The Blood Trail
Baek Yeo-eul clamped a hand over her mouth and shrank back. The monster, uttering grotesque noises, rooted through the trash cans before letting out an irritable shriek. Grade 2 monsters possessed extraordinarily acute hearing, so she held her breath until it was gone.
With a wailing cry, the monster receded into the distance.
If there's a monster here, that means its lair is nearby.
Realizing this spot was nowhere near as safe as she'd hoped, Baek Yeo-eul decided to move. Worried she might yet lose her survival kit, she tucked food and water, a single flare, and a body-heat pack into the various pockets of her vest.
She had just gotten to her feet when—
Bzzt. Bzzt.
Her nerves already stretched to their limit, Baek Yeo-eul flinched violently at the vibration rising from her wrist and lifted her arm.
Oh!
It was her watch. The moment she spotted the name Han Yi-hyeon on the screen, she hurriedly unlocked it.
About thirty seconds passed before another message arrived.
The vest Baek Yeo-eul was wearing had originally belonged to Han Yi-hyeon. The moment he'd been handed the gear, he'd noticed hers was inferior to his own and swapped them on the spot.
Just as he'd said, a machine the size of her palm came out of the innermost pocket. The instant she pressed the power button, it mapped the positions of every monster within a 500-meter radius of her.
A red dot blinked at 350 meters.
Those two sentences alone worked like magic. Her heart, which had been lurching with anxiety, steadied at once. Baek Yeo-eul had faith—absolute faith—that Han Yi-hyeon would come for her.
Drawing a deep breath, she eased carefully out of the garage with the frequency device in hand. Fortunately, the green-roofed house he'd mentioned wasn't far, and no monsters lurked nearby.
It wasn't much of a distance, and yet the cold sweat that had poured out of her in those few minutes had soaked her back through.
When she reached the house—little more than a ruin—Baek Yeo-eul happened to glance down at the doorstep, and her feet stopped of their own accord.
…Blood?
It was a bloodstain. And not just a drop or two—the quantity made it clear it had dripped from a serious wound.
Baek Yeo-eul rifled through her memories at speed. No one had ever mentioned that anyone else had been dropped into this Gate. Nor could it be a monster—monster blood didn't run red, and since no living creature could survive inside a Gate, it couldn't be an animal's either. It was human blood, beyond any doubt.
It isn't old.
She rubbed at the blood that came away on her fingers, not yet dried.
Had the information simply never reached her? It was entirely possible her bodyguard had been dropped in here too—landed somewhere else, been attacked by a monster, and gone into hiding to survive.
Swallowing drily, Baek Yeo-eul slipped inside, killing every trace of her presence as best she could. The bloodstains made it easy to track where the person had gone. Following the trail to a basement whose door had been half torn from its hinges, she drew a dagger from inside her vest and closed her hand around it.
Anyone who had bled that much was either unable to move or already dead from hemorrhage—the odds said so—but she didn't let her tension slip for a second.
The house didn't look especially old, but it had long been eaten away by the Gate, and the corroded stairs let out a creeeak the instant she set foot on the first step. She froze—but only for a moment. Even at that noise, not the faintest sound came from the basement. Baek Yeo-eul started down a little more boldly than before, and the rotting wood groaned again.
Before taking the last step, she pulled out her flashlight and swept the beam across the floor. The trail of blood that the darkness had severed picked up once more. Barely daring to breathe, she moved nothing but the flashlight, following the blood.
"……."
And then, at last, the beam came to rest on something that was not blood.
"…It's dazzling."
A parched voice drifted up through the dark. Gazing at the eyes blinking lazily beneath hair roughly disheveled and damp with cold sweat, Baek Yeo-eul recognized the man clutching his abdomen.
It's him.
The suited figure who had stood before the Gate with his back to the screen.
The United Kingdom's one and only S-rank Esper.
"Ugh…"
Jerry breathed out a groan heavy with pain. Every breath sent blood welling up from the wound in his abdomen. In the beginning he had at least gone through the motions of staunching it, but after realizing he wasn't going to survive this place, he simply watched it flow. Every time air rushed in, he felt it leak back out through the hole in his stomach—a deeply unpleasant sensation. Each inhale dragged the nameless ash and dust that filled the basement into his throat, where it clung and itched.
"Hrk—!"
The moment he coughed, blood surged back up as though it had only been waiting for the chance. Jerry muttered a low curse and scrubbed roughly at his mouth. He spat at the fishy tang of blood, and felt marginally better for it.
