If It's Han Yi-hyeon
No. Get a grip. You're a doctor.
Ha Yoon-seo had been a Guide. An E-rank Guide.
Having realized early on that she had no future as one, she promptly turned her ambitions toward medicine. The medical field welcomed her with open arms—low rank or not, she was still a Guide—and the government, for its part, was eager to find a use for E-rank Guides who were Guides in name and nothing more.
That was how a medical team built around Ha Yoon-seo and staffed entirely with E-rank and lower Guides came to exist. And so, still young, she became one of the department heads at the fifteen-story hospital in the heart of Seoul.
The word Ha Yoon-seo had heard most often on the way to this seat was tenacious. It was a nickname earned for her habit of achieving, without fail, whatever she set her sights on. She had punched through countless obstacles to get here—failing to overcome this one thing would be an insult to her own pride.
"Today, I will be delivering patient Baek Yeo-eul's diagnosis."
Her mouth was parched, her lips cracked dry. Watching Han Yi-hyeon hang on her every word, Ha Yoon-seo found herself seized by a fresh question. Who on earth is that woman, to have him this on edge?
At first she'd assumed Baek Yeo-eul was Han Yi-hyeon's unofficial Guide, but Baek Yeo-eul was C-rank. There was no way she could be his partner.
And so Ha Yoon-seo had deduced the most plausible answer.
That woman is Han Yi-hyeon's secret lover...!
She marveled at her own razor-sharp instincts.
Once she settled on that conclusion, the mystery solved itself. The hundreds of millions of won Han Yi-hyeon had poured out without blinking, the missions he refused to go on, the way he sat rooted at her bedside all day long, fidgeting with worry—all of it made perfect sense now.
"Patient Baek Yeo-eul is..."
"..."
"In other words...!"
"Pardon me for just one moment."
"Yes! Who is it? It must be urgent!"
With the feeling of having dipped one foot into a river of no return and yanked it back out just in time, Ha Yoon-seo turned toward the door.
She had died and come back to life. She pressed a hand to her hammering heart.
"Esper Seo Joo-hwan?"
Turning to welcome the visitor with open arms, Ha Yoon-seo caught sight of Seo Joo-hwan and her eyes went round as saucers.
"A pleasure to meet you. I'm Seo Joo-hwan, the assigned agent for Esper Han Yi-hyeon."
"I'm Ha Yoon-seo, the attending physician for patient Baek Yeo-eul."
Seo Joo-hwan greeted her with impeccable courtesy, as if he hadn't come bounding in out of breath mere moments ago. And as she returned the bow, Ha Yoon-seo knew: a savior had arrived to deliver her from this week-long hell.
Her prediction was not wrong.
"Given the circumstances, I'll beg your pardon."
Having asked her understanding, Seo Joo-hwan crossed the room in quick strides until he stood before Han Yi-hyeon.
"Han Yi-hyeon. You took off your watch?"
"..."
The silence was as good as a confession.
Seo Joo-hwan was very nearly ready to lose it. What did the man think he would do if Han Yi-hyeon rampaged, or some emergency erupted? With no way to monitor his condition, the other handlers had spent the past week worried half to death.
"What exactly do you plan to do if something truly catastrophic happens because of this? Hm?"
"I'll know before it does."
I'm losing my mind.
What made it even madder was that Han Yi-hyeon was never wrong. Somehow, impossibly, he always knew when a monster would appear that was nowhere on any schedule, and he was always the first one on the scene.
Which left Seo Joo-hwan with nothing to say.
It was a sorry state of affairs, the kind that had him ready to tear his hair out—but thanks to it, Ha Yoon-seo heard Han Yi-hyeon's voice for the very first time.
It was less gloomy than she'd imagined, less steeped in bloodlust, and younger. Early twenties, wasn't it? Hearing him speak certainly made his age feel real.
And secretly a rather lovely voice, at that.
She was still tilting her head over it when Seo Joo-hwan, while Ha Yoon-seo was lost in her own thoughts, leaned in and whispered low enough that only Han Yi-hyeon could hear.
"A monster's going to appear soon."
"I know."
"You know—!"
At that shameless reply, Seo Joo-hwan's voice rose before he could stop it. He caught himself, darted a glance at Ha Yoon-seo, and pressed on in a lower tone.
"You knew, and this is what you're doing right now? Are you kidding me?"
"...I was going to go."
Seo Joo-hwan didn't believe a word of it.
Not when longing dripped from every glance Han Yi-hyeon cast at Baek Yeo-eul. A ridiculous excuse like that? He'd have to be a fool to buy it.
Sure, the man possessed inhuman abilities, his social skills fell more than a little short, and he thought in ways ordinary people couldn't follow—but he was still only twenty-three. Having never properly navigated life in society, he was, against all expectation, childlike in certain ways, and word was that if you handled him just right, he'd come around.
"Guide Baek Yeo-eul is fine. Apparently her first field deployment a few days ago left some severe aftereffects. She couldn't rest properly because of it, and when the tension finally let go, that's what did this."
Seo Joo-hwan gathered himself and delivered it in a soft, coaxing tone—and Han Yi-hyeon, who hadn't been able to pry his eyes off Baek Yeo-eul, snapped his head up.
"Hyung, is that true?"
Well, well. So it's hyung only when it's convenient.
