The Whisper Beyond the Barrier
Baek Yeo-eul's wide, staring eyes slowly lost their focus. Her feet, however, stayed planted exactly where they were.
The monster waved its arm again, and the voice came through far more clearly this time.
Under that ceaseless lure, Baek Yeo-eul's pupils went slack entirely, and her half-drained body began to move, little by little, toward the monster. The distance she had fought so hard to put between them collapsed in an instant. One step. Two. And just before the monster's arm could meet her limp, outstretched hand, its antennae stirred.
"Baek Yeo-eul!"
"Gah!"
At the call of that familiar voice, Baek Yeo-eul sucked in a desperate breath, as though breaking through the surface of some deep sea. Still panting, she registered the monster standing right in front of her nose and nearly jumped out of her skin. The shock was one thing—but up close, the creature was even more grotesque than she had imagined.
"Aagh! What the hell!"
On pure instinct, Baek Yeo-eul hurled the rock in her hand straight into the monster's face.
Distracted by Han Yi-hyeon's sudden arrival, the monster spotted the stone flying at its face a beat too late. It dodged with startling agility—but of all things, one of its antennae snapped.
Kieeeek!
Robbed of its bearings, no longer able to read the movements around it, the monster thrashed in a panic. It tried to flee on the strength of its one remaining antenna, but a single gesture from Han Yi-hyeon shredded its nerves to ribbons.
Kiiiiik… Kiik…
Without so much as a glance at the creature's pointless struggling, Han Yi-hyeon trampled its last remaining nerves into the dirt and went straight to Baek Yeo-eul.
"Give me your hand."
Still heaving for breath, Baek Yeo-eul did nothing at all.
"Quickly!"
"Huh…?"
Han Yi-hyeon urged her urgently, but when no sign of her surfacing from wherever her mind had gone appeared, he simply took her hand and pried open the fist she had clenched tight. The hand that had been reaching for the monster. Aside from a few small cuts and some raw redness, it was unharmed.
"Haah…."
Confirming that not a drop of the monster's saliva had touched her, Han Yi-hyeon barely stopped himself from collapsing on the spot. The thing's venomous saliva needed only the slightest contact with the body to rot it whole, slowly, starting from that single point and spreading outward. A treatment existed, but it was far from complete—riddled with side effects, and with a probability of dying mid-treatment that climbed toward 98.5 percent.
"Don't get hurt. Please…."
With both hands wrapped around hers, pressed to his forehead, Han Yi-hyeon murmured the words like a prayer. His heart was still slamming against his ribs.
Even in the chaos of his panic, finding Baek Yeo-eul the way he usually did had been no simple matter. He had cleared away everything in his path—monster and human alike—and only then spotted her, far off in the distance. Baek Yeo-eul, one heartbeat away from taking a monster's hand.
His heart had quite literally dropped through the floor, and even now his hands wouldn't stop shaking. Han Yi-hyeon was desperate.
"I'll never, never let you slip away from me again."
Only with her held in his eyes, kept under his watch, kept at his side, could his heart finally settle. With neither pretext nor legitimate reason to bind Baek Yeo-eul to him, all Han Yi-hyeon could do was be caught in her gaze, receive her attention, and stand guard at her side.
Baek Yeo-eul stared at him in silence.
"…What's wrong with you?"
Han Yi-hyeon lifted his head. Baek Yeo-eul's face was pure confusion.
"Why do you keep doing this to me?"
Even the faint tremor in her voice was thick with bewilderment.
"…Pardon?"
"Why—why are you…."
looking at me like that?
She couldn't force the words out. Her breath snagged short in her throat.
"Esper Han Yi-hyeon."
Someone cut in. It was Do Geon. The situation had apparently been brought under control in the meantime; beyond his shoulder, the wounded were being evacuated with brisk efficiency. Do Geon's gaze dropped to Baek Yeo-eul and Han Yi-hyeon's tightly clasped hands, then lifted away.
Do Geon recited the Esper principles out of nowhere.
"Esper Han Yi-hyeon has just violated those Three Principles. Are you aware of that?"
However vastly an awakened body might outclass an ordinary civilian's, it was nothing beside an S-rank Esper's. And among the obstacles Han Yi-hyeon had swept aside in his search for Baek Yeo-eul, Guides had been mixed in.
A fractured arm, and a mild herniated lumbar disc. The injuries sustained by a Guide Han Yi-hyeon had lightly shoved out of his way.
"Esper Han Yi-hyeon. By the authority of the Director of the Guide Protection Center, I am placing you under arrest on charges of assaulting a Guide."
"Guide Baek Yeo-eul."
It wasn't until a mug was nudged in front of her that Baek Yeo-eul surfaced from her thoughts. She accepted the cup of warm milk Kim Yu-ra held out.
"Are you all right?"
"Oh. Ah—yes."
Only with the mug in her hands did Baek Yeo-eul realize how cold her fingers were. She huddled deeper into her clothes and took a sip, and as the warmth spread through her, the chill finally began to recede.
Kim Yu-ra studied her.
"Don't let it weigh on you too much. The odds of this turning into anything serious are low."
The words came out of nowhere, with no subject attached, but Baek Yeo-eul caught her meaning at once. Han Yi-hyeon. She was talking about Han Yi-hyeon.
