”
“It’s cold, can’t we just do it inside?”
“No. If it’s warm, you’ll get drowsy. Not allowed.”
Wow, the scolding and nagging he was hearing for the first time in his life seemed impossible to get used to, no matter how many times he heard it. Ryu Ho-yeon wrapped his scarf tightly around his neck and cheeks before following Lexy outside. The scarf stolen from Choi Jae-won’s closet had once faintly smelled like him, but now the scent was dim. No matter how much he sniffed, the remembered smell wouldn’t come.
“What are you doing? Got a cold?”
Once outside, as Ryu Ho-yeon just sniffed instead of preparing to start training, Lexy asked without showing any concern. This was natural. No matter how much mental stress he was under, his physical condition was always maintained at its peak, so there was no way a mere cold virus could penetrate an Esper’s body.
Without answering, Ryu Ho-yeon sluggishly sat down in his usual spot. On the sturdy table, which had been nailed to the ground to prevent it from blowing away in the wind, sat a transparent heat-resistant glass pot, the kind you might see in a cooking program, without even a burner underneath.
Ryu Ho-yeon had a rough idea, but he waited for Lexy’s instructions.
“Today’s task is this. As always, you can’t sleep until you complete it.”
“…I know that.”
“If you want to sleep or rest, just finish it quickly. Simple, right?”
“Ah, I said I know. Just tell me the conditions. What do I need to do and how?”
“It’s simple. Without creating fire or any other heating tools, create a pure principle to make this water boil vigorously.”
Pure principle. Though he was as familiar with the term as he could be by now, hearing it still made his head ring. The ability of materialization itself was to create ‘matter,’ yet Lexy demanded that Ryu Ho-yeon create a ‘pure principle’ without form. The pure principle itself, like 1 plus 1 equals 2, or that gravity acts on all things on Earth.
According to him, that was the only way to completely separate the past from the byproducts of the future that were constantly being discarded. Since the past began to run out quickly, it seemed that many futures had made numerous attempts to stop the unauthorized dumping of dungeons into the past to some extent, but there were always those who wouldn’t listen, no matter the era. Lexy demanded that Ryu Ho-yeon protect this universe, the only past that remained, by creating a single law.
Such as creating a principle that time travel from the future to the past is impossible.
The mechanism through which Ryu Ho-yeon had manifested his abilities so far faithfully followed the textbook for materialization ability users. He used his ability by ‘understanding’ something well enough to vividly imagine it, thoroughly ‘visualizing’ it in his mind, and then ‘summoning’ it into the air.
But to suddenly materialize a ‘principle’? It was an unreasonable demand, even for an S-class Esper like Ryu Ho-yeon. One thing was certain: the moment he actually materialized—no, created—such a grand principle, Ryu Ho-yeon would definitely go berserk and die. He had already reached the precursors of going berserk several times just practicing to materialize existing principles, so this much was certain.
Ryu Ho-yeon had repeatedly said that this didn’t seem right, that it seemed completely impossible, and that they should think of another method, but Lexy was immovable. He had clearly seen Ryu Ho-yeon completely neutralize Howard’s gravity with a moment of quick thinking, so he lashed out fiercely every day, telling him not to exaggerate.
“If you can’t even boil a single pot of water, you surely don’t dare to think about saving the world?”
It wasn’t clear if he was encouraging or taunting him. Whenever he heard those annoying words, he wanted to just throw the ice-cold water from the pot at him, saying to hell with it all, he didn’t care if the world perished or not.
‘I like you, I like you, Ho-yeon hyung. I love you so much. So much that I don’t even know why I’ve come to love you this much.’
Ha, truly, the saying that affection is a disease was spot-on. Ryu Ho-yeon gritted his teeth, thinking of Choi Jae-won.
And at the same time, in Seoul.
“Young master! The detailed CCTV analysis results are in! It’s confirmed that he went as far as Jeolla Province!!”
“Check the flights and ship departures abroad again, just in case. Have the car ready immediately.”
A man carrying the slogan “if affection is a disease, then devotion is evil” squarely on his back got into the car, gritting his teeth just like Ryu Ho-yeon. A savage energy filled his face, which was covered in layers of fatigue.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