Seo Joo-hwan swallowed a bitter laugh at the sight of Han Yi-hyeon reaching for him only when he needed something.
"That's what I said. If you go deal with that monster and come back, the timing should line up roughly with when she wakes—"
A rush of wind swept past.
"...Ha."
Seo Joo-hwan exhaled a hollow laugh as he stared at the spot where Han Yi-hyeon had vanished in the blink of an eye.
The man's behavior flipped like a coin from one moment to the next, and it was absurd—but Seo Joo-hwan had seen plenty of Espers imprint on someone in his time, and he decided to let it slide.
And then—
"Mmm."
The instant Han Yi-hyeon, who had been glued to her side for a solid week, disappeared, Baek Yeo-eul woke up as though she had only been waiting for the chance.
BOOM! A thunderous crash shook the air.
"That monstrous bastard..."
Someone's hollow mutter drifted through the air, and the B-rank Espers—renowned names in their own right—agreed with a passion.
Like a fish finally in water, Han Yi-hyeon left his mark on everything he passed. He was a monster, plain and simple. More astonishing still, he was fighting those unruly monsters right now on raw physical strength alone, without touching his Esper ability at all.
They had answered the emergency summons in a single bound, only to be greeted by this sight. To be fair, the Grade 5 monsters Han Yi-hyeon was facing weren't especially troublesome opponents—all hulking size and monstrous strength, with the intelligence of a kindergartner.
But the sight of Han Yi-hyeon taking on five monsters at once without a shred of Esper ability was more than enough to shut the mouths of B-rank Espers hailed as geniuses wherever they went.
Skreeee!
"And he's not even rampaging while he does it. Incredible."
Only after putting down two of them did Han Yi-hyeon finally use his ability. His power was none other than hallucination—and its peculiar twist was that pain suffered inside the hallucination was felt in reality, exactly as inflicted.
And so the monster, its body utterly unmarked, collapsed shrieking—a grotesque cry drenched in agony. The ability itself was astonishing, but the fact that he'd exerted himself like that without a single rampage was even more so.
"He's not going to rampage today, is he?"
"Don't jinx it."
Even as he scolded his comrade—what-ifs had a way of coming true, after all—the B-rank Esper knew perfectly well that Han Yi-hyeon wasn't the sort to be devoured by his own what-ifs. He usually used his ability far more liberally than this; the worry was pointless.
"Say, does Esper Han Yi-hyeon have some urgent business today?"
Someone remarked it while watching a monster go sailing off into the distance. And true to the observation, Han Yi-hyeon did look impatient. There was extra force packed into his fists, unrestrained and unpolished, until his movements looked almost sloppy.
"Does he? He just looks even more like a monster than usual to me."
But only a sharp-eyed few had noticed. To everyone else, he looked like the same old monster he always was.
Han Yi-hyeon had always been quick to wrap up his missions. Normally he would cooperate with the B-rank Espers, but today he gave no one so much as a sliver of an opening to join the fight. A few of them realized it then: all this time, Han Yi-hyeon hadn't been cooperating with the B-ranks at all—he'd been letting them in, doing them the favor of a place on the battlefield.
It stung their pride. But not one of them voiced the complaint, because the plain truth was that missions ran far more efficiently with Han Yi-hyeon working alone.
And what could anyone do about it anyway? Han Yi-hyeon was a chosen monster.
"Oh, right—I heard a rumor, actually."
The B-rank Espers were on standby in case anything happened, but they had leisure enough to trade gossip.
"My partner let this one slip, see... Apparently a Guide compatible with Esper Han Yi-hyeon has turned up."
"What?"
Han Yi-hyeon's Guide history was one of the most well-worn topics of conversation among Espers. It couldn't be helped—Guides were scarce enough as it was that Espers were forced to share partners with one another.
And yet this one man, for no reason other than being S-rank, cast off in under a month the Guides assigned to him once every three months. From where the other Espers stood, it was the height of spoiled ingratitude.
"Don't tell me that's why he looks even more monstrous today?"
Because he got Guided?
It held up. Han Yi-hyeon didn't match with just any Guide—and now, out of nowhere, a perfect match had appeared? He brought to mind a fledgling Esper who'd received Guiding for the very first time and gone half-wild, unable to contain the surge.
"Then what rank is this Guide supposed to be?"
"Uh... the Guide's rank?"
Unfortunately, the Esper who'd started the story only knew what his own partner had heard secondhand, so the details were beyond him.
"He wouldn't even match with Seo Ji-ah, and she's an A-rank Guide..."
"Then, don't tell me..."
S-rank?
The two looked at each other, and the same thought struck them at the same instant. Then they burst out laughing—PWAHAHA! Decades had passed since the world's first S-rank Esper appeared, and in all that time, not a single S-rank Guide had ever emerged.
Most experts the world over maintained that A-rank was the ceiling for Guides—that anything beyond it simply could not exist. And so the two of them wrote their own thought off as absurd.
An S-rank Guide? A Guide, S-rank? You might as well claim Espers have an SS-rank—at least that'd be more believable! So does that make Han Yi-hyeon an SS-rank Esper, then? PWAHAHA! Ha... haha...
Their uncontrollable guffaws gradually died down.
"...If it's Esper Han Yi-hyeon, it just might."