Dragged breath by ragged breath, Jerry leaned back against the wall and let his eyes blink slowly. It was his habitual way of putting his thoughts in order. With death staring him in the face, the life he had lived flashed before his eyes like a lantern show.
A wretched life, if you wanted to call it that. An unhappy one, if you preferred. And at the same time, an utterly ordinary one.
Jerry had grown up an orphan, and the moment he awakened as an S-rank Esper, he was hauled off into the nation's secret organization. He had been younger, at the time, than the youngest S-rank awakening ever made known to the world. The reason the world never heard of it was simple: he had been an unregistered Esper.
Because his ability was classified as high-risk, Jerry had been quite literally farmed, from an age before his sense of self or his convictions had ever taken root. The sum total of his childhood memories was his body and mind being oppressed, subdued, and restrained.
And Jerry had let the country use him. Gladly, even.
And then they stab him in the back like this.
David—the man paraded before the world as the United Kingdom's only S-rank Esper—had always regarded Jerry as a rival, and in the end he had baited a trap and dropped him into a Gate.
With a gaping hole bored through his abdomen.
Of all possible times, it had been less than half a day since he'd been injected with Suppressants over the risk of a rampage, so he hadn't managed even a single act of defiance before being thrown in. The Suppressants issued to Jerry were low-grade stock that circulated through backroom deals—harsh on the body, demanding a full day of rest to recover from.
"You were fated to die young. You should have died back when you were a child. Tsk."
"Ha."
So that was the line that surfaced, right at the edge of death. Jerry burst into a short, dry laugh.
He was surprised at how ordinary his death turned out to be. He'd always assumed he would be used until he fell apart, then be made a test subject for Suppressant experiments on the brink of rampage, and die mid-rampage.
But now that death had come right up to him, the pain, if anything, was growing fainter.
Creak. Creak.
The noise reached him. Jerry had come down those very stairs making that same sound himself, and even through his dulled senses he could tell that someone was descending into the basement, wound tight with tension. Had they sent a person to confirm the kill? Or perhaps it was a monster drawn by the scent of blood.
Out of habit, his hand closed around the blade tucked inside his coat—and then, acknowledging that he was going to die either way, he let the strength drain out of his body.
The approaching noise stopped without warning. Jerry registered that the thing—monster or something else entirely—had halted at the final step.
Then, with a soft click, a single beam of light poured into the pitch-dark basement. The light traced the blood he had spilled. It drew closer and closer, until at last it spilled across Jerry's face. He spoke to the figure whose face he couldn't make out for the glare.
"…It's dazzling."
With that languid smile that never let anything show, as always.
The glare dimmed. And with it, the face behind it gradually emerged. She had been so tense she was barely breathing—but it seemed she had realized Jerry was human.
Black eyes met his. Dark pupils that gleamed with startling clarity even in the pitch-black basement. The kind of eyes that seemed as though they might drink in every shadow around them and make the darkness their own.
"……."
Jerry was startled—though not a flicker of it showed on his face.
The scent drifting faintly from her was a familiar one. Jerry realized that the person before him was a Guide.
Unregistered Espers like Jerry—kept around purely to be used—were never granted the luxury of a Guide. Instead, they were issued pills that produced an effect much like guiding. Nobody knew what the pills actually were. Only that narcotics were mixed into them, and that they addicted you, slowly.
You knew all the while that someday you would crave them more—and still, addicted to that feeling of calm, you found yourself wanting the next pill.
In all his life, watching countless Guides come and go, Jerry had never once thought he needed one.
He had his pills, after all. And Jerry, who had never intended to live long anyway, was one of those who emptied them into his mouth without sparing a single one.
He swallowed a ragged breath. His shoulders heaved irregularly as his breathing quickened. A body already destabilized by the Suppressants had held out right up until it crossed into the Gate—and there, it simply gave out.
Even knowing he would rampage soon, Jerry was calm. More than the hollow punched through his belly, it was the pain slowly tightening around his heart that he was fighting to endure, and it had reddened the rims of his eyes.
"…Hey, you."
A voice so languid it raised goosebumps rippled quietly through the dark.
"Don't just stand there staring… Come here."
Instinctively, Jerry stretched out his hand toward the Guide standing before him. Even with his reason dimming at the edges, he looked so utterly at ease that no one would have believed he was a man on the verge of a rampage.