One Day, a Gate Appeared
One day, a Gate appeared.
The Gate spat out monsters unlike anything the world had ever seen, then swallowed an entire city whole and turned it into a dungeon. What had begun as one or two Gates spread across the globe in the blink of an eye.
Nothing could stop the monsters—not military force, not any physical power on earth. They killed people and leveled buildings.
It took a single week from the discovery of the first Gate for the entire world to descend into screaming chaos.
Then, on the 368th day after that first Gate was found, someone killed a monster. A few days later, someone else did it again.
They had one thing in common: they wielded powers science could not explain. Their numbers grew, one by one.
They bent the wind to their will, ran faster than light, conjured hallucinations out of thin air—people of such varied and impossible gifts came to be called ability users.
People believed, without a shadow of doubt, that these were a new breed of humanity who would deliver them. But the faith didn't last. It soon came to light that the more power an ability user exercised, the more excruciating pain they suffered—until they lost their minds and their abilities ran rampant.
Into that despair stepped a different kind of gifted: those born with another power entirely, one that could calm the ability users down. Through physical contact, they soothed the storm raging inside them.
In time, the ability users came to be known as Espers; the only beings capable of quelling them were named Guides; and the act of stabilizing an Esper was called Guiding.
With stabilized Espers and their Guides at the forefront, cutting down the rampaging monsters one by one, governments that had lost all power rose from the ashes. After a few rounds of trial and error, the world found its footing again.
Both Espers and Guides were ranked by the strength of their abilities, and to protect the relatively scarce, precious Guides, the Guide Protection Center was established.
And then a long, long time passed.
Baek Yeo-eul is a Guide.
Nearly half of all Guides in South Korea—45 percent—are C-rank. If you're lucky, you're a B, and A-ranks number a mere ten in the whole country.
Yeo-eul had not been lucky. She had awakened as a Guide against vanishingly long odds, and even then, only as a thoroughly unremarkable C-rank.
She didn't feel cheated by the life she'd been dealt. If she had one small regret, it was this: she'd awakened at nineteen, the night before the CSAT.
She had figured out early that in a world crawling with rich, well-connected prodigies, hard work was the only way to survive, and so she'd been a conscientious student who studied herself half to death. But the moment she awakened as a Guide on the eve of the exam, the word effort was deleted from her dictionary.
A Guide's rank is fixed at birth. No amount of striving could raise it. Awakening so late, Yeo-eul had set foot in a world she'd always assumed would never have anything to do with her.
That was five years ago now.
And Baek Yeo-eul...
...is still just an ordinary C-rank Guide.
She had never met a handsome, wealthy S-rank Esper with a compatibility rate north of 80 percent who fell for her at first sight, the way it happens in the movies, nor had she become one of those once-in-a-generation anomalies who leap straight up to A-rank.
Baek Yeo-eul was no movie heroine. She was just an ordinary salaried civil servant doing slightly unusual work.
Handsome be damned—she had never so much as brushed hands with an S-rank, and she remained as average a C-rank as ever. But by now Yeo-eul had become seasoned enough to focus on Guiding without throwing up amid severed limbs, scattered fingers, and organs spilling across the ground.
This life suited her fine. No—it satisfied her.
Even with C-ranks making up such a large share, Guides as a whole were absurdly scarce compared to Espers. So the quick-witted Yeo-eul had long ago worked out that a C-rank Guide was treated better by society than any amount of studying could have earned her—and, most importantly, that the paycheck was deliciously fat. She'd made those two facts her life's small pleasures and sailed through the past five years without a single mishap.
Besides, unlike B- and A-ranks, C-rank Guides never came face to face with monsters. They worked out of emergency centers or the perimeter of incident zones and nowhere else—so really, when she thought about it, her lot wasn't just satisfactory. It was the best.
Sure, it was a rank made to be worked to the bone at everyone's command, and the workload ran heavy. But that was a trivial problem, forgotten entirely the moment she saw the number stamped into her bank account on payday.
