The Past I Cannot Remember
That was how it was. When you can't grasp the situation, the best move is to keep your mouth shut until the other party reveals more information. I stayed silent and simply looked at the Advisory Chairman. He spoke.
"Tell me, Professor Kyo. How much do you remember?"
"I'm not sure."
At my vague answer, the usually stern-faced Advisory Chairman let out a small chuckle. It seemed to mean I should stop playing games and tell the truth. So that trademark sneer of Yoo Hee-won's was inherited from her father.
"If you truly couldn't remember anything, you wouldn't have come here."
I still couldn't read the Advisory Chairman's intentions. If I had been the one probing first, it might be different, but since he was the one asking how much I remembered, I couldn't speak carelessly.
"Listen, Professor Kyo. No... Grey Steel."
"You know my callsign."
"Of course I do. How could I not?"
The Advisory Chairman slapped his knee with a loud smack and laughed quietly.
"It looks like you've at least figured out that Han Tae-woo and Seo Ji-ah were on the same team."
Han Min-ha's parents' names... As expected, this man was from Secreto. And both I and Han Min-ha's parents had been part of Secreto as well. What I had seen in the archives that day wasn't some absurd delusion. It was real.
"Speak, Suhyeon. How much have you remembered?"
At some point, the Advisory Chairman had switched to casual speech, and the way he addressed me had changed.
"The fact that you're not answering probably means you don't trust me. After all, a powerful figure from a secret organization is pressing you about your past."
He had accurately read my inner thoughts. The Advisory Chairman slowly took a sip of his tea.
"But trust me. Only then can I tell you what you want to know."
"And what exactly do I want?"
"Those strange dreams you keep having. Information about them."
For a moment, I strengthened my Mental Barrier even further. Could he be using mind reading? I'd heard that among heroes, there were extremely rare cases of people with such abilities. It was only a rumor, but since heroes' special powers manifested in such unpredictable ways, it wasn't impossible. However, I had the ultimate defensive technique known as the Mental Barrier. This Mental Barrier could block any kind of mental damage coming from outside. And most importantly, I hadn't felt any kind of attack at all. That meant the Advisory Chairman had already known for some time that I was having these dreams. But I had never told anyone about them. Just how... did the Advisory Chairman know about this?
"It must be disconcerting. The fact that I know this much."
"Dreaming is a common thing."
"But regularly dreaming about falling meteors while screaming in agony isn't so common, is it?"
Damn... He knew everything. Seeing my expression, the Advisory Chairman spoke in a low voice.
"I've shown you that I know this much and have laid all the information on the table. Now tell me everything, Professor Kyo Suhyeon."
"First, let me ask one thing. Was I part of Secreto?"
"You were."
"I see..."
The Advisory Chairman already knew everything about me. He was the only one who could tell me about my past. And there were many things I wanted to ask him. To do that, I would first need to answer his questions.
I told him everything.
About how strange text had suddenly appeared when I met Han Min-ha. How my Mental Barrier had nearly collapsed when I heard her parents' names. How that had triggered the strange dreams I kept having. How, while investigating her parents to help resolve her issues, I had seen that vision in the archives. And how I had learned that her parents had once been on a team with me in the past.
The Advisory Chairman remained silent without interrupting until I finished speaking.
"That's all."
"I see."
The Advisory Chairman lifted his teacup, realized it was already empty, and stood up. He instructed through the intercom on his desk to bring more tea, then sat back down on the sofa.
"How is Han Min-ha doing?"
"Didn't you hear everything from your daughter?"
"No. That child hardly ever talks to me about academy matters. Aside from asking me to pressure the academy into letting you choose her as your student, she has never called me."
Right, as expected. That incident had been Yoo Hee-won's doing.
"So, does Han Min-ha really not know how to operate her aura at all?"
"Yes. I don't know the exact problem, but I can only assume it's because of her parents' disappearance or death."
"I see. A reasonable assumption. And you intend to make a girl like that into an S-class hero..."
The Advisory Chairman rested his elbow on the armrest and rubbed his temple with his fingertips.
