Full Moon (2)
Full Moon (2)
Baek Ha-na collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
The whole thing happened in an instant.
But the moment something went wrong with Baek Ha-na's body, my own body reacted at the same time.
"Baek Ha-na."
I caught her in my arms before she hit the floor and called her name, but there was no response.
'......She's awakening.'
The body in my arms was growing warmer.
Her parted lips let out breaths that came faster and faster.
"So... this is happening."
From time to time, I'd let myself think—maybe... just maybe, meeting me might let this small girl live an ordinary life instead of becoming an Awakened.
But this world, it seems, refuses to allow that kind of variable.
"Baek Ha-na."
"Nngh, nnngghh..."
She wasn't responding to my call.
Still, it seemed she hadn't completely lost consciousness.
I wanted to lay her down in bed immediately, but she collapsed the instant the full moon radiated that pure white light.
So for now, I simply held her in my arms and waited until the moon returned to its original color.
Perhaps because it had expelled that light rather than merely shifting color, the moon, stained white, couldn't hold on for even five minutes before fading back to its original dull hue.
Thud—
I closed the window, went straight into the bedroom, and settled her onto the bed.
Most Awakened manifest their abilities upon awakening without any side effects. But some—those with exceptional or uncommon powers—experience symptoms when they awaken. Fever, like Baek Ha-na. Hallucinations. Chills.
That knowledge came from research done after I possessed this body, and from what remained in 'Baek Woo-jin's' memories.
'The power to kill a god.......'
If I'd expected that kind of power to awaken quietly, well, that was my own foolish hope.
Her temperature kept climbing. Her breathing grew more ragged.
Lowering her temperature was the priority.
Using mana would be simple enough, but mana that passed through my will took on a different nature from ordinary mana.
That was why I'd avoided manipulating it in front of Baek Ha-na until now.
More than anything, awakening was a process of becoming an Awakened from an ordinary person. During that process, their mana sensitivity awakened, and their body began to take in ambient mana.
You absorb pure mana, blend it with your own nature, and develop innate mana of your own. Soon, Baek Ha-na would enter that stage.
If my own altered mana seeped into her body during that stage, she'd end up a half-wit who couldn't recover mana on her own and had to take her deficient mana from me.
If she were going to live as an ordinary child, a girl, a woman—that wouldn't matter.
But now that her abilities have awoken, I'm going to raise Baek Ha-na as a proper Awakened.
That's my duty as her guardian.
That's Baek Woo-jin's purpose, the one who wished for the happiness of a girl named... Baek Ha-na.
'First, I need to bring this fever down.'
Baek Ha-na had already broken out in a cold sweat and begun to whimper.
I lifted my hand from her forehead and moved to get off the bed.
But.
Squeeze—
"Nngh, nnn..."
"......"
A small, pale hand—still so small to me—clutched my sleeve tightly.
It would only take a moment. The briefest moment away.
But even knowing that, I couldn't bring myself to remove her hand.
"Don't... go..."
"I'm not going."
I sat on the edge of the bed and brushed back the sweat-drenched strands of her hair.
Her forehead brushed against the back of my hand—it felt like a lump of fire—and the cold sweat trickling down soaked her shirt.
"Woo-jin... nnngh... ngh..."
"Yeah."
The grip on my sleeve tightened.
Her temperature was still rising. It had to be painful.
And through that pain, she kept calling my name.
"How long do you plan on acting like a child."
She's almost an adult.
After brushing her hair, I laid my hand across her forehead.
Six years since I opened my eyes in this body.
It was a pathetically short span—a blink—compared to the infinite lifespan of this body, but my ruined vessel had recovered to a tolerable degree.
'I'll take... the heat.'
I wasn't stealing anything grand.
I was merely borrowing a little heat from one girl.
Had her power fully awakened, it would have been impossible. But while she was still in the process, taking her body heat was something even I could manage, undeveloped as I was.
"Haaaa... ngh, nnggghh..."
I didn't need mana.
-What I needed was solely my own desire.
"Kkghhh... haaah... woo... jin..."
Snow-white hair.
Eyes that could look fierce.
A body that had grown up so well.
And yet inside, a girl whose heart was still that of a pure child.
She wasn't text on a screen.
She was alive and breathing right in front of me.
-Primal desire.
'Absolutely.'
I will see the end of this story adorned with this child's smile.
And I'll witness and record the whole journey—memories solely mine, shared with no one.
-Concretization of will.
'Anything unnecessary to that journey... I'll carry it myself.'
A fierce heat streamed from her damp forehead into my hand, my palm pressed against it.
"Haaah, haaa... haaah... nnnngh..."
Baek Ha-na's ragged breathing gradually began to steady.
That forehead, burning like fire, cooled as well, little by little.
"Tsk......"
Because this heat wasn't from an illness like a cold or body aches, the fever I stole from Baek Ha-na affected me in turn.
Fortunately, my body isn't ordinary, so enduring it wasn't a problem—but the real issue was that I'd have to keep siphoning this heat the entire time she was finishing her awakening.