Lounging in the penthouse the government provided her in Guide City, peeling tangerines, Yeo-eul sometimes thought:
I'll live like this... and one day I'll die like this, I suppose.
She had lived carefully, on the thin edge of things, and she believed without a doubt that she always would.
Surely. Surely she had.
"Yeo-eul!"
It was Lee Mi-so—her close friend, bonded by the twin common ground of being C-rank Guides and the exact same age—who spotted Yeo-eul and waved.
Yeo-eul rubbed her drowsy eyes and gave a vague half-nod in greeting.
"It's seriously been forever!"
Mi-so shrieked—kyaa, kyaa!—and flung herself at Yeo-eul.
With practiced ease, Yeo-eul hung Mi-so off one arm and trudged along, half-dragging her. Once she'd had her fill, Mi-so peeled herself off and dropped back to the ground.
"Didn't you sleep yesterday? You look wrecked."
"I slept. At seven."
"Seven hours? That's way too little."
"Thirteen hours."
"Huh?"
Mi-so cocked her head in confusion, then decided it didn't matter and nuzzled back into the crook of Yeo-eul's arm.
"Anyway, why on earth would they call an emergency assembly of just the C-ranks? I haven't heard a single thing about it."
Mi-so mused aloud, and at the memory of the summons order, fury surged up in Yeo-eul. A Guide's advantage was having no commute to speak of; her disadvantage was having no end of the workday, either.
In a word: on standby, twenty-four hours a day.
She was used to it—jolting awake to an emergency alert and bolting out the door in her pajamas was old hat. But today's destination was headquarters. Which meant this was no emergency.
And yet the emergency summons had come down anyway—right in the middle of a dreamlike week of leave, while she was sleeping herself back to life.
"Oh, right."
Mi-so, who had been chattering away on the arm of Yeo-eul as Yeo-eul walked with her eyes closed, half drunk on sleep, suddenly clapped her hands.
"Yeo-eul, they deployed you to a monster outbreak zone a few days ago, didn't they?"
Her eyes, half rolled back in her head, snapped into place in an instant.
At the words monster outbreak zone, the color drained from Yeo-eul's face.
Whenever Guides ran short, C-ranks were routinely shipped out to the front lines, and every Guide who came back from there took a full week off afterward.
Then came the ordeal of being hounded by Guides who had never once set foot in the field, forced to cough up information on demand. Yeo-eul herself had only ever heard the grim rumors—until a few days ago, when she was deployed to a monster outbreak zone for the first time in her life.
"How was it? Was it like what all the others said?"
Mi-so, who had never been deployed anywhere in her life, asked with her face full of innocent curiosity.
Yeo-eul had considered herself fairly seasoned by now. That, it turned out, had been nothing but a foolish delusion.
"...It was worse."
I never want to go back.
Her face contorted as she added the words.
She had spent days doing absolutely nothing, resting as hard as she could. She'd even slept thirteen hours straight today, and still the fatigue wouldn't lift—the lingering aftereffect of field deployment.
Just as Mi-so's lips began to quiver at the look on Yeo-eul's face, someone appeared.
"Everyone, attention!"
It was Seo Joo-hwan, the department head in charge of Guide management—and an A-rank Esper. Thanks to his high rank, he looked to be in his twenties, though he was in his early-to-mid thirties: young and capable, even by Esper standards.
"I imagine the sudden emergency assembly caught you off guard."
Even without a megaphone, Joo-hwan's voice rang out clear enough to reverberate inside their skulls. But Yeo-eul, finding his voice fainter than usual today, tried to focus on it for a moment—then simply gave up.
"...Therefore, I ask that you all proceed to the Matching Examination Room."
"What did he say?"
Yeo-eul, who had been off in a daze, slipped into the stream of people the moment Joo-hwan finished speaking and asked Mi-so as they moved with the crowd.
"...Uh, what?"
Something was off about Mi-so.
Ordinarily she wouldn't have missed a single syllable from the mouth of her beloved Joo-hwan, but her face looked dazed somehow—and faintly sulky, too.
"Mi-so?"
