Yoon Minoh covered his eyes with both hands and spat out. Thanks to leaning his upper body back sharply, the front legs of the chair floated up toward the air. The creaking sound made Yeo Dowoon feel restless.
Thud. Yoon Minoh, who brought the chair back to its place, continued speaking as if deeply moved.
“Families all eat like this and have conversations like this, right? Playing around with trivial jokes, eating food for each other when they don’t want it. This is what’s called a family-like relationship. A relationship of mutual devotion.”
That wasn’t necessarily the case. Such things could be done plenty between non-family members too. If the definition of devotion was reduced that much, people who didn’t devote themselves would exist more rarely in this world.
“Devotion, dude, refers to what I do for Guide-nim.”
Yoon Minoh, who had been swimming in the wings of imagination, was pulled to shore by Yeo Dowoon’s cold answer. After putting a piece of seasoned bellflower root that Yoon Minoh had eaten and thrown a fit over into his mouth and swallowing, he asked lightly.
“So, is your cognitive-type Esper recording all of this too?”
In fact, he had been roughly guessing for a while. Since that shaggy-haired Esper he’d encountered last time said he recorded everything about the guild members in detail, it couldn’t not be true.
Yeo Dowoon spoke definitively as if the answer was predetermined.
“That person who looks like he’s about to collapse will also make contact.”
He knew the personnel management of illegal guilds inside out.
The role of setting the date and location for contact must be handled by the one with the most outstanding skills among guild members. It would be a natural personnel arrangement since they needed to have the capability to evade the Esper base’s surveillance.
At least unless the guild leader was an idiot, they wouldn’t assign a cognitive-type Esper to this role…
“Oh. That’s not it though?”
…They might not assign them. Yeo Dowoon asked back half a beat late.
“Not?”
It was an awkward tone. Yoon Minoh answered breaking up his voice like a staccato.
“No. Totally not.”
“If you’re lying to piss me off, don’t. It makes you look pathetic.”
“Haha. Listen, hyung. If you were him, would you want to act as SNS on top of acting as CCTV with mental influence?”
The mission Tartaros demanded from the cognitive-type Esper was simple. Fill his head with an excessively large amount of information, then extract and deliver the information the guild leader needed each time.
So the last operation when he encountered Yeo Dowoon was just an exceptional participation in actual combat. Originally, that person was holed up in his room decorated more lavishly than any decent PC room and didn’t come out into the world.
‘Ugh, don’t call me… I can’t concentrate.’
While enjoying a game where the win rate converges to 0%, with his eyeballs fixed on the monitor.
‘Hehehe. Hehehe.’
Even when suffering a hundred defeats, that appearance of just grinning was at a level where one could even feel madness. But even the guild leader didn’t interfere with him.
Because the guild members’ information that flowed in ceaselessly was perfectly organized without getting tangled. Though he didn’t want to admit it, he was a man who was born undeniably excellent in ability alone.
Yeo Dowoon asked with considerable curiosity.
“Does Tartaros have one more cognitive-type Esper besides that person?”
If that were the case, the guild leader’s choice wouldn’t be completely idiotic. But Yoon Minoh shook his head vigorously. He clicked his tongue as if he’d heard absurd words.
“Cognitive-types aren’t like neighborhood dog names, absolutely not.”
“You said the contact person is someone else. If they’re not cognitive-type, how do they play the intermediary role?”
“There’s this thing, you know, it won’t be too late to ask after hyung becomes part of our family.”
Yoon Minoh smiled and deflected. Though he could have interrogated further, Yeo Dowoon also gave up quickly.
“It’s not something I need to know anyway. In any case, as long as the message is delivered safely, that’s all that matters.”
Then this time Yoon Minoh asked toward Yeo Dowoon. It was truly a Q&A session.
“What exactly does hyung want to find out by meeting the guild leader?”
At least this one thing, he felt like he absolutely had to hear an answer to be satisfied.
“What exactly are you so curious about that you’re desperate for the guild leader?”
Last night, he’d been crouched and hiding in the house wanting to surprise Yeo Dowoon, but far from the event succeeding, he only received reproachful looks, so he wanted to at least know the reason why he was obsessed with the guild leader.
When Yeo Dowoon dragged out the time, Yoon Minoh seemed to feel frustrated and opened his mouth again.
