81.
To answer the questions from other employees including Song Ye-sung, the truth was that Choi Jae-won had been in disarray all along. Since that early spring day when he was twenty-four, when the only person he had ever loved in his life injected him with anesthetic directly and disappeared without a trace.
After difficultly entering the Center at twenty-eight, he voluntarily left, and at twenty-nine became a late-blooming college student, attending until he was thirty-two.
As dungeons completely disappeared and Espers who had been dependent on the state and security began returning to society one by one, Choi Jae-won, whether he wanted it or not, became a representative figure for such Espers. This was because his vanished pair was Ryu Ho-yeon, humanity’s great savior.
He attended school properly enough. After all, his grandfather and father would continue searching for Ryu Ho-yeon only if he didn’t bring shame to the family.
Looking at Choi Jae-won, who appeared fine on the surface, his family members seemed to relax one by one. They thought he might get better after a year, might be okay after two years, might have completely forgotten by the time he graduated from university.
Not knowing that behind his seemingly indifferent appearance, his inner self was actually rotting and crumbling away.
The Choi Jae-won who had desperately climbed onto the experimental table to stay by the clearly visible Ryu Ho-yeon’s side was now nowhere to be found. This was because there was no target to raise the matching rate for, and the damn guiding purity and quantity that wouldn’t increase before now had nowhere to be applied.
He was just quietly rotting away. Unable to die. Trapped with a nose ring by Ryu Ho-yeon’s last words that he would return if he could, being dragged along by the listless burden of life.
Choosing the affiliate with the most offices connected worldwide among the group companies for his seemingly natural employment, and then specifically selecting the global marketing team within that affiliate, was all to accelerate his endless search.
At branch offices spread like spider webs around the world, following orders from above, people diligently searched and searched for someone already declared dead without knowing why.
Starting work in spring this year and now about half a year later, Choi Jae-won was now thirty-three. He had already well passed thirty. Since Ryu Ho-yeon was twenty-nine when he said goodbye and disappeared, Choi was now four years older than Ryu Ho-yeon had been then.
In the empty office where everyone else had left, Choi Jae-won fell into familiar boredom. Into familiar helplessness. Generally, in every moment he was breathing, he would quite concretely imagine hopes that would never come true.
The content of these imaginings was mostly that a sudden earthquake would cause the building he was in to collapse without any chance to help, or that a lost comet would crash into Earth like a disaster, pointlessly destroying all humanity that Ryu Ho-yeon had saved.
To his bitter knowledge, those scenarios had a higher possibility of coming true than Ryu Ho-yeon, who had been alive, suddenly appearing before his eyes in the same form as when he disappeared.
Choi Jae-won couldn’t dare to think about wanting to die voluntarily. What if Ryu Ho-yeon was alive, what if he was really returning to him, what if, what if, what if… Such terribly persistent hope torture was still at least outwardly keeping his lifeline intact and well.
Even in his disappeared state, Ryu Ho-yeon was capable of keeping Choi Jae-won alive. He made it so Choi could slowly wither and die on some future day, not immediately.
The more the world marveled at Ryu Ho-yeon’s greatness, the more Choi Jae-won himself gradually aged. Choi Jae-won came to well understand that Ryu Ho-yeon’s last words asking him to wait because he would return if he could were in fact just a temporary measure to appease him, who would have immediately thrown away any attachment to the world without Ryu Ho-yeon.
Ryu Ho-yeon must have believed in the value of the obvious saying that time heals.
Choi Jae-won couldn’t even guess how much time was needed to serve as medicine.
At the very least, no medicinal effect had occurred from when he was twenty-four until he became thirty-three. Thinking about it, since he had first met Ryu Ho-yeon at age five and desperately clung to him for nineteen years until twenty-four, if it was to be offset by the same length of time, there were still ten years left.
In ten years. He would be forty-four. What if he was still living like this then?
In the office that at this moment was the most desolate and lonely in the entire universe, Choi Jae-won just burst into dry laughter at the overwhelming emptiness and fear that came rushing as if to crumple his entire body. There wasn’t much else he could do. He truly couldn’t even die because the possibility of a slight chance was too precious to waste.
