Juwon’s eyes began to tremble.
“You were wailing, ‘Jiyeon…!’ while we crossed Dowon Bridge, decorating the whole damn bridge with your vomit. And that certain senior happened to have just bought an expensive new car, so the next day you cried even harder while begging for forgiveness. I’m pretty sure getting that car cleaned cost you about a month’s salary.”
“Y-You… how the hell do you know that…?!”
“I’m not finished yet. Was it around January 2020? You picked some unidentified grass inside a Gate because there was a rumor it was good for stamina, ate it, and nearly made yourself impotent. Did you get that fixed? Does it still work?”
Juwon’s face instantly went from red to purple.
Those were humiliating secrets that only two people in the entire world had known: Lee Seunghyun, who was dead, and Lee Juwon himself. Secrets they had sworn to take to the grave.
Yihyun leaned forward toward the dumbstruck Juwon, who could only open and close his mouth, and smiled coldly.
“Now answer me, Juwon. Still feel like throwing your weight around as an Esper in front of me?”
“Hey, how the fuck do you know that? What bastard told you?!”
Juwon lunged forward as if having a fit and grabbed Yihyun by the collar. The strength of an S-Rank Esper lifted the slender Guide’s body slightly off the floor, but Yihyun didn’t even blink. Instead, he tapped Juwon’s arm as if the whole thing were merely annoying.
“Let go, asshole. You’re choking me.”
At that familiar low tone, Juwon’s pupils shook violently.
It was Baek Yihyun’s voice, but the cold pressure and arrogant air contained within it were chillingly similar to those of his dead superior.
Juwon’s grip went slack in a daze. Yihyun straightened his collar and gave him a crooked grin.
“Lee Juwon, if you died and then suddenly woke up one day in somebody else’s body, would you believe it?”
“…What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Right? That’s what I thought too. Makes no fucking sense. But fuck me, that’s exactly what happened.”
Juwon stared down at Yihyun as though looking at a madman, then seemed to regain his senses and clenched his fists.
“I don’t know where you heard all this shit, but don’t insult boss like that. Baek Yihyun, do you seriously want to fucking die today? Tell me where you heard it. Now.”
“You were originally supposed to be part of the advance team for the Gehenna Gate, but you got injured right before deployment and were dropped.”
Yihyun continued indifferently.
Juwon’s face went pale in an instant.
“You were making a huge fuss about turning a Gate core into an engagement ring, then touched a live core and burned the shit out of your hand. That’s why you couldn’t go, and I ended up going in without you. Hey, did you ever give Jiyeon that ring? Or did she dump you after finding out you nearly made yourself impotent?”
Juwon staggered backward, his expression now beyond fear and into outright shock.
“The idiot who gambled his life as an Esper just to make an engagement ring got nothing but bigger over the last five years.”
Yihyun jerked his chin toward Juwon’s right hand. Thanks to an Esper’s exceptional healing ability, only the faintest scars remained from the injury.
Yihyun fixed Juwon with a confident stare.
“Believe me now? Or do I need to tell you exactly where the mole on your ass is?”
The strength seemed to leave Juwon’s legs, and he collapsed straight onto the floor. His lips trembling, he stared fixedly at Yihyun’s face before murmuring in a shaky voice,
“…Boss? Are you really…… Boss Seunghyun?”
Shock, joy, and complete disbelief tangled together in Juwon’s eyes.
“Yeah, asshole. On the left side of your ass….”
Yihyun tilted his head impatiently, preparing to deliver the final blow.
“Aaaargh! Stop! Stop it! You really are boss, you are! I’m going to die of humiliation, so please just shut up!”
Juwon screamed and clamped both hands firmly over Yihyun’s mouth.
Yihyun frowned, roughly yanked the bastard’s hands away, then scrubbed his lips hard with the back of his hand as though thoroughly disgusted.
“That fucking hurt.”
“Boss, what the hell happened to you? Why did you have to show up in such a… such a scrawny little body?! Your old body was solid and packed with muscle!”
“You think I chose this? I opened my eyes and it was five years later, and my body was like this.”
Still seemingly unable to believe it, Juwon slapped himself across the cheek with a loud smack. He touched his rapidly swelling cheek in a daze, and at last his eyes filled with tears of certainty and overwhelming joy.
“Boss……!”
With tears of happiness welling in his eyes, the massive Juwon leaned forward to throw his arms around Yihyun.
But at that moment, he must have instinctively remembered the cold glare Seunghyun used to give him whenever he tried to cling to him, accompanied by, ‘Fuck off, asshole.’
Juwon abruptly froze with both arms suspended in midair.
He was so happy he could barely contain himself, yet he didn’t dare move any closer. The sight of that enormous man awkwardly frozen in place looked exactly like a huge dog watching its owner’s mood.
Yihyun raised an eyebrow at him as if he were pathetic.
Juwon meekly lowered himself back into his seat and swallowed.