“If it’s a guild-related question, it’s fine to ask me. I know everything I should know too.”
Like the operating system, or the guild member recruitment method.
“I’ll decline.”
But Yeo Dowoon rejected him immediately. There was no hesitation.
“Why, fuck. Is it because I’m not trustworthy?”
“This isn’t something to discuss with you.”
It couldn’t be helped, because Yeo Dowoon was thinking of proposing Yoon Minoh’s expulsion to the guild leader.
Since he was planning to push for him to be dismissed from the guild, if he mentioned it carelessly, he could get into big trouble. What if Yoon Minoh refused and went wild?
Such serious business was customarily carried out secretly without the person in question knowing in the industry.
A snort of self-mockery burst out. Because it seemed like he was following exactly the methods of the Esper base he’d been so uncomfortable with.
“By the way, why did you guys take that person who was supposedly a school teacher back then?”
Yeo Dowoon suddenly opened a new topic. The face of a man who had been made to kneel on the school rooftop faintly came to mind.
Yeo Dowoon, who had been massaging the back of his neck, spoke as if something felt unsatisfactory.
“At first you acted like you were going to throw him to me and leave.”
But since they said only he was transported by the suppression unit, he could speculate that the Tartaros side had dragged him away.
Seeing them not hesitate to even kidnap civilians, it didn’t seem like as clean a guild as the rumors. Since his own problems were three feet deep, it was a topic he’d neglected, but since it came up, he wanted to confirm.
“Do plans change that often originally?”
“School teacher…”
Yoon Minoh, who forcibly raised the corners of his mouth, muttered the word he was most interested in like talking to himself. Soon he suddenly got up holding his rice bowl and looked around searching for the food waste bin.
After finding his target object, he started walking steadily. Yoon Minoh, who opened the trash can lid and poured all the remaining rice in, said in a lowered voice.
“I called that person Researcher-nim. No wait. I don’t think I ever actually called him that. I always thought it in my head. Researcher-nim, Researcher-nim, Researcher-nim…”
It was an attitude surprisingly different from just before.
Hermaphrodite chimera experiment. Yeo Dowoon traced back the contents Yoon Minoh had told him and focused on his voice. But the un-Yoon Minoh-like atmosphere didn’t last long.
“Originally he was a person we were going to leave behind for the purpose of making hyung spill about the chimera experiment.”
Turning his face sharply, he made a stern expression as if reproaching Yeo Dowoon.
“Thanks to hyung freezing my ankles to give them frostbite, there was a setback?”
Blaming others was Yoon Minoh’s specialty, habit, and vice.
“If I could have left, I would’ve left him as a gift for hyung, but thanks to getting frostbite I had to stay, so the guild had no choice but to carry him away.”
“Carried away? That cognitive-type?”
It seemed impossible to even carry him on one’s back, but thought his skills were good. Then Yoon Minoh laughed “haha” and answered.
“You’re underestimating cognitive-type Espers too much, hyung.”
I understand. If you don’t see them up close, you can’t realize what dangerous breeds they are.
“That much, you just wake up the person you’d knocked out and control them?”
Cognitive-types were like the final destination of abilities. It was because he was Yeo Dowoon that he could face them head-on, meaning they weren’t as easy Espers as they appeared.
“It’s not for nothing that there’s a rumor that one cognitive-type can grind up one guild.”
So Yoon Minoh didn’t want to show Yeo Dowoon to the guild leader.
Wasn’t he someone who even kept that great cognitive-type beneath him and shrewdly exploited them? If the utterly careless Yeo Dowoon encountered him, it was obvious he’d be devoured clean without leaving a single bone fragment.
“To summarize the key point… you dragged him away to destroy evidence.”
Yeo Dowoon expressed disappointment.
“You guys are pathetically uncool too. Being scared of a civilian.”
“Well, he’s a researcher, not a civilian.”
“If they haven’t gone through combat training, they’re all civilians to me.”
Yeo Dowoon had a fatal weakness, and that weakness stood out most in situations like this.
“I don’t care about elements other than the standards I set. Especially if they’re related to life and death, even more so.”
He was always a person who fulfilled his responsibility for assigned missions. Probably even during his illegal miner days. Acting as educated, making judgments as instructed.
“As long as they’re not Espers, they’re all subjects I must protect.”