"It happened because of me."
"An Esper protecting their partner Guide is only natural. Incidents like this happen every day."
Kim Yu-ra said it flatly. Honestly, when the report had come in that Han Yi-hyeon had injured another awakened individual while trying to save Baek Yeo-eul, her first thought had been that it was a long time coming—she'd expected it to happen far sooner than it did.
"Besides, Esper Han Yi-hyeon is S-rank. An asset the country cannot afford to lose. It will end in a light fine, nothing more."
She simply saw no need to mention that the fine in question was two billion won. Only then, feeling somewhat reassured, Baek Yeo-eul drained the rest of her milk.
It was around the time the bottom of the mug came into view.
"Thank you. I know how busy you must be—I appreciate you coming by."
"…It's nothing."
Kim Yu-ra paused a beat before answering. It was true that Baek Yeo-eul had snagged her attention. For only a moment, of course.
The deciding factor in her visit, in the end, had been entirely at his behest. Her superior—Do Geon.
Lately, Kim Yu-ra had been getting a distinct sense that Do Geon had become someone she didn't know. She had stood at his side since early childhood, before even her memories began, and she believed that with the exception of his butler—her own grandfather—no one on earth read Do Geon better than she did.
The Do Geon Kim Yu-ra knew would deploy any means whatsoever in service of the country, and for all his reverence for rules and principle, the moment he judged them to stray from his own convictions, he would not follow them. He had been born with an innate gift for using people, for handling them like objects—which was precisely why even his most unethical exploitation of them never failed her understanding.
Which was to say: Do Geon was not a man who sent his aide off to check on a C-rank Guide with some flimsy excuse tacked on.
And it didn't stop there. The order to inform Baek Yeo-eul of how to help Han Yi-hyeon regain his stability sooner—that, too, had come from Do Geon.
Startled by the thought unspooling in her head, branching out unchecked like a spreading vine, Kim Yu-ra gave her head a shake.
No. That can't be it.
Unless he meant to use her as a tool. Or—what, had Do Geon fallen for Baek Yeo-eul at first sight?
Startled by her own unbidden thought, Kim Yu-ra let out a long sigh. She never imagined she'd sink to speculating like this.
For now, she chose to watch how things unfolded—neither intruding where she wasn't invited nor leaping to conclusions—and simply follow Do Geon's orders.
"Esper Han Yi-hyeon will return today at the earliest, tomorrow in the daytime at the latest."
Baek Yeo-eul nodded, her face a shade paler than usual.
"Then get some rest."
With three days still left before her vacation, there would be time enough for that. With that, Kim Yu-ra took her leave of the penthouse.
Just as Kim Yu-ra had predicted, Han Yi-hyeon returned in the early hours of the morning.
Too restless to sleep, Baek Yeo-eul had paced the living room until late in the night, and had finally drifted off on the sofa. A sudden chill rattled through her and her shoulders shivered—and then she felt a blanket being drawn up under her chin, and her eyes snapped open. It was Han Yi-hyeon.
"When did you get here?"
Baek Yeo-eul bolted upright.
"Just now."
True to his word, he was still dressed to go out.
"…How did it go?"
At her cautious question, Han Yi-hyeon answered with a faint smile.
"It was resolved without incident. It ended in a fine."
"That's a relief."
Exactly as Kim Yu-ra had predicted.
Only once the worry loosened did Baek Yeo-eul remember the question that had been gnawing at her.
"But how could the monster have gotten outside the barrier? I can't imagine you and the Director missing it…."
No monster could have slipped out of a perimeter with an S-rank Esper inside it. And with Han Yi-hyeon—a monster in his own right—paired with the immaculately efficient Do Geon, it was all the more unthinkable.
"Normally, the perimeter is raised before combat begins. So my guess is that the monster had already left the Gate before the barrier ever went up."
"But… there was no crack in the Gate when we arrived. I'm sure of it."
The crack was the entrance that formed once a monster emerged from its Gate. And since a crack, once opened, never vanished again, it was how they could tell whether a monster had already come out or was still waiting inside.
"I suspect that's because it was an Aberrant Gate."
Its location, its grade—and now even its crack defied the rules. Gates, by nature, followed no fixed formula. They varied in small, scattered ways, but for one to differ in every last particular, nothing short of an Aberrant Gate could explain it.
"So you're saying the crack opened, and then closed again?"
"That hypothesis carries the highest probability."
The ease that had settled over Baek Yeo-eul's face drained back into gravity.
Location, grade, stage—those were problems enough, but this was the first Aberrant Gate where the crack itself was in question. And a crack was a different order of severity from all the rest. A Gate's existence could be confirmed by reading its wavelength through frequency—but every so often, one simply failed to register. Suppose no one knew, and it was left unattended, and then a crack opened, monsters came pouring out, and the crack sealed itself shut again? The responders, arriving a step too late, would naturally wait for the crack to open before raising their perimeter. Never suspecting, even for a moment, that the monster was already outside it.
"Ah—and you mustn't repeat any of this to anyone else. It's classified… Not that I suspect you in the slightest, Guide Baek Yeo-eul. It's only that you could face disciplinary action."
"…And you're allowed to tell me classified information?"
"You asked…."