Odin watched Kapu rambling on without so much as glancing at him, her eyes fixed solely on Doyun, then reached out and pulled the monocular from her hand.
“Major, no indulging personal interests during training.”
Odin raised an eyebrow as if to say the peculiar atmosphere that had settled over the training facility was not to his liking.
Doyun, who had just put on a performance that made him want to scratch the back of his head, stared at the speaker as he waited for the next instruction.
Kapu’s voice came through a beat later.
“Margo Timberly. Radiant Guiding: 3% in one minute. Contact Guiding: 3% in twenty seconds. Mucous membrane Guiding: 0% in two seconds.”
At that, Anna’s hand shot into the air, cutting through the silence.
“Me! I want to go next!”
Doyun caught Anna’s eye and gave her a small grin. He was grateful — she had been warm toward him from the very first day of training, and now here she was again, trying to lift the awkward atmosphere.
But even after Anna, Fred and Kapu both stepped willingly into the sphere with eager expressions. Everyone’s eyes had changed, lit with excitement over an output value stronger than anything before, as they each stepped in.
When Odin finally stepped up onto the training facility stage as the last in line, Doyun involuntarily took one step back.
A Guide matching rate of 97%. For Doyun, this kind of wave pattern was entirely new territory too. Already standing on the stage together, both of them were charged with the thrill of being just about to leap into the unknown.
Through the preceding practice sessions, Doyun had learned from experience that Guiding S-rank Espers like Kapu and Anna was far less efficient and drained his stamina far more quickly than Guiding A-rank Espers like Margo and Fred.
The blond Colonel standing before him was the highest-ranked spacetime-class S-rank Esper in the entire unit.
As Doyun let the tension out of his shoulders with a brief, quiet breath, the other man’s voice resonated. Even though they were standing roughly three arm-spans apart, the voice felt as though it was being whispered directly into his ear, and Doyun startled.
-I think I can understand why you developed that habit of handling everything alone.
With every scene and exchange being broadcast live to the team members outside, Odin was using his ability as if he had no intention of giving the audience anything to feed on.
Unable to use the same ability as Odin, Doyun simply listened without responding.
-I’ll be handling your training personally for the time being.
“Personal training?”
But the words had flown out of Doyun’s mouth at full volume before even a second had passed, and he pressed his lips together to manage his expression.
Odin’s Rampage gauge was already at 67% from the starting point. He slowly curled his hand inward and compressed the small space between himself and Doyun.
In an instant, the space before Doyun’s eyes warped as if folding in on itself. His vision twisted and the sensation beneath his feet went wrong. The floor felt like it was arriving a beat too late, and Doyun staggered.
「Odin Quaid (S): 71%」
Even as he tried to check his biowatch, his vision kept shifting. Then, the space folded and unfolded, and the distance between the two of them suddenly halved. Doyun lost his footing and went down hard.
「Odin Quaid (S): 82%」
Outside the training facility, a rapid succession of sharp intakes of breath rang out. The output escalation of a spacetime-class Esper couldn’t be properly seen even from inside the special stage. All that remained was a visual trail — the two figures’ positions shifting continuously in the blink of an eye.
-Lost my coordinates?
Odin’s voice remained low and unhurried. Like a whisper right at the ear.
-Every Esper you’ve dealt with before, you would have located by tracking their wave pattern. But the usual method won’t work for finding me.
Doyun gritted his teeth. Just as Odin said, his wave pattern had scattered like sparks from a firecracker. The reference point for extending his Guiding kept shifting according to his ability, and his senses lost their footing.
-Up until now, you never had to rely on anyone else, did you. The moment you closed your eyes, you could Guide anyone.
Before he knew it, Odin had closed in until he was right in front of him. Again, as though the space were folding, the wave patterns enveloping them both began vibrating in frantic, disorienting pulses.
「Odin Quaid (S): 96%」
Doyun’s biowatch sounded a warning. He needed to attempt radiant Guiding soon, but the individual targeting method he was used to wasn’t going to work here. He would have to fire it out in all directions, the way other Guides did.
But that kind of radiant Guiding consumed stamina heavily. Doyun trusted no one, and he couldn’t afford to drain his stamina like a broken battery just to bring one Colonel under control. He was beginning to understand why Guides had avoided Colonel Quaid all this time.