“Hey, Lee Juwon. What the hell happened after I died? Do you know why Han Taeyun went to the research institute?”
At Yihyun’s question, Juwon scratched his head, still looking somewhat dazed.
“……No idea. It’s not like that bastard ever went around telling anyone anything. After boss died, I just lost my fucking mind and spent months drinking.”
Of course a bastard who had no interest in the Ability Bureau’s affairs wouldn’t know.
At Juwon’s confession, Yihyun grabbed his throbbing head.
“Tell me whatever you remember.”
When Yihyun’s gaze sharpened, Juwon swallowed dryly and searched his memories of that day.
“That bastard crawled out of Gehenna alone, barely alive. His mana was surging backward through his entire body like crazy, and everyone thought he was about to go into overload. The whole Ability Bureau went on emergency alert…….”
Juwon rubbed his forearm as though the memory still gave him goosebumps.
“Anyway, we’d all thought the Gehenna Gate was going to destroy the world, so we barely had time to celebrate when the notification came that it had been cleared. Because of Han Taeyun, even everyone who was off duty got called in. You know how it is. If that bastard goes into overload, that really is the end of the world. He was basically another catastrophe all by himself.”
“…….”
“But he slammed gravity down in every direction so no one could even approach him, sweeping everything in front of him away. Then suddenly, every trace of mana around him started getting sucked into his body like he was a black hole……. After that, he coughed up blood and collapsed. Everyone thought he’d died on the spot.”
Yihyun’s straight brows furrowed.
He could picture it even without having been there.
“But then he miraculously opened his eyes three days later and disappeared the moment he regained consciousness. A few days after that, he showed up at the research institute, blew the entire Ability Bureau away, and vanished.”
“So it was the research institute first, then the Ability Bureau Director.”
“Yes. After Han Taeyun disappeared, every member of his squad vanished with him. Then they reappeared a year later and formed an organization called ‘DUST.’ Anyway, those bastards took over an entire city, defeated the government forces, and kept expanding their territory. By now, they’re basically an independent country. I’ve also heard that crazy bastard travels from Gate to Gate looking for something…. There are endless rumors that he’s completely lost his mind.”
Juwon’s voice trembled.
“Everyone wonders about it. What the hell happened in there to make Han Taeyun turn out like that? Boss, what really happened inside?”
At Juwon’s desperate question, Yihyun narrowed his eyes as though staring at some distant mountain.
“Nothing much happened….”
His answer was indifferent, but Yihyun’s mind was already being dragged back to the heart of that hellish Gehenna Gate five years ago.
A Gate above SS-Rank.
Its rank alone made it a catastrophe, but Gehenna’s true horror had been its absurdly high level of mana contamination.
‘The difficulty was fucking brutal.’
The moment they stepped inside the Gate, mana poured over them like it was tearing their skin apart. They had to expend several times more power than under normal conditions just to move their bodies.
Even though the team consisted entirely of elite fighters, their strength was nowhere near enough, and the monsters kept coming without end.
‘One o’clock. Thirty targets.’
By the time Han Taeyun’s cold shout rang out, the ground was already drenched in their comrades’ blood.
Seunghyun gritted his teeth and drew up his mana. Because of the contaminated air, even attacks he would normally have unleashed effortlessly consumed enormous amounts of mana.
Their circuits screamed.
One team member after another fell.
And by the time they finally stood before the last boss, only two remained.
Seunghyun and Taeyun.
“The contamination level was so high that we burned through mana like crazy. There weren’t enough of us, and there were too many monsters. We were just unlucky.”
Yihyun finished speaking calmly.
But something still bothered him.
If the entire team had simply been wiped out because of the extreme contamination, the data the Ability Bureau was hiding was far too suspicious, and Han Taeyun’s rage had been far too immense.
‘Come to think of it, reinforcements were supposed to arrive back then, but they never did.’
“Boss….”
Juwon’s eyes reddened as he imagined the horrific battle hidden behind Yihyun’s brief recollection.
Yihyun lightly smacked him on the head and stood up.
“Hey, don’t cry. If you start bawling, security’s going to come barging in again. Anyway, this DUST or whatever it is, I’ll have to check it out myself. But before that… let’s do something about your fucked-up mana circulation.”
Yihyun roughly grabbed Juwon by the wrist.
Grumbling inwardly, he closed his eyes and concentrated. He refined his Guide energy with extreme precision and pushed it into Juwon’s chaotic mana circuits.
Yihyun’s cool, heavy guiding energy gently wrapped around Juwon’s rough mana and soothed it.
“…Haa. This really is your wave, boss.”
Feeling Seunghyun’s unique wavelength—the equivalent of a fingerprint among ability users—Lee Juwon bit his lip and held back his tears.
It was a refreshing, cleansing kind of guiding unlike anything he had ever felt from any Guide in the Ability Bureau.
“This should keep you going for a week, easy.”
When Yihyun released his hand, Juwon stared down at his own palm, still seemingly unable to believe what had just happened.