It was just at the moment when the digital clock was changing from 8:31 to 8:32.
Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep.
An emergency alarm, somewhat insufficient to rescue someone drowning in despair and grief, began to ring loudly.
[Fire Disaster Headquarters Situation Room – Esper rampage precursor, urgent request for guiding support. Response required if support possible]
Although he had no intention of responding to the guiding support request, Choi Jae-won decided to get up for now. He had started preparing to leave late.
Anyway, since all Guides within a certain range from where the incident occurred would have been automatically contacted, there was no particular reason why he had to go.
With that thought, he slowly got up and was about to head down to the parking lot when, as soon as he got out of the elevator, his mobile phone rang urgently.
“Hello, this is Choi Jae-won.”
– Guide Choi Jae-won! I’m calling because you didn’t respond. I apologize. I’m really sorry, but could you deploy right now?
“No. That would be difficult.”
Even though all he did after work was lie blankly at home before briefly falling asleep, Choi Jae-won expressed his refusal casually with a clear expression and voice. In response, the person on the other end of the receiver raised their voice even more. The situation seemed quite serious, as the background noise occasionally audible was particularly chaotic.
– Couldn’t you come right now? The Esper entering the rampage precursor stage is Class A… ugh, without an S-class Guide, it’s impossible to suppress…!
Though it might have been a desperate and valid reason from their perspective, it wasn’t from Choi Jae-won’s standpoint. If the Esper couldn’t escape the rampage precursor stage and went into full rampage, they would be immediately executed. But, wouldn’t everyone have been destined to die one by one if not for Ryu Ho-yeon anyway?
Rather, they were able to live a few more years thanks to his sacrifice, so this was enough. His sentiment remained the same even if several others died during the process of suppressing the Esper’s rampage.
“If you need an S-class Guide, please contact Lee Han-seo. There will be no reconsideration. It would be difficult for me. I’m hanging up now.”
– Wait, Guide Choi Jae-won, Guide Choi Jae-won…!!
He was saying this knowing that Lee Han-seo was currently on vacation with his pair and lover Park Woo-jun at a picturesque resort in the Mediterranean.
Currently in South Korea, no, throughout all of Asia, Choi Jae-won was the only S-class Guide.
That’s right. The dramatic increase in guiding ability that he had so desperately wanted became the last gift Ryu Ho-yeon left for Choi Jae-won.
‘I’m going to save the world.’
‘H-ho, Ho-y-yeo-ong, ugh, urgh…!!’
‘I’ll apologize in advance. Actually, I don’t know if I can come back or not. Probably… the chance of not returning is higher. But, if.’
‘…!!’
‘If I can return, I definitely will. So please wait for me. You have to be doing well.’
When leaving that last greeting that hardly seemed like a greeting, Ryu Ho-yeon’s choice of a guiding substitute as the drug to prevent Choi Jae-won’s actions was his own form of consideration. After all, the stabilizers or sedatives mixed in the substitute were far less physically taxing than other drugs.
But there was something even he hadn’t thought of. Choi Jae-won’s body had already been pickled by numerous experiments, so he might have a hypersensitive reaction to agents involving guiding wavelengths compared to other ordinary Guides.
After Ryu Ho-yeon turned away and left, Choi Jae-won began showing extreme adverse reactions to the trace amounts of guiding components in the substitute. If he had just remained still without fighting it, he would have calmed down without much trouble, but to free his increasingly paralyzed body, Choi Jae-won gritted his teeth and fanned the ominously bubbling energy even more.
Blood vessels burst and nerve endings snapped, screaming in pain, but it didn’t matter. At that moment, if he could just move one step, if he could just drive away the heavy sedative energy infiltrating his entire body, it felt like he could do anything.
However, the price of that desperate struggle came back in a completely different way. Choi Jae-won fell into guiding rampage, and when he came back from the brink of death, everyone was applauding him. Simply marveling with joy at the birth of Asia’s second S-class Guide following Lee Han-seo.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
