Not Quite Heaven
Seo Joo-hwan clicked his tongue at the sight of the five twenty-kilogram sandbags dangling from the harness. This was Do Geon, after all — the man who had calmly squeezed off shots even with a combined hundred kilograms of sand strapped to his body.
Now Do Geon had cast off even the harness, leaving it dumped carelessly on the floor, and sat with his eyes closed, concentrating. It was the first proper focus he had managed in two full hours of training.
Do Geon's ability was Cutter, the power to command the wind. Only high-ranked Espers ever possessed it — and in truth, even among those, its holders could be counted on one hand. Wielding the wind at will took years, and the odds of ever getting there were vanishingly slim.
But for the one who did come to rule the wind lay a realm no one had ever touched.
The dungeons inside Gates were notoriously unforgiving terrain. Every Gate passed through three stages: the first, when the Gate had only just been born; the second, when it could spawn monsters within; and the third, when it could spawn no more. More often than not the stages arrived in random order rather than in sequence, and this particular Gate had been crossing over from the second stage into the third.
The catch was that certain abilities simply stopped working inside a dungeon — which meant not every Esper could set foot in one. Cutter, by contrast, worked anywhere that air existed.
A power in such high demand was that much harder to come by. The vast majority went to their graves without ever truly bending the wind to their will. Do Geon, however, had manifested at S-rank and made the wind his own within a single year.
And so the savage gusts that hammered against him felt anything but savage — to Do Geon, they were familiar, almost comforting. After a few deep breaths, he opened his eyes.
The instant his foot left the ground, the wind surged up beneath him, bearing his body into the air, sharpened to a razor's edge and trailing faithfully at his heels.
The human-shaped training dummy scaled its difficulty to the trainee's skill, and it moved at a speed that matched Do Geon's own, evading him with ease. It even sensed the flow of the wind, slipping past every blade he hurled as it whittled the distance down bit by bit — it had seen through Cutter's advantage at long range, and closing in was its counter.
Do Geon's eyes narrowed to slits at the dummy hurtling toward him at breakneck speed — and then he threw himself forward.
The dummy shot skyward at the same instant, and the two of them collided head-on in midair. Without a flicker of panic, Do Geon twisted his body and drove his foot into the dummy's abdomen.
Its midsection caved in, yet the machine never so much as staggered; the arm came around in a full swing, and the fist closed in a hair's breadth from Do Geon's nose. It was the very moment before the dummy's movement would freeze at the permitted approach range — a safeguard for the trainee's protection—
BOOM!
In a single flash, the dummy was smashed into the far wall. With a creaking grind, its writhing movements ceased altogether.
Seo Joo-hwan, who had been watching the session with bated breath, could only stare at the sight, dumbfounded.
Astonishingly, Do Geon's ability had grown even since the last time he'd seen it. The data-driven dummy had failed to read the flow of his wind. In a word, it meant Do Geon was manipulating the air so subtly that even a machine couldn't detect its presence — and in the middle of combat, no less.
He's changed.
Do Geon knew it, too.
Catching his slightly ragged breath, he looked down at his own palm. His wind drifted across it, nuzzling the skin like an affectionate pet vying to be noticed.
Until only recently, the dummy had sensed his strikes at the final instant and slipped away before he could take a vital point. The training he had kept up without fail since the age of fifteen — since the day he first learned to wield the wind at will — had only just begun to yield the faintest increments of progress.
By his own estimate, mastering this technique would have taken him at least another five years. Instead, Do Geon had attained mastery in the space of a single month.
And the only thing out of the ordinary in that span had been—
Contact!
—nothing but his contact with Guide Baek Yeo-eul.
"...Ha."
Do Geon scoffed at his own absurd hypothesis.
It wasn't as though they had spent hours in contact; he had merely held her around the waist for all of five minutes. Granted, guiding had been underway right up until then, so perhaps her power, left ungathered, had flowed into him instead. It had been a brief window in the middle of utter chaos — maybe she had been guiding him all along and simply hadn't felt it.
But guiding had never once amplified an ability. No Esper possessed such a power, and a Guide had exactly one gift: the power to soothe.
Absurd.
Scowling at the ridiculousness of it, he clenched his fist. The battle had ended mere moments ago, and his unspent adrenaline still crackled through him; the wind flailed at the hem of his shirt like a giddy child.
Even after all that violent movement, his slicked-back hair sat perfectly immaculate — so pristine it seemed to mirror its owner's exacting nature, and Seo Joo-hwan's skin crawled. Do Geon had just stilled the wind and was reaching for the weighted harness when—
"Director."
Someone strode in at a hurried pace — one of Do Geon's subordinates. The man bowed at the waist to Seo Joo-hwan before turning to deliver his report.
"What is it?"
"Guide Baek Yeo-eul has awakened."
At the report, Do Geon went rigid for a beat.
After fifteen long days, Baek Yeo-eul had awakened.
