An Unprecedented 89%
Baek Yeo-eul, who had already spent a small eternity waiting on her feet, was in as foul a mood as a mood could sink.
"Baek Yeo-eul."
Standing beside the matching machine, she recited her name to the researcher who was logging one meaningless matching rate after another with mechanical detachment, then let a drop of blood fall into the slot. To the low whirring hum of the device, all she could think about was how badly she wanted to crawl back into bed. She squinted against the light spilling from the machine and heaved a sigh.
Ugh, my head hurts.
The fatigue she'd never managed to shake had come circling back as a headache. Clutching her throbbing skull, Baek Yeo-eul was already drafting a demand for compensation for emotional distress, to be filed with headquarters.
Ding! With a clear, bright chime, the machine announced the match was complete.
Surely it would be no different from the people ahead of her, she thought, lifting her head. But the moment she checked the number, her feet might as well have been glued to the floor.
Baek Yeo-eul stared blankly at the machine. At the top of the device—which determined matching rates from a single drop of blood each from an Esper and a Guide—glowed a figure she had never once heard of, let alone seen, in her life.
89%
It would have been lovely if 89% were the name of somebody's beloved family dog—sadly, she had never once heard of a dog answering to that name. Right, of course. Maybe my eyes are just broken.
"8, 89 percent?!"
But the researcher beside her shattered that hope to pieces. She narrowed her eyes, popped them wide open, then scrubbed at them diligently with her sleeve—before finally conceding that she had not, in fact, seen wrong, and lowering her hand.
Still there.
"M-my eyes aren't playing tricks on me, right? It's definitely 89 percent!" The researcher, whose glasses had lenses a good centimeter thick, shook Baek Yeo-eul by the shoulders as he asked.
"If my eyes are working properly, then yes."
Something about the exchange felt distinctly backwards, but Baek Yeo-eul answered kindly.
This needs to go straight into the journals as groundbreaking data! Fitting, really, for a researcher rumored to pursue his studies with the fervor of a fanboy—even his flustered stammering sounded academic.
"A C-rank Guide, at 89 percent with an S-rank Esper..." Someone's murmur drifted through the room.
Haha, flustering for you, I bet. Trust me, I'm f—ing flustered myself. Baek Yeo-eul looked one more time at the matching rate that belonged only in movies, then turned toward the man studying her openly from across the room. One of the mere five S-rank Espers in all of Korea.
A brazen stare bore into her from between strands of snow-white hair.
To say it once more: Baek Yeo-eul had lived quietly under the radar all her life, and her dream was to go on living exactly that way forever.
This is straight out of— —that is, it had been, right up until an 89 percent match came back with Han Yi-hyeon, the man famous for cycling through Guides without ever lasting a full month.
"I'm so f—ed..."
Baek Yeo-eul's muttering was by no means quiet. But the crowd's aghast buzzing was so loud that her curse was buried completely.
Across the room, Han Yi-hyeon's shoulder gave a sudden jolt—but Baek Yeo-eul was in no state to notice.
"She's really C-rank?"
"Even Seo Ji-ah couldn't crack 50 percent..."
"Is the machine broken?"
The objections quickly converged. Either the machine was defective, or she wasn't actually C-rank—nothing short of that could explain such a result.
Listening to all of it, Baek Yeo-eul agreed with passion. Yes, the machine must be broken. Me—the Guide whose matching rate always scraped the bottom—89 percent? With an S-rank, no less? Wait, is today my birthday? Some kind of surprise? Not a present I'd enjoy, but if this whole situation turned out to be fake, I'd be thrilled.
"Quiet!"
Seo Joo-hwan was the first to collect himself and shout. Such was the pressure of an A-rank Esper: every agape mouth snapped shut at once.
Seo Joo-hwan gestured to the dumbstruck researcher. "Is there any chance the machine is malfunctioning?"
"Not a chance."
At having his machine suspected of defect, the researcher frowned, visibly displeased. "It's a brand-new model, not even a year old. The very machine that tested an S-rank Esper's partner just last week, I'll have you know."
One hypothesis was dead: the machine was not broken.
"Then how about running the test once more? Errors do happen, however vanishingly rare."
Reading the disbelief on Seo Joo-hwan's face, the researcher proposed a second run. Baek Yeo-eul decided that sounded like a fine idea, and gave even more blood than before.
She had never been this tense in her life. She'd trembled less on the day she awakened as a Guide and waited for her rank results.
Two percent had dropped off, but the figure remained staggering.
"...It's consistent. Matching rates inherently carry a two-percent margin of error."
Haa. A long sigh seeped out between Baek Yeo-eul's lips.
Across the room, Han Yi-hyeon's shoulder jolted yet again. This time, no one—not even Baek Yeo-eul—caught it.
"...A drug test! Run a drug test!"
Baek Yeo-eul's eyes lit up. Right. I must have swallowed an amplifier without knowing it. Nothing else could explain this.
Drug use was never disciplined lightly. Even so, Baek Yeo-eul cheerfully thrust her arm out toward the researcher, looking fully prepared to bleed on the spot.
"One moment, please."
The researcher hurriedly dialed someone. Today wasn't a scheduled matching-test day, so naturally no drug screening was on hand—amplifiers being illegal substances so difficult to circulate that screening machines were never kept at the ready in the first place.
Perhaps because his voice had sounded so urgent, before long another researcher came huffing over, dragging a drug screening machine behind him.
"Date of birth, February 14th. Name, Baek Yeo-eul. Blood type, O. Is that correct?"
"That's right."
Baek Yeo-eul answered promptly and slid her arm into the machine. A sharp sting, and the screamer whirred to life.
