Don't Go, and the Coup
Baek Yeo-eul's eyes flew wide open at the sudden shock.
"E-excuse me. Excuse me? Esper Han Yi-hyeon?"
She jabbed her index finger into the back of the man who had collapsed over her, swaddling her like a blanket. All she felt was dense, unyielding muscle; Han Yi-hyeon didn't stir in the slightest.
Is he dead?
The stray thought sent a chill down her spine. Baek Yeo-eul hastily trained every nerve she had on him, and thankfully caught the soft rasp of his breathing, the steady thud of his heart beneath it.
Wait. Then that means…
"He's asleep?"
On top of me?
Baek Yeo-eul murmured the words blankly. Absurd as it was, that wasn't the issue. The real problem lay elsewhere.
Does he want to kill me?
Was this revenge for being saddled with a partner — a mere C-rank Guide foisted upon an S-rank Esper?
Baek Yeo-eul pondered the question in complete earnest. There was no other explanation. On a bed this vast, this roomy, the only conceivable reason he had insisted on collapsing squarely on top of her was to crush her beneath his body weight and suffocate her to death.
And heavy? He was far, far too heavy. As the seconds crawled by, Baek Yeo-eul's face grew slick with cold sweat. She groaned and strained her arms with everything she had, but Han Yi-hyeon, predictably, didn't budge an inch.
He stood well over six feet even at a glance, and his body was more muscle than she'd ever given him credit for — there was simply nothing Baek Yeo-eul, freshly awake from a fifteen-day coma of all things, could do about it. But a premonition seized her that if she lay like this any longer, she'd be back in a coma before Ha Yoon-seo ever arrived, and she squeezed out every last drop of strength she'd possessed since the day she was born.
Nothing changed.
For all her thrashing, Han Yi-hyeon slept on, peaceful as could be. Baek Yeo-eul looked down at her own arms, spasming from the effort of summoning strength she didn't have. Past spasming, they had graduated to trembling helplessly, like a newborn fawn.
It was do or die.
Baek Yeo-eul grabbed the hair at the back of Han Yi-hyeon's head and yanked.
"Come on…! Wake up!"
His head rose, brushing his shaggy bangs aside, and she caught the faint crease that bent his straight brows. The moment she realized this actually worked, Baek Yeo-eul stretched her arms back as far as they would reach.
Sure enough, the weight pinning her down eased. Hope blooming, Baek Yeo-eul broke into a radiant smile.
"Hrk—!"
But the embrace only tightened, and her strength gave out entirely. Baek Yeo-eul would honestly rather have blacked out. At this point he was without a doubt just waiting for her to suffocate.
"W-wait…."
She tried addressing him while held rigid, but every movement only drew his arms tighter around her, like a snare closing on a trapped animal.
Why is he this strong?
Baek Yeo-eul felt her soul trying to leave her body under that monstrous grip.
Sniffle.
…Sniffle?
Sniffle.
Sniffle?
She hadn't misheard.
Baek Yeo-eul, who had been glancing around in bewilderment, turned to stare at Han Yi-hyeon. Damp. Her shoulder was. Crying. Han Yi-hyeon was.
She was the one who ought to be crying right now — yet the man holding her hard enough to crush her was the one shedding tears. Struck speechless by the absurdity, Baek Yeo-eul couldn't manage a single action. Then, right at her ear, Han Yi-hyeon began to mumble something.
"…Don't. Don't go. Don't leave."
Attaboy?
One of Baek Yeo-eul's eyebrows climbed skyward. Just how deep asleep was he, to be sleep-talking this blissfully? With the crushing weight eased somewhat, she gave up struggling altogether — and even went so far as to answer the stream of mumbles pouring out of him.
Uh, uhh, yes, of course. I'm not going anywhere. With you holding on like this, who could possibly get away? Yes, yes, I'm not leaving. Can't leave. Wouldn't manage it even if I wanted to.
She let every muscle go slack, sprawled however she happened to land, and waited for Ha Yoon-seo to come.
The door burst open — right as Han Yi-hyeon, still deep in sleep, nuzzled his forehead against the nape of her neck. The sensation tickled, and Baek Yeo-eul hunched her shoulders as high as they would go.
"Esper Han Yi-hyeon is probably in there with her as wel—"
The Ha Yoon-seo she had been waiting for and waiting for had finally arrived. The problem was that she hadn't come alone. The crowd that came pouring in as one heaving mass caught sight of Baek Yeo-eul and Han Yi-hyeon and, as though bound by some prearranged signal, froze mid-step all at once.
Baek Yeo-eul's face, which had gone soft with relief at the thought of being saved at last, hardened in an instant. She swallowed hard. Then, seizing the tuft of Han Yi-hyeon's hair that was still nuzzling her nape and tugging it with an iron grip, she forced out the most resolute tone she could muster.
"…This is a misunderstanding. Just a misunderstanding."
It is not what any of you are thinking, so kindly do something about those expressions first.
According to Ha Yoon-seo, Han Yi-hyeon had simply collapsed because he hadn't slept properly once in the past fifteen days.
Baek Yeo-eul didn't know what to do with that. What exactly was her relationship to Han Yi-hyeon, that he had gone fifteen days without sleep watching over her?
