Leaning against the window of the Guide Room, Yihyun took a sip of coffee packed with ice. Outside the window, the Ability Bureau’s massive, hypocritical glass palace still glittered beneath the sunlight.
Bzz—.
The terminal in his palm vibrated lightly. Yihyun’s gaze grew serious as he checked the screen. It was a message from Minji.
[Yihyun, except for the people aligned with Jung Yura, most of the Guide Wing has decided to cross over together. Everyone except those on duty today is already on the move. The ones on duty are going to leave as soon as their shifts end, so the Ability Bureau shouldn’t notice anything for now.]
A mass escape by the Guides.
A faint curve appeared at the corners of Yihyun’s lips.
But Minji’s next message made his brows furrow.
[And I don’t know if we should call this incredibly lucky, but somehow ‘DUST’ found out about our movements and contacted us first. They offered to provide us with an escape route and safe houses, so I think getting out will be much easier.]
‘DUST contacted them first?’
But he soon found it understandable. Hadn’t Juwon clicked his tongue before and said DUST spies were scattered throughout the Ability Bureau? On top of that, after Ho Yeonwoo’s prison break, the control room and security team had to be completely preoccupied with finding him. It wouldn’t have been difficult for DUST’s collaborators on the inside to take advantage of the opening.
Even so, Yihyun couldn’t completely let go of his instinctive wariness. There was still a slim chance that this was a trap set by the higher-ups or Baek Seungho to round up all the Guides attempting to escape in one sweep.
Worried, Yihyun hurriedly typed out a reply.
[They could be government informants disguised as DUST, or this could be a sting operation by Security. Don’t act rashly. Thoroughly verify whether the person contacting you is really trustworthy. If they pick up your trail, it’s over immediately, so be careful.]
Several minutes of uneasy silence followed. Yihyun fidgeted with the condensation-covered coffee cup as he stared anxiously at the screen. At last, the display lit up, and another long message from Minji arrived.
[Thank you for worrying about us. But you really don’t have to. Do you know who the rebel contact who approached us is? He used to be a member of the squad under Esper Lee Seunghyun. He even knows the classified codes that were only used back when you were a squad leader, and Esper Lee Juwon confirmed his identity too. He says he really is someone we can trust. Thank you so, so much for getting us out of this hell. You have to cross over too. We’ll be waiting for you.]
The moment Yihyun read the message with his own eyes, his heart dropped heavily in his chest.
“…….”
Minji’s words of gratitude didn’t even register.
The tips of Yihyun’s fingers trembled faintly around the terminal.
‘A squad member who served under Squad Leader Lee Seunghyun.’
Just like Juwon, another one of his precious subordinates was still alive.
A dull ache spread through one corner of his chest. Emotions he had buried surged up uncontrollably.
‘You were alive and well…….’
***
The clock in the Guide Room had long since passed shift-change time. One of the Guides who remained in the room muttered irritably,
“Those little shits are getting way too lax. It’s already been twenty minutes. Where the hell is everyone, and what are they doing?”
She belonged to Senior Guide Jung Yura’s faction and, more specifically, was the leader of Guide Team 4, notorious for being the most coercive of them all.
Clang―!
The heavy door was thrown open roughly, and a fierce-looking Esper strode inside. He was an A-Rank Esper who had come for his scheduled guiding session.
“What the hell? Why is nobody here?”
The Esper frowned as he looked around the empty Guide Room. Before he could even understand what was happening, a piercing emergency signal suddenly blared from both the emergency speakers mounted on the wall and the watch strapped around his wrist.
Weeeeng―!
The Esper hurriedly checked the screen of his watch, and his face instantly went deathly pale.
[Emergency Alert: Large-scale DUST air raid detected in Sector U-03.]
Sector U-03, a strategically vital military area where many of the Ability Bureau’s key assets were concentrated, was under attack.
“An air raid? Fuck, why did it have to be our jurisdiction?!”
Cursing, the Esper hurriedly rushed out of the Guide Room. In an instant, the entire corridor shook with the pounding footsteps of Espers mobilizing for emergency deployment.
At that same moment, Yihyun crossed the research institute lobby and reached its highest floor, looking down through the glass at the people frantically moving out for deployment.
On the terminal in his hand, the coordinates of DUST’s air raid overlapped with the Ability Bureau’s internal alerts.
‘DUST made its move.’
To allow the Guides to escape all the way to the border without interference, DUST had drawn the Ability Bureau’s forces out to the front lines.
Juwon, who had approached his side at some point, chuckled quietly.
“Boss, their timing couldn’t be better.”
“Yeah. We should take advantage of this opportunity and start moving too.”
Yihyun held a gold-tagged access card against the reader at the restricted area on the top floor, and the massive steel door slowly slid open.
But beyond it was not a laboratory.
There was only a single private elevator.
It had no numbered buttons, only a blinking downward arrow.
After riding it down for what felt like a long time, the doors finally opened, and cool, damp air rushed over them.
“…What the hell is all this?”
Yihyun’s brows drew together.
Inside enormous glass cultivation tanks lining the corridor, grotesquely twisted Gate monsters—Corrupts—were submerged in pale bluish culture fluid. At first glance, it looked like an ordinary monster research laboratory, but the data sheets attached to each tank contained chilling terms such as human compatibility testing and fusion rate.
And on one wall hung a current map of the Allied Nations.
The moment Yihyun saw the countries marked on the map and the accompanying list of nations, he realized that they were countries connected to this secret underground research facility.
When he carefully pulled open the massive door at the end of the corridor, they finally found what Kim Seonho had told him about—
‘the server room where a backup copy might still exist.’
A gigantic supercomputer emitted a constant low hum, while incomprehensible figures and complex streams of data flowed endlessly across dozens of monitors.
“Boss, do you understand what any of this means?”
“No. Not a damn thing. This isn’t my field. If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve kept Yeonwoo around a little longer.”
Yihyun reached toward the keyboard, but Juwon hurriedly caught his wrist. His eyes sharpened as they turned toward the entrance.
“Boss, someone came in.”
“An Esper? I mean, are they an ability user?”
Juwon read the faint vibrations in the air, then shook his head.
“No. Their energy is weak. Seems like an ordinary person… They’re getting closer!”
“Hide.”
At Yihyun’s command, the two hurriedly threw themselves toward the large cabinets lining the wall. Yihyun slipped easily inside thanks to his slender body, but Juwon, built like a brown bear, had to squeeze and contort himself into one with a muffled groan.
A moment later, rhythmic footsteps approached, breaking the silence.
Through the narrow crack in the cabinet, Yihyun could make out the silhouette of an employee wearing a white lab coat.
The employee walked up to the main computer with practiced movements, then held the identification chip hanging around his neck against the terminal.
[Authorized. Security clearance verified: Level 4.]
With the mechanical announcement, the monitors came alive, displaying elaborate interfaces. The employee hurriedly began typing, while Yihyun held his breath and stared intently at the man’s back and the title of the document that had just appeared on the screen.
The employee moved through several folders with practiced ease and opened a file.
Through the crack in the cabinet, Yihyun saw a title far more academic and clinical than the rumors Seonho had told him about.
[Gate Rank Adjustment Project: Report on the Feasibility of Rank Adjustment Through Corruption-Level Conversion]
‘Gate rank adjustment…?’
To an Esper, a Gate’s rank was an absolute guideline and an ironclad rule that had to be obeyed. If a dungeon’s rank differed from an Esper’s by even a single level, the survival rate of the personnel deployed to the scene dropped to a fraction