“What? Han Taeyun destroyed this place? Why?”
“You really did lose your memory, Guide…. It was a few days after the successful Gehenna Gate raid five years ago. The moment Mr. Han Taeyun came back alive, he completely lost it and stormed into the Ability Bureau Director’s office. He used gravity to wipe out both the Director and the Ability Bureau’s main building. We all thought we were going to die that day.”
The Gehenna Gate. That hellish place where he had detonated his core and died. He had definitely sent Han Taeyun out alive, and the bastard had gone straight from there to smash the Ability Bureau to pieces?
“Seonho, then the current Director took office after the previous Ability Bureau Director died?”
Seonho nodded at Yihyun’s question. Yihyun set down his chopsticks and swallowed the bitter taste lingering in his mouth. The wrinkled face of the former Ability Bureau Director, that old bastard, had come to mind.
That man had been a far more cunning hypocrite than Baek Seungho. Yihyun could still vividly hear the voice that used to speak while smiling benevolently and patting Taeyun on the shoulder.
‘Taeyun, your devotion will become a beacon that illuminates this world. Please, keep going just a little longer for humanity.’
Watching from the side, Seunghyun had barely managed to suppress a scoff.
‘Give me a fucking break. A beacon that illuminates the world, my ass. Fucking hypocrite.’
In truth, Taeyun had more options than he could ever need. The moment an EX-Rank appeared, the No. 1 spot in the world rankings became a foregone conclusion, and ability-user organizations from countries everyone had heard of practically wore down the border crossings trying to recruit him.
But Han Taeyun had never spared those sweet temptations so much as a glance.
Instead, he traveled with the spatial-movement Esper assigned to him by the Allied Nations, wandering from one supposedly impossible Gate to another all across the world. The Arctic today, a desert tomorrow. Behind all the praise calling him humanity’s savior, he was thoroughly used as the Allied Nations’ sharpest killing weapon.
‘That old bastard practically lost his mind trying to keep anyone from taking Han Taeyun away from him. Even sending him as support to Gates all over the world was ultimately just political posturing to show off, “We have a monster like this on our side.”’
What made it even more ridiculous was that there was no way Han Taeyun himself hadn’t known.
The bastard had been indifferent to whether they saw him as a tool or treated him like a commodity. The hollow affection the old man poured out to preserve his own power always bounced coldly off the wall Han Taeyun had built around himself.
That indifference only fueled the old man’s obsession. An EX-Rank so spotless it bordered on pathological. No matter how hard he tried, Han Taeyun could never be held in the palm of his hand, and the old man had been desperate to make him his somehow.
‘For someone that indifferent to go after that man first and choke the life out of him the moment he came back alive…….’
It couldn’t have been something he had done in a moment of rage.
‘What the hell happened inside that Gate?’
Yihyun frowned and searched his memories. He wondered whether Han Taeyun might have suffered some fatal mental attack inside the Gate. But no matter how much he thought about it, the pieces didn’t fit.
‘The final boss monster was definitely a physical destruction type. It didn’t use mental attacks.’
The Gehenna Gate was the kind that simply overwhelmed everything with tremendous force. It wasn’t a place that gnawed away at an Esper’s mind or showed them hallucinations.
That left only one conclusion.
It wasn’t the monsters inside the Gate that had made Taeyun that way.
It was the humans outside it.
“It must’ve been complete chaos back then, huh?”
Seonho nodded vigorously at Yihyun’s question.
“You have no idea. The Ability Bureau was practically paralyzed. It was literal hell. Gravity twisted, the ceilings collapsed into the floors, and the roaring was so loud we couldn’t even hear people screaming…. Most people managed to escape with help from the Espers, so there weren’t many casualties, but the building itself was just crushed out of existence. Every building you see here now was built from scratch afterward. But do you know the very first thing Director Baek Seungho did after taking office? He classified every last piece of Gehenna Gate data from the previous Director’s tenure. I don’t know if he was trying to cover up what happened, or if he was scared himself….”
Yihyun put down his spoon.
He could roughly picture what had happened.
The former Ability Bureau Director had incurred Han Taeyun’s wrath and died. Baek Seungho, newly appointed amid the chaos, seized power while simultaneously concealing the truth of the incident. And somewhere in that process, Han Taeyun turned the entire Ability Bureau against himself and became a rebel.
‘Which means you were either an accomplice, Baek Seungho, or at the very least you stood by and let it happen.’