A family member he'd lost as a child, perhaps? Or had someone left something in his care concerning her? No — wait. Did she resemble a lover who had died or gone missing? Was she the stand-in now, destined for the discard pile the moment the real one reappeared with a mole by their eye?
Baek Yeo-eul cycled through one theory after another as she recalled how it had taken several burly men piling on before Han Yi-hyeon could finally be pried off her. She felt as though she'd just speed-run a season's worth of morning melodramas.
"Guide Baek Yeo-eul."
At the low voice addressing her, Baek Yeo-eul turned her head without thinking, her spine snapping ramrod straight. There stood Do Geon.
Confronted anew with Do Geon's infuriatingly superior face, Baek Yeo-eul recalled what she knew of him. Born the treasured son of a chaebol dynasty and risen to a senior executive seat purely on his own merit, he was, by Baek Yeo-eul's private definition, the flawless specimen of a 'genius born with money and connections.'
And handsome on top of it all.
As if that weren't enough, he'd been born an S-rank Esper, rare ability included. Men like him lived in a world of their own.
"How is her condition?"
Do Geon drew Baek Yeo-eul's gaze fully to himself, then turned to Ha Yoon-seo, who had finished the blood work and detailed examinations the moment Baek Yeo-eul came to. The doctor rifled through her chart.
"She's in such good health it's hard to believe she was ever comatose."
Ha Yoon-seo looked faintly disgruntled, as though she herself found the result rather astonishing.
To be precise, Baek Yeo-eul had already spent a week in a coma before the fifteen-day one, meaning she had been unconscious for over three weeks in total. And yet, all things considered, she was remarkably healthy — healthier, in fact, than in her most recent medical records from three months prior. Baek Yeo-eul herself found it strange that, aside from a slight weakness, her body felt exactly as it always had.
"You mean she is fit to hold a conversation?"
"More than fit."
The instant Ha Yoon-seo finished declaring her more than fit — positively overflowing with health, in fact — the crowd that had come swarming in filed back out in step with a single gesture from Do Geon.
"Huh?"
Ha Yoon-seo was included in that exodus. Utterly oblivious, the doctor was swept up in the tide and carried out along with the rest. Baek Yeo-eul blinked, nonplussed by the sudden turn of events.
"What we are about to discuss is classified."
Fortunately, Do Geon resolved the question for her.
Baek Yeo-eul willed her tension-stiffened body to loosen. But alone in a room with a high-ranking superior she would never in ordinary life have so much as laid eyes on — how was the tension supposed to fade? With the pack of suits that had packed the examination room gone, the hollowed-out space made it sink in at last: she really was alone here with Do Geon.
"How much do you know about the Anti-Government Army?"
"The Anti-Government Army, you mean…."
Her inscrutable superior's question came utterly out of left field, but Baek Yeo-eul calmly retraced what she'd been taught during her trainee days. In any society, however peaceful, an opposing faction is a given — and with monsters surfacing and all manner of events unfolding that no one a century or two ago could have imagined, an army standing against the government was only inevitable.
The Anti-Government Army, which had forever stood opposite the government and marched through the years alongside it, had exactly one goal: abolish the practice of grading human beings, and hand the powerless a greater share of opportunity. In a nutshell.
"From what I was taught, it's a gathering of people with no abilities who can't be bothered to work hard but still want to get rich."
Baek Yeo-eul laid out the Anti-Government Army as she'd learned it. Do Geon's expression didn't shift so much as a hair from before. Doubting her own memory, she opened her mouth cautiously.
"Was I wrong?"
"That is correct. But the Anti-Government Army of today is different."
Baek Yeo-eul was puzzled. Everything she knew about them dated from her training five years ago, before she had qualified as a Guide. Information on the Anti-Government Army had never been readily available to begin with, and across those five years nothing of any real consequence had happened in connection with them.
"As you may know, the truth is the Anti-Government Army was never a major force until a few years ago. Little more than an occasional nuisance."
Until a few years ago?
The phrasing made it sound as though they had since grown immensely powerful. But contrary to Do Geon's words, the Anti-Government Army had been feeble, and those so-called nuisances had amounted to nothing more than organized protests.
"And then, at some point, it all stopped. Cut off, just like that."
Back in her school days, she used to catch snippets of adult conversation on the bus to and from class. The Anti-Government Army was staging some protest or other again. That was already the umpteenth one this year, apparently.
But even that had ended five years ago and was heard no more. Having never spared them much mind to begin with, Baek Yeo-eul had simply assumed the rumors dried up because she'd stopped caring.
Five years ago — the change that came over the Anti-Government Army was…
"A coup."
Baek Yeo-eul lifted her head as though something had just clicked, murmuring the word.
The change was simply this: a coup had erupted within the Anti-Government Army itself, and the faction in power had been replaced. In truth, more people were unaware of that incident than aware of it.
The moment any article appeared, it was gone in under a minute; on the community forums, any post mentioning certain keywords was deleted on sight. It had been the dead of night at the time, which was the only reason the whole affair could be buried so quietly. Because of these strange occurrences, a rumor spread among the Guides — strictly underground, strictly whispered.
"We shall purge the corrupted government and raise a new one in its place."
That, so the whisper went, was the goal of the Anti-Government Army's new leader.