Besides that, I could already feel a subtle fatigue accumulating in my soul rather than in my physical body—the cost of using an Authority in my current state.
"Nnnnggh... Woo-jin..."
The girl who'd been clutching my sleeve had turned on her side at some point, hugging my arm completely now.
The residual heat and the dampness of cold sweat did not feel particularly pleasant.
"Always so full of energy, never catching the tiniest cold... and now I see you were saving it all for this."
Oblivious to my condition, Baek Ha-na's face had already relaxed into peace, her lips pursing slightly.
It was just a little annoying, so I lightly pressed her cheek, now missing its baby fat.
"Mmnng~"
Her soft cheek dimpled under the touch, and Baek Ha-na smiled sleepily.
What could be making her so happy.
Then and now, she remains someone I understand, and yet don't.
Fwooh— Fwooh—
Steady breathing rose from right beside me.
Her fever episode, mercifully, didn't last long.
Exactly two hours.
"This much... well, at least it ended calmly."
I'd worried that after the heat fever, she might lose herself, assimilated into that beast of hers—but luckily, there was no seizure of that sort. Instead, Baek Ha-na's body now held innate mana it hadn't possessed before, along with an unfamiliar power that unsettled me.
I kept watch for two more hours, on guard against any delayed fit. But as of now, she was drooling in deep sleep—so deep someone could carry her away and she wouldn't know.
"Indeed......"
"Nngg~"
That dumb-looking face suits her.
If she frowned, it only made her eyes look fiercer.
"Hehe."
"......Or maybe she looks a little too stupid."
When I gently stroked her cheek, she let out a wide, gap-toothed smile.
It was only tolerable because the base model was a beauty.
After spending a moment simply looking at her face, I turned and leaned back against the bed.
Physically, I hadn't pushed myself that far. But using the Authority had left my meager soul deeply exhausted.
'I suppose I'll have to write the log after I wake up.'
It's the kind of thing that shouldn't be put off, but the fatigue pooling in my soul wasn't something I could overcome with my body.
I wasn't fond of the way my hand grew damp in her grasp, held like a doll, but right now, both mind and body screamed at me that rest took priority over solving that.
My eyelids grew heavier.
Through my narrowing vision, I angled my eyes slightly downward for one last look at Baek Ha-na's face.
Her sweat-drenched hair was mussed in every direction as she lay passed out, with a slightly goofy expression.
Swish—
I didn't fight my closing eyes. With my free hand, I brushed her disordered hair back once.
-Wanting you to show that face... only to me. That would be greedy of me, wouldn't it.
My consciousness faded away.
**
"Schlrrrrp...?"
Baek Ha-na sucked up the drool that had spilled from the corner of her mouth and opened her eyes.
"......Huh?"
Her body felt gross, yet weirdly full of energy. And she could see a familiar man's hand in front of her.
"Ah......."
A few seconds passed. Baek Ha-na had been staring at Baek Woo-jin's hand when she let out a small sound and slowly straightened up. She didn't check her own body first—instead, she looked at Baek Woo-jin, who was asleep with his back against the bed's headboard.
'It wasn't... a dream.'
She'd lost consciousness the moment the white moon flared with light.
But Baek Ha-na remembered everything that had happened while she was out.
She was sure she'd been unconscious, yet somehow she'd heard, seen, and felt it all like a vivid dream—from a perspective looking down at her own collapsed body.
As if she'd turned into a ghost.
"......."
"......."
Baek Ha-na stared at Baek Woo-jin, who looked as if he were dead to the world.
Moaning in the grip of the scorching heat, calling Baek Woo-jin's name over and over—that was deeply embarrassing. But what Baek Woo-jin had murmured at the end was so shocking, it made her forget the embarrassment entirely.
As that warm, large hand brushed back her hair, the low, quiet words that slipped out.
'He said he wanted me... to show that only to him....'
Whoosh—!!
A blazing red heat burst across Baek Ha-na's face.
The flush was far hotter and fiercer than the fever Baek Woo-jin had stolen away with his Authority.
"Augh...."
Her heart pounded—Boom! Boom!—as loudly as if she'd just run laps around the garden.
A tight, stuffy feeling filled her chest.
It was a different kind of tightness from what she felt when she saw Claire and Baek Woo-jin together.
At the same time, Baek Woo-jin's actions while she'd been lying there flashed rapidly through her mind.
The hand that had tidied her sweat-soaked hair.
The broad palm that rested on her burning forehead.
The fingers that, with a hazy smile, had pressed her cheek.
And then.......
The touch—so full of affection—that gently smoothed down her disheveled hair.
"C-Cleaning... no, I should wash up first...."
Clutching her chest, which pounded as if it were malfunctioning, Baek Ha-na carefully climbed off the bed.
Would he be disgusted by the drool soaking the blanket cover?
Did her body and clothes, drenched in cold sweat and now dried, give off a smell?
Things that hadn't bothered her in the slightest before were now making her acutely self-conscious.
Growl—
"...F-First, I should at least eat something."
Of course, eating still came first. That hadn't changed at all.