Is this heaven?
Baek Yeo-eul thought blearily through the fog in her head. She couldn't help it. The dazzling white ceiling and walls swimming into view, the white bedsheets — and, decisively, the snow-white hair scattered across the bed...
An angel?
She hadn't lived like a saint, but she hadn't lived like a sinner either — so apparently she had made it to heaven after all. Baek Yeo-eul tracked the movement of the angel's white head with her eyes. Then the angel sprawled face-down on the bed turned its head, and a face came into view. Gazing at skin so white it verged on pallid, she thought, so it really is an angel.
The bridge of his nose was sharply elegant, and unlike his pale face, his lips held a flush of life. Taken as a whole, he was a rarity among handsome men. Perhaps because his eyes were bound in a white blindfold, there was even something eerily otherworldly about him.
Wh-what kind of angel... looks that impure?
Come to think of it, do angels wear blindfolds to sleep?
If the goal was to look mysterious, it had succeeded — but the moment her eyes landed on that blindfold, Baek Yeo-eul's mood turned filthy. It was exactly the sort of blindfold a goddamn S-rank Esper would wear — the kind who bursts, uninvited, into the life of a C-rank Guide who had lived an ordinary, unremarkable life.
Something about it feels familiar...
She tried to claw the memory back, but her heavy eyelids won out, and she was on the verge of slipping under again when—
"...Ah."
Her eyes flew open, and the blank slate of her mind began to fill in, memory by memory: the rippling black haze; the power draining away through the fingertips she had fisted in someone's hair. And the arm locked around her waist — and the handful of white hair she had torn out by the roots.
"Guide Baek Yeo-eul! Snap out of it!"
Baek Yeo-eul's brow knitted for an instant.
Not a dream. Not heaven, either. And the instant she registered that the figure face-down on the bed was no angel but Han Yi-hyeon, that floating, heavenly sensation plummeted straight into the gutter.
"Esper Han Yi-hyeon, Guide Baek Yeo-eul — the results of your diagnosis... Huh?"
The one who had barged in without warning was Ha Yoon-seo, looking even more haggard than the last time Baek Yeo-eul had seen her. The two women stared at each other with identical expressions of bewilderment, trading a silent chorus of Huh? Huh? Huh?
The only difference was that Ha Yoon-seo's mouth kept falling open wider and wider. By the time her jaw had dropped far enough for a moth to sail straight down her throat, she clapped it shut with a strangled gasp.
"I-I'll re-re-report to-to my su-superiors! I'll g-g-go and re-report r-right away!"
Ha Yoon-seo bolted from the room before Baek Yeo-eul could so much as lift a hand. She was so fast that a single blink was all it took for her to vanish without a trace.
What's gotten into her?
Baek Yeo-eul cocked her head, then reached toward the table beside the bed. As luck would have it, today's newspaper lay there. April 29th. She rubbed her eyes and checked the date over and over.
...Fifteen days?
Fifteen days had passed. She had guessed a fair stretch of time had gone by, but never in her wildest imagination this long. A jolt of anxiety surged up out of nowhere.
Baek Yeo-eul frantically combed through the front-page articles.
S-Rank Esper Han Yi-hyeon — Who Is the C-Rank Guide Who Stopped His Rampage?
The Controversial C-Rank Guide — Still Unconscious?
A Modern-Day Cinderella. But Who Is She?
What is this?
She dug through every article from the front page back and skimmed the coverage of rival papers besides, but only the headlines differed — the message was identical in every one. The whole country was desperate to know the identity of that C-rank Guide.
And Baek Yeo-eul despaired, utterly and completely, over the fact that the C-rank Guide in question was her. She had expected to become a subject of controversy the moment she became the Guide of Han Yi-hyeon — an S-rank even among S-ranks — but facing it head-on was a hundred times more flustering than she'd bargained for.
...Should I run?
Skip the country in the dead of night?
Baek Yeo-eul gave the question genuinely serious thought. A Guide's work was relentless, so even when the money came in, there was barely any time to spend it. She had never been much of a shopper to begin with, and the lion's share of her salary went to delivery food and video games.
Which was how Baek Yeo-eul had, entirely by accident, accumulated quite a nest egg. She was mentally tallying her bank balance when she stopped mid-thought. Lifting her head, she found Han Yi-hyeon — awake since who knew when — bolt upright and staring straight at her.
"......"
"......"
Strangely enough, even with the blindfold on, Han Yi-hyeon's shifts in expression were easy to read. And right now, he was very visibly startled.
Blink. Blink. Baek Yeo-eul blinked.
He said nothing either; the only sound was the whisper of long lashes brushing against the blindfold. Strictly speaking, this wasn't their first meeting. But circumstances being what they were, the two of them — partners, no less — had never once managed a proper conversation.
"Um... oof!"
At that very moment, without a shred of warning, Han Yi-hyeon collapsed right on top of Baek Yeo-eul.