At Yihyun’s cool, cutting answer, the look in the Guides’ eyes shifted. Baek Yihyun — once an object of pity — had made real the kind of retaliation they had never dared to imagine.
At that moment, the sharp click of heels rang out from the cafeteria entrance. Jung Yura — the senior Guide known as the Guide wing’s disciplinarian and the Director’s most trusted subordinate — walked up to Yihyun’s table with a frosty expression.
“Baek Yihyun, how are you sitting there eating? The medical room is in an uproar right now because of the Espers you made a mess of.”
At Jung Yura’s arrival, the Guides who had gathered all ducked their heads in intimidation. But Yihyun clicked his tongue and stared back at her plainly.
“A mess? From what I heard, it was early-stage berserk from overexertion. What kind of strength would I have to knock an Esper flat? Wouldn’t you agree, senior?”
At Yihyun’s brazen smile, Jung Yura’s eyebrow twitched.
“Ha! Tried to kill yourself by swallowing pills and this is the side effect?”
“Must be. After coming back from the dead, I found myself wondering why I was living so stupidly.”
“What? What did you just……?”
Jung Yura looked momentarily dumbfounded, as though she couldn’t trust her own ears. The old Yihyun would have been unable to meet her eyes, mumbling in a voice that barely carried. This was the first time she had ever seen him hold his gaze with such obvious contempt and talk back clearly, one word at a time. Thrown off by Yihyun’s unexpected composure, she missed the timing to respond entirely and stood there opening and closing her mouth like a fish.
“You — you’ve really lost your mind. Fine, go ahead. Let’s see how that works out for you.”
“Yes, please watch.”
The openly unbothered tone made Jung Yura’s face cycle through shades of red and purple. When she finally turned on her heel and stormed off, a hush fell over the cafeteria as if cold water had been thrown over it.
The sight of Jung Yura — who held something close to absolute power in the Guide wing — retreating without a single proper word was nothing short of staggering. The Guides around the table looked back and forth between her retreating figure and Yihyun calmly picking up his spoon again, swallowing dryly.
“……”
Yihyun chewed and swallowed his food without expression. But beneath the table, his left hand had been trembling on its own for a while now. The price for forcibly twisting the circuits of three A-Rank Espers throughout the morning.
The soul of an S-Rank Esper was still razor-edged — but the body of Baek Yihyun that had to carry out those commands was no better than a thin glass vessel.
Tsk, look at this. All that, and the body’s already in this state. Fragile as a sunfish.
Yihyun clenched his thigh beneath the table to hide the trembling. Even as the sensation at his fingertips went numb, he forced broth down his throat rather than let himself come apart in front of all those watching eyes.
“She’s really changed. Did you see the look on Senior Jung Yura’s face?”
“Yeah, serves her right. Felt like a years-old knot in my chest finally came loose.”
“But why were the Espers carried out? I want to learn how to do that too.”
“……Same. I had someone like Cheolsu assigned to me today. He kept stroking my thigh during Guiding and I was about to lose my mind from irritation.”
“Don’t even get me started. My dedicated Esper is practically paranoid. Apparently he’s monitoring me in case I defect to the rebels.”
“……Still…… they say the way the rebels treat Guides is something else.”
Yihyun had been eating his meal with the chatter nearby as background noise when at some point he noticed the voices around him drop lower. The word rebels that followed made his eyebrow flicker.
“Right. Did you see the post on UnderArc? Apparently on the rebel side, an Esper gets disciplined immediately if they so much as lay a finger wrong on a Guide. And Guiding isn’t forced — it’s done strictly on a contract basis, apparently. Completely different from here.”
Unable to let it pass, Yihyun let out a short laugh and cut in.
“Hey. Are you two naive or just dense? The rebels? They’re an armed faction at the end of the day. People with no national system are going to treat Guides well? I’d say they’d be worse than here, if anything. Don’t fall for their sweet talk.”
At Yihyun’s firm words the Guides faltered. But Minji bit her lip and pushed back quietly.
“Still…… it seems like it would be better than here. Even with the Guide shortage, there’s not even decent treatment — we’re not even treated like people.”