Ding... ding... ding... In the dead silence, only the soft chime of the drug screamer rippled through the room.
Ding!
No Detected Substances
The breath everyone had been holding burst out at once. Seo Joo-hwan stared at Baek Yeo-eul, dumbfounded.
A Guide who truly, truly matches Yi-hyeon... had appeared. Her being C-rank wasn't even a flaw. 89 percent! A whopping, whopping 89! And with the world's highest recorded match sitting at 92 percent, the number could climb even higher as their affinity deepened!
It bruised his pride, but with no sign of a matching Guide ever surfacing in Korea, he had even contemplated pairing Yi-hyeon with an overseas Guide. Seo Joo-hwan's rear end bounced off his seat at the thought of reporting this joyous news to his superiors that very moment.
"Uh—uh? Miss Baek Yeo-eul!"
The researcher's frantic voice cut through the room. By the time Seo Joo-hwan spun around, Han Yi-hyeon's C-rank Guide, Baek Yeo-eul, had lost consciousness and was swaying, her balance gone.
The instant he thought it was too late, something shot past too fast for the eye to follow.
"What was that just now?"
The Guides blinked, baffled—and Seo Joo-hwan alone understood what it had been.
Han Yi-hyeon! Before anyone knew it, the one holding Baek Yeo-eul upright was none other than Han Yi-hyeon himself. Through her dimming vision, Baek Yeo-eul saw the man who had caught her—and her mind snapped wide awake.
What the hell—when did this bastard get here, and why? She instinctively tried to thrash free, but her body, spent past its limit, went limp without asking her permission.
My life... honestly... is f—ed... With that final mutter, like a last will and testament, Baek Yeo-eul sank wholly into the arms of sleep.
The Director's office at Guide Protection Center Headquarters. An emergency meeting had been convened. Those who had been away on overseas business trips attended without a moment to catch their breath—for even in that room, Seo Joo-hwan, the A-rank Esper who had climbed to department head at a young age, had someone before whom he could not so much as fidget.
Born beneath high-ranking executive parents and assessed as an S-rank Esper at the precocious age of fifteen: Do Geon, Director of the Guide Protection Center.
He was a full ten years Seo Joo-hwan's junior, and yet Seo Joo-hwan had never once looked down on him. Back when Do Geon still ran field operations, unlike now, it was through him that Seo Joo-hwan learned what a real monster was.
He had personally witnessed Han Yi-hyeon in combat—an S-rank who was no pushover even before Do Geon's day—but Han Yi-hyeon and Do Geon felt like entirely different orders of being.
Truthfully, the Han Yi-hyeon of those early years had been a wild colt, thrashing about, unable to rein in his own power. Sustained training had since erased most of those old traces, though every so often they still surfaced, out of habit.
Do Geon, by contrast, moved as though copied straight from a textbook specimen, without a hair's breadth of deviation. Befitting his emotionless, rational temperament, his ability—Cutter—was sharp and utterly restrained.
And the true reason Do Geon was counted among the finest Espers alive was none other than Self-Guiding. It was an exceedingly rare case: Do Geon could guide himself without any Guide at all. He could regulate his own energy and hold rampage at bay single-handedly.
That was a far cry from Multi—the mythical condition, held by a mere 0.1 percent of the world's awakened, that allowed an Esper to guide others as well. Do Geon could only guide himself. In exchange for being unable to guide fellow Espers, his Self-Guiding was as capable as any decent B-rank Guide's.
On top of that, Do Geon—who placed the safety of ordinary citizens above all else—had always ranked among the most popular and deeply trusted Espers in the public eye. People joked that if he ever went into politics, he'd have a free pass all the way to the presidency.
A fairly plausible joke, given his retirement from the field and his high-ranking executive parents—except that ability users like Espers and Guides are barred from the presidency, so it remained exactly that: a joke.
That was how immense his popularity ran—never mind the striking looks, the outstanding ability, and a career of colossal achievement without a single failed mission.
If anything, he might be an even greater monster than that lunatic Han Yi-hyeon. For all these reasons, though five years had passed since Seo Joo-hwan began working with him, handling Do Geon remained as difficult as ever.
Cold sweat trickled down Seo Joo-hwan's spine as Do Geon's silence over his report stretched longer and longer.
"Are you certain?"
"Yes, sir. She underwent a Guide rank re-examination as well. The result was the same—C-rank."
Seo Joo-hwan could understand the skepticism. Had he not been there himself, he would have summoned the Guide and verified it before his own eyes.
"89 percent..." Do Geon ran his gaze down the report he had already read several times through, starting once more from the top.
"So Esper Han Yi-hyeon really is getting a partner who truly matches him." Team 1 Head, A-rank Esper Se Yeon-ah, murmured in disbelief.
Han Yi-hyeon was one of the problem children who gave Do Geon no end of grief. He never lasted a month with a partner, and by the Guides' own accounts, guiding happened at most three times in those few short weeks—on occasion, not at all.
"Told you Esper Han Yi-hyeon would go on a rampage one of these days." Team 2 Head, A-rank Esper Hwang Tae-seon, gave a whistle.
Thanks to those rare, sporadic sessions of guiding, Han Yi-hyeon had never once rampaged. But he was no Do Geon; he was, at bottom, an Esper whose energy never flowed smoothly—a time bomb with no telling when it would go off.
This was Han Yi-hyeon, after all—the man would never stir for a mere order from above. Talk had even arisen about forcing guiding on him, by mobilizing S-rank Espers if that was what it took. And then, right in the middle of all that, one week ago to this day, the Guide tailor-made for Han Yi-hyeon had appeared.
'Baek Yeo-eul.'