The surroundings were already in ruins. The Espers of the allied nations who had gathered under the name of the elite were now cold corpses, or had scattered as ash without even a trace of their forms remaining.
Two were left. The man ranked first in the World Esper Comprehensive Rankings, assessed to single-handedly overwhelm the military might of an entire nation — and Lee Seunghyun, who had spent his entire life chasing after him.
“Ha— ugh, this… monstrous bastard……”
A blood-laced groan spilled out from between Seunghyun’s lips, crushed and barely audible. His mana reserves were already scraping the bottom, and at the end of the circuits he was wringing out by force, the precursor to mana berserk had transformed into a searing pain that surged through him.
Seunghyun lifted his blurred gaze and looked to the side. Even Han Taeyun — the only EX-Rank in humanity, who had reigned as an absolute powerhouse — appeared to be in a similar state. His usual overwhelming presence had vanished; he too was enduring the mana recoil of imminent berserk as he severed one of the boss’s arms.
SHRIEEEEK—!
The enraged boss monster’s crimson eyes blazed as its massive claws cleaved through the air. A lethal strike aimed directly at Taeyun’s heart. There was no way to dodge it. If he — humanity’s last bastion — died, the Gate would rupture in an uncontainable explosion, and the world beyond would meet its end just like that.
In that instant, two thoughts flashed through Lee Seunghyun’s mind like lightning.
First: the peculiar sense of superiority that if he saved Han Taeyun now and died in his place, then he — who had never once managed to beat him — would at least be remembered as the victor in the final moment.
Second: the pragmatic judgment that, much as he hated to admit it, if this world on the brink of annihilation was to be rebuilt, that bastard’s power was far more desperately needed than his own.
“Han Taeyun, watch closely.”
Seunghyun wrung out his last reserves of strength and moved the shadows. He shoved Han Taeyun far back and hurled himself in front of the monster. In the moment Taeyun lost his footing from the impact of being pushed away, Seunghyun threw himself between him and the boss.
BOOM—!
With a dull, heavy impact, the ‘Core’ within Seunghyun’s chest — the lifeline of every Esper — began to convulse. He deliberately overloaded the Core, which had already been faintly cracked. A blinding white radiance spiraled around Seunghyun’s body.
“Hyung, right now—!”
I’m not saving you because I’m stronger than you. If I die and you survive, then in the end, I’m the one who won.
Seunghyun let out a bloodstained smile. The mana on the verge of going berserk erupted from the Core and struck the boss monster directly in the face.
“Survive… and prove it. That you were worth more than me.”
“No! Hyung!”
Amid the sight of a massive explosion swallowing the Gate whole, Taeyun let out a scream tangled with despair. In the final moment of his life as his body crumbled away to white, Lee Seunghyun at last looked down at Taeyun and closed his eyes.
“Ah, ugh—!”
A ringing pierced through his skull as though his eardrums were being torn apart. Perhaps the flash of the explosion still lingered as an afterimage — every time he opened his eyes, black spots swarmed his vision. He had definitely self-destructed his Core. The last thing he remembered was the agony of every cell in his body burning away, and yet strangely, what he felt now wasn’t a scorching pain but a headache that felt like his skull was about to split.
“What the…. Fuck, I wasn’t dead?”
A cracked voice burst from between his lips. Seunghyun instinctively pressed a hand to his head and pushed himself upright. But the texture of the floor beneath his fingertips was unfamiliar. Not the rough, cold stone floor of a Gate — smooth, luxurious marble.
Is this a dream? Or is the afterlife some kind of lavish penthouse like this?
As he looked around, he spotted pill bottles scattered across the floor, their caps open. Stimulants specifically formulated for Ability users, high-dose sleeping pills. Poison that would have burned out an ordinary person’s brain before their heart could even stop.
“Urgh……”
The nauseating effect of the drugs twisted his stomach. A burning sensation as though his insides were melting, and the foul chemical aftertaste lingering on the tip of his tongue — Seunghyun barely propped his unsteady body against the wall and made his way toward the kitchen.
Every piece of furniture was obscenely extravagant, but Seunghyun spared none of it a glance in that lavish penthouse. He pulled open the refrigerator and grabbed the first bottled water his hand landed on.
Gulp, gulp—
As the cold water went down, the bitter taste of the drugs rose back up along his throat. Perhaps because his body had teetered on the threshold of death, even lifting a single finger felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
“……?”
He noticed then — the hand holding the water bottle was slender and long. Smooth, pale skin without a single callus was unmistakably not his own rough hand.
“This is insane, what the hell is this now.”
His skin crawled. Seunghyun shook the water from his hand and rummaged through the apartment until he found his way to the bathroom. The moment he stood before the mirror, he forgot even to draw breath.