The Guide shortage appeared to be a chronic problem for the Ability Bureau, now as much as before. Even from his own memories, for every ten Espers there had only been three or four Guides. A warped structure where one Guide had to manage three or four Espers. The exhaustion and wounds wrought by that punishing schedule and the abuse that came with it were written in the worn-out expressions scattered throughout the cafeteria.
“Because we’re scarce, they clamp down harder on us. So we can’t run.”
Minji reached up and touched the black band around her neck. It was a choker with an unpleasant metallic sheen — something absent from his memories. It looked similar to the vital checkers used to signal when Espers were approaching berserk, but far thinner and more intricate.
“What’s that?”
Yihyun frowned and asked, and the Guides around him all flinched at once. Minji smiled with a trace of self-mockery and touched the joint of the choker.
“You don’t remember that either? It was distributed to all Guides last year when the law was amended. The Ability Bureau calls it a safety management device for Guides, but in practice it’s a location tracker.”
“A location tracker?”
“Yeah. If we move beyond a certain distance outside the Ability Bureau, or head somewhere we haven’t been authorized to go, a notification is sent to the control room immediately. As more Guides started joining the rebels, they just put leashes on us outright. At least the Espers’ vital checkers have a berserk alert function — this is just…… a cord to keep us from running away.”
Minji’s voice trembled faintly. In Yihyun’s eyes, the black choker looked like a living snake, coiling around the Guides’ throats.
If Guides are scarce, the answer is to improve conditions and retain them — not to slap leashes on them like animals and manage them that way.
Yihyun instinctively reached up to feel his own neck.
……Nothing. Right, this body didn’t have one of those.
The only thing his fingertips found was smooth bare skin. As his hand paused there, every Guide gathered around him fixed their gaze simultaneously on Yihyun’s pale, slender neck. Even Minji’s eyes, which had held curious warmth just moments before, passed over with something cool.
Someone nearby let out a short, scornful laugh.
“Oh right. Baek Yihyun doesn’t have one, does he? Guess the Director gave him a special exemption?”
“Illegitimate child or kept woman — at the end of the day it means he’s got something going on. While we’re rolling around like dogs with a ticking time bomb around our necks, he gets to be comfortable. Lucky him.”
Yihyun’s brow furrowed as he murmured low.
“Illegitimate child, kept woman……. The rumors are mixed into quite the filthy cocktail.”
A Guide sitting nearby added, as though making sure Yihyun could hear.
“Who knows. They keep it so hushed up from the top. Whether they’re keeping him alive because he’s blood, or whether the Director’s been keeping him close like the rumors say — how would we know? Either way, some people get to live comfortably without a leash, so good for them.”
The earlier energy flipped to sneering in an instant. Yihyun understood now. Why Baek Yihyun had been so thoroughly isolated. When Espers had treated Yihyun like an easy toy, the Guides on the same side had treated him as a member of the privileged class — or a fraud.
Baek Seungho, you calculating bastard. You isolated Baek Yihyun so completely he couldn’t even breathe.
The Guides began picking up their trays and drifting away one by one. Even Minji lowered her head and left in a hurry.
Left alone at the table, Yihyun ran his hand over his neck one more time. The fact that the Ability Bureau and allied nations he had tried to protect had been reduced to this — that they had made the rebel enemy’s territory something people dreamed of as paradise — cut deeply.
If Han Taeyun is the one leading them…… His personality is garbage, but at least he was never the type to stand by and watch the weak be abused.
No matter how much five years of turning had changed him, Yihyun knew the core of who Han Taeyun was. There was no way he would turn a blind eye to people harassing Guides. If what the Guides had said was true, it meant Han Taeyun was building a far more sensible order on the ruins of the world he had destroyed than anything the Ability Bureau could offer.
Yihyun felt something press in strangely at the corner of his chest. On top of the anger directed at Han Taeyun, the smallest bud of hope was quietly sprouting — the possibility that the man might still be the person Yihyun had known.
The time remaining before the afternoon Guiding session. Yihyun locked the waiting room door and dropped into the chair at the desk. The trembling that had started around lunch had now worked its way up to his entire arm.
“Ha…… this body, honestly.”
Yihyun opened his inventory in irritation and pulled out a Strawberry-Flavored Mana Supplement, draining it to the last drop. A faint warmth began to stir through a body that had gone as cold as ice water. As the sensation slowly returned to his trembling fingertips, Yihyun finally took out the terminal.