The reason Han Taeyun became a rebel, the truth hidden in the data erased by the Ability Bureau, and Yihyun’s own bizarre situation of waking up again in the body of a Guide.
Every one of those tangled threads converged at a single point.
The ‘Gehenna Gate.’
When the bastard’s face came to mind, a dull ache spread through one side of Yihyun’s chest.
“Guide? Aren’t you eating? Your food’s going to get cold.”
Seonho’s voice snapped Yihyun back to his senses, and he picked up his spoon again.
“Ah, I just have a few things on my mind. Seonho, those classified records… how high does your clearance have to be to access them?”
Seonho’s eyes widened at Yihyun’s furtive question.
“Those? Guide, don’t even dream about it. As far as I know, you can’t even access them without the Ability Bureau Director’s official seal.”
Seonho waved his hands in vehement refusal. Yihyun nodded as though disappointed, but his mind was already planning his next move.
‘Then I guess I’ll have to raid the Ability Bureau Director’s office first.’
While Yihyun was lost in thought, Seonho glanced around before subtly leaning closer and adding in a quiet voice,
“But did you know this? Five years ago, that day, the first place Mr. Han Taeyun went before he blew away the Ability Bureau was our research institute. According to the security records, he went all the way down into the deepest levels beneath the institute. I’m dying to know what he saw down there that made him reduce the Ability Bureau to dust.”
Yihyun’s eyes flashed.
“Under the research institute? What’s down there?”
Seonho began tidying his tray, glanced around, and lowered his voice.
“That’s classified, so even I don’t know. And when Mr. Han Taeyun destroyed the Ability Bureau’s main building, the place disappeared without a trace in the explosion.”
Yihyun nodded. Of course. With that temper, there was no way Taeyun would have spared the research institute.
“……I only heard this from a senior colleague, but apparently the data from that underground laboratory came from a project the Ability Bureau and the Allied Nations were conducting in secret, and it was incredibly important to the higher-ups. That’s why there’s a rumor that a backup copy must exist somewhere.”
Yihyun’s eyes narrowed.
Even while the building itself had been reduced to powder, those records had somehow stubbornly survived?
‘…Then they might’ve shoved them somewhere underground in the newly rebuilt research institute.’
Yihyun smiled.
The records from five years ago that an enraged Han Taeyun had gone so far as to destroy in an explosion, and that the Ability Bureau had nevertheless preserved and desperately hidden away.
He needed to see them for himself.
“Seonho, this was seriously enlightening. I’ll make sure I repay you properly somehow later.”
“Ah, n-no! I’m not an Esper, so I don’t need guiding….”
***
Sitting in the Guide Room, Yihyun looked at the name displayed on the tablet.
[S-Rank Esper: Lee Juwon]
When the door opened and the man appeared, Yihyun nearly burst out laughing.
Lee Juwon.
Seunghyun’s former left-hand man, a Tosa fighting dog of a bastard who would charge through fire and water to carry out whatever he was told.
Seeing him again after five years, Yihyun found that his already vicious features had grown even more menacing, and his frame had become even bulkier.
Yihyun leaned deep into his chair and grinned. Juwon immediately furrowed his brow in displeasure.
“What the fuck, Baek Yihyun? You nearly die and come back to life, and now you’ve finally lost your damn mind? What the fuck are you grinning at?”
“Your face got even uglier. Been doing well? Sit down first.”
Yihyun jerked his chin toward the guiding recliner.
Juwon stopped dead and glared at him in disbelief. His expression practically screamed that he couldn’t believe Baek Yihyun, who had always lived as quietly as a mouse inside the Ability Bureau, was giving orders to an S-Rank like him.
“Have you actually lost your fucking mind….”
Just as Juwon started toward him, Yihyun abruptly released a burst of long-range guiding into the air.
It wasn’t simple purifying energy. A heavy pressure that violently shook an Esper’s mana circuits, along with a strangely familiar wave, wrapped around Juwon’s entire body.
Juwon instinctively shrank back and stumbled, then dropped into the chair almost before he realized what he was doing.
“I told you to sit down first. We need to have a little talk, don’t we?”
Yihyun stared directly into Juwon’s eyes and spoke in a low voice.
“I happen to know very well what happened on July 31, 2019, when you got completely shitfaced, clung to a certain senior’s car window, and puked while crying.”