"Then now please tell me what I want to know."
"I will. But before that, I have one question for you as well."
"Yes."
"Are you satisfied with your life as a professor?"
A question whose intention I couldn't read. The proper responses to such a question were either to stay silent or laugh it off.
"Haha. Well..."
"Hm. I see."
The Advisory Chairman didn't seem particularly bothered by my ambiguous answer.
"Alright, Kyo Suhyeon. Since I expected you would be curious about your past and that it would cause you various difficulties, I suppose it's right to tell you everything here."
Just then, an employee brought in fresh tea. This time it wasn't the hot tea from before, but a cool green tea. After taking a few sips to moisten his throat, the Advisory Chairman began to speak.
"Right after you graduated from Graford, you joined Secreto. We picked you because we thought a hero specialized in defensive techniques that no one paid much attention to would have high utility."
"I was a supporter."
"That's right. Your role was to protect the team members from behind. And as you know, you formed a team with Han Tae-woo and Seo Ji-ah and worked with them for quite a long time."
So far, this was roughly what I had guessed. Nothing particularly surprising. I stayed quiet and waited for the Advisory Chairman's next words.
"Unlike other teams, the three of you were extremely close. If someone who didn't know you saw you, they might have thought you were blood siblings. But for some unknown reason, when Han Tae-woo and Seo Ji-ah died, the team was disbanded."
"So Han Min-ha's parents... weren't missing. They were dead."
"Obviously. If that weren't the case, why would a survivor's pension have been paid to that child?"
"But... you said for some unknown reason. Does even the Management Bureau not know what happened?"
"Isn't that obvious? If we knew everything, we would have immediately wiped out every single villain hideout."
This was disappointing. While looking into my past, I had wanted to know what had happened to Han Min-ha's parents and, if they had died, how they had died.
"The Management Bureau still hasn't figured out exactly what it was that left your team completely helpless. But since you've started remembering things, there's something we can check."
"You want me to tell you about the situation at that time. I'm sorry, but I don't remember that."
"Seeing the body cam footage might jog your memory."
Yes, that was right. Heroes always wore body cams on their suits. They were used for various purposes: recording mission performance, determining fault if civilian casualties occurred, analyzing villain combat patterns, and establishing countermeasures. The videos I had shown the freshmen during basic evaluation were all body cam footage from dead heroes. Han Min-ha had fainted after watching them. She must have thought her own parents had died in a similar way and been shocked by it. If there was footage of Han Min-ha's parents' final moments, it would be valuable enough. Of course, my own body cam footage would be there too. There was nothing to lose by watching it.
"I'll take a look."
The Advisory Chairman brought over a laptop and placed it on the table. He inserted a password module into the USB port, scanned his fingerprint, and went through several layers of security procedures to access a system I had never seen before. It was probably Secreto's secret system. From there, the Advisory Chairman navigated through a complex path, entering multiple passwords and authentication keys before accessing a certain folder. It was a folder categorized by video files. They were body cam recordings documenting Secreto's secret operations.
"Something this important... is it okay to keep it as digital files?"
"What, should we make old-fashioned video tapes, write out charts by hand, and store them in an underground bunker? It's the flow of the times."
"Ah, yes."
The Advisory Chairman entered a subfolder, scrolled down, and stopped at a particular file. The filename only had a date written on it, with nothing else filled in. The thumbnail was just a black background with 'TOP SECRET' written on it. There was no way to guess its contents at all.
"There are three videos in total. Watch them carefully and try to recover your memories."
The Advisory Chairman opened the first file. The laptop screen showed a rugged mountain range covered in snow. It was a bird's-eye view. The peaks and ridges raced from the top to the bottom of the screen, suggesting they were in flight. Then a crackling radio sound could be heard.
The moment I heard that voice, the vision from the archives came to mind. It was Han Tae-woo, Han Min-ha's father.
That was her mother, Seo Ji-ah.
And that was my voice. It sounded a little unfamiliar hearing it through my own ears, but the callsign was correct. It was definitely me.