Doyun abandoned radiant Guiding. The light that had been spreading across the training facility floor vanished in an instant. He saw no reason to bother with the effort of tracking Odin’s coordinates by that method.
-What are you thinking?
Doyun focused on the voice hovering at his ear. If he couldn’t find the coordinates, he decided he would follow the wave pattern of the voice instead.
The wave pattern tangled like a thin skein of thread, sketching a complicated picture. He traced it calmly, untangling the knotted parts one by one.
-Ando?
There it was again. Ando. A form of address that had become familiar to his ears by now. Doyun sharpened his focus in order to hold onto the voice.
-No need to push yourself from the start.
In that moment, the spatial pressure loosened just briefly. Without letting the gap slip by, Doyun poured his full concentration into the low, unhurried voice and pressed one step inward.
Doyun’s eyes snapped wide open. He had found the pattern behind the way Odin was folding space.
Odin wasn’t “moving” through space. He was redefining the distance between two points. That was why his wave pattern left no trace.
What Guiding perceived was the change in energy left behind by an Esper — but Odin minimized that change while altering only the spatial structure itself. Like a deranged mathematician who skips every step of working out an equation and pulls only the final value.
“Please keep talking.”
Moving as if leaping across the folded space by following Odin’s voice, Doyun steadied his breath and raised his head. The space that had been twisting in chaos until just a moment ago felt like it was starting to align.
-You’re trying to follow my voice?
What Doyun had started searching for wasn’t coordinates — it was continuity. Voice was a wave, and a wave always carried its prior state. No matter how much space was folded, vibration always left a trail along the time axis.
Doyun discovered that even as spatial coordinates shifted discontinuously because of Odin’s ability, the continuity of the vocal wave pattern itself remained unbroken — and he chose that trace as his reference point.
“Yes.”
-Ha. This is a first.
It was a method Doyun was trying for the first time too. He eased his Guiding gently into only the intervals where the vocal wave pattern held most stably. He had decided to make use of the margin of error that occurred just before Odin’s spatial-folding equation completed itself.
“Whoa, what is that…”
Outside the training facility, Anna’s mouth fell open. Doyun’s wave pattern began spreading in a way entirely unlike before — like stars scattered across a night sky. Points of light scattered throughout the spherical stage maintained different levels of brightness and spacing, arranged all in one direction.
Like coordinates plotted on an invisible graph, the points connected, and along their center a single, extremely fine curve formed. It was the trajectory traced by following the path of Odin’s voice.
With his eyes closed, Doyun murmured.
“Please keep talking, Colonel.”
Doyun attempted radiant Guiding again, following the trajectory he had drawn.
「Odin Quaid (S): 66%」
The Rampage gauge dropped meaningfully for the first time.
Doyun’s Guiding didn’t blanket the entire space. He discarded every element unnecessary to the calculation and drew only the trajectory to the most stable coordinates.
As Odin’s position shifted, unnecessary lights went out like stars blinking from the sky all at once, and only the remaining points held their lines. The lines, flickering on and off like a sequence of lights being switched, all pointed toward Odin.
To be precise, they extended toward the predicted location where Odin would exist next.
「Odin Quaid (S): 54%」
The Rampage gauge began dropping at speed.
「Odin Quaid (S): 38%」
「Odin Quaid (S): 22%」
The deep crease between Odin’s brows smoothed away. The moment his Rampage gauge fell below 50%, the unpleasant pressure that had always bore down on his nerves lifted.
The peace he was feeling for the first time was quiet. Like the moment consciousness blurs just before sleep. The senses that had been bristling as if to torment him released their tension and began accepting the surrounding environment with an appropriate layer of noise.
His heart beat. At the sound of his own heartbeat — buried until now beneath the constant clutter of miscellaneous noise — a smile found its way to Odin’s lips. Setting aside the instinct to destroy something, softer emotions and impulses began welling up.
Odin felt a flicker of something almost like injustice. The fact that other Espers had been enjoying this kind of peace freely, with just a single Guiding session, all this time. And something new stirred in Odin’s eyes.
Odin watched Doyun, absorbed in his Guiding, and murmured.
-A raw gem that shines this brightly — anyone would want to claim it for themselves.