“Ha……”
There was a stranger standing in the mirror. A man with fine, sharp features — one who looked as though not a single speck of battlefield dust had ever touched him — devastatingly frail and unmarked, staring back at him blankly.
Seunghyun struck his own cheek hard. Smack! The pain was vivid. And that pathetically weak face in the mirror wore the same expression of shock, cheek flushing red in kind.
“This… what is this. That’s supposed to be me?”
He roughly raked his hair back, and soft strands wound between his slender fingers. There was none of the overwhelming presence that had placed him in the upper ranks of the World Esper Comprehensive Rankings — none of the solid muscle tempered by years of training.
Seunghyun instinctively tried to draw his mana up. But the destructive, storm-like vortex of S-Rank power was nowhere to be felt. In its place, what remained was a lukewarm, gently undulating wave — a bizarre resonance unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life.
“……Why is my mana like this too?”
Seunghyun bolted out of the bathroom. Wet footprints stamped erratically across the luxury marble floor, but he paid them no mind. This situation was too vivid to be a dream, and too bizarre to be reality.
He went through the living room table and the drawers, then threw open every door in sight and ransacked each room indiscriminately. His legs gave way from the lingering drugs and he crawled ungracefully across the marble floor, but he didn’t care. At last, he found a brand-new phone wedged between the mattress and the bed frame. He brought his face close to the screen — ‘Face Recognition Successful’ appeared, and the lock smoothly disengaged. Unmistakable proof that the stranger in the mirror was the rightful owner of this device.
Seunghyun’s eyes went wide with horror as he checked the date displayed at the top of the screen.
“……5 years?”
It was exactly five years after the day he had died in the Gate. 2026. The world had not ended, and time had been flowing on, indifferent to it all.
With trembling fingers, Seunghyun began rifling through the text history and messenger app.
The message inbox was filled with filth he could barely bring himself to read.
[Hey, you little slut. If you’re going to Guide, you’d better put out too.]
[There’s a line of guys who want to fuck you. Crawl your ass out to the Ability Bureau tomorrow.]
[Who do you think you are, playing hard to get when you’re just a Guide? Do as you’re told if you don’t want to die.]
“Ha, fuck……”
He finally understood what those pill bottles were for. The owner of this body hadn’t swallowed those pills to survive — they had taken them in order to die.
Seunghyun tossed the phone onto the bed and perched on the edge beside it. He ran his hands roughly through his hair and scrubbed at his face with dry palms. He had a grasp of the situation now. Esper Lee Seunghyun, ranked 2nd in the world, was dead — and had woken up five years later inside the body of some unknown Guide. And on top of that, a person who had been driven so far into a corner that they had chosen suicide after being treated as less than human.
Did the Gate’s core explosion warp the dimension? Or did the mana shockwave just knock my soul loose……
All manner of hypotheses collided in his head. The most likely explanation was that the enormous energy generated by self-destructing his Core in the final moment had reacted with a singularity inside the Gate. Soul transference — which had only ever floated around as theory — appeared to have actually occurred.
Seunghyun let out a hollow laugh. He found it darkly funny that this peaceful world he had given his life to protect had been nothing short of hell for the original owner of this body. For someone who had spent his entire life as one of the strong, this pathetically frail body — on top of the reality of being treated as someone’s plaything — felt completely unreal.
“Han Taeyun, that bastard is probably living it up just fine.”
His rival was most likely being celebrated as a hero while holding onto the number one spot in the rankings. Suppressing the irritation rising from the pit of his stomach, he pressed a hand to his throbbing head.
Seunghyun instinctively reached into the air and called up his system window out of habit — the personal inventory that every Ability user possessed. It was his treasure vault, packed with legendary-grade weapons and top-tier potions he had accumulated traveling the globe.
[Personal Storage activating.]
A translucent system window materialized before his eyes. But Seunghyun’s brow immediately crumpled into a scowl.
“……What is this. Don’t tell me — where did all my equipment go?”
No matter how hard he looked, the S-Rank greatsword Heukroe — which had cleaved through battlefield monsters in a single blow — was nowhere to be found, nor was the dungeon armor that had maximized his mana resistance. Instead, filling their place were strange items he had never seen before in his life.
[Item List]
Strawberry-Flavored Mana Supplement (Guide Exclusive) x20
Emergency Portable Medical Kit x5
Emergency Recovery Potion (A-Rank or higher) x10
Guide Perfume (Lavender Scent) x3
Self-Defense Stun Gun x1
Self-Defense Pepper Spray x1
“Strawberry-flavored…… Mana Supplement?”