Just as she called Mi-so's name a second time, the door to the Matching Examination Room swung open, revealing a man standing there blankly.
Shaggy white hair, and a bandage wrapped over his eyes.
"Han Yi-hyeon?"
Yeo-eul's mind went blank.
What the hell is that lunatic doing here?
Even as a researcher took her by the arm and she drifted, dazed, into line, the question refused to resolve itself.
The only person who could answer was Mi-so.
When Yeo-eul saw the C-rank Guide at the very front of the line step onto the matching machine together with Han Yi-hyeon, she nearly died of shock and rounded on Mi-so, demanding answers.
"Ah, well, it's..."
Mi-so, finally coming back to her senses, explained the situation.
"WHAT?!"
The moment Mi-so's explanation finally ended, a cry laced with profanity burst out of Yeo-eul's mouth.
Han Yi-hyeon. The Esper who had awakened as S-rank at the age of ten. Every single thing he did became tabloid fodder; the thin white cloth he wore over his eyes to hide his scars was his signature.
When the youngest S-rank Esper in history first appeared, all of South Korea—no, the entire world—had buzzed with the news.
Monster. Lunatic. Psycho. Han Yi-hyeon hauled around a long list of labels, and he had exactly one flaw.
His utter lack of manners aside, it was his Guide history—the one that began at the age of thirteen.
Espers who couldn't afford to be picky about Guides stuck with a single one for at least six months, no matter how poor the match. Han Yi-hyeon, however, had burned through Guides countless times.
Once, Seo Ji-ah—Joo-hwan's younger sister, an A-rank Guide proud of her rank—had demanded a reason from Han Yi-hyeon as he cast her out.
His answer had been a single word.
"Just because."
There was a time when everyone had been struck dumb by it. These days, everyone just shrugged it off.
Headquarters assigned him a new Guide once every three months, and not once had he lasted a full month.
It was time to select a new Guide, and the selection had been limited to A- and B-ranks. Everyone assumed that whichever Guide he was given, he'd dump her within a month yet again. And now, suddenly, he was matching with C-rank Guides? It made no sense whatsoever.
The higher an Esper's rank, the higher a Guide's rank needed to be for a good compatibility rate. Even a child passing by on the street knew that much. It was basic, universal common sense.
What in the world... was this some dog-chewing-on-grass level of nonsense?
Yeo-eul stared at the matching machine. Naturally, the numbers coming out were drastically lower than anything the A- and B-ranks had produced. Standing near the back of the line, she watched the C-rank Guides strung out ahead of her and thought:
Keep this up, and Han Yi-hyeon's going to die first.
There were around a hundred C-ranks, and every run of the matching machine required at least a drop of blood—so Han Yi-hyeon's fingers never had a chance to dry.
What a pointless waste of time and blood, she thought, watching the matching proceed with a bored expression.
10%
8%
11%
Meaningless numbers, useless even if they did try Guiding—and yet a surprising number of them walked away with disappointed faces, as if they'd somehow been expecting more.
It was all because of That Esper, That Guide, the movie released just a month ago that had already smashed through ten million admissions.
A textbook Cinderella story of a film: Ji Woo-yeon, the nation's beloved actress, cast as a C-rank Guide who tests at a high compatibility rate with an S-rank Esper, moves in with him, and falls in love.
And apparently, a great many Guides had watched that movie and started thinking, Could it be me?
By the time more than half the C-rank Guides had been tested, Joo-hwan paused the examinations for a moment, walked over to Han Yi-hyeon, and said something to him.
A brief exchange passed between them, and judging by the deep sigh Joo-hwan let out, his persuasion had evidently failed. Han Yi-hyeon brushed past him and dripped yet more blood onto the matching machine.
"Yeo-eul, I'll be right back."
Before she knew it, Mi-so's turn—right in front of Yeo-eul's—had arrived. Nervousness plain on her face, she swallowed hard.
The result: 20 percent.
For a low-rank Guide, Mi-so matched high with most Espers, so even this was on the better side. Nobody else here had come anywhere near 20 percent.
Now it was Baek Yeo-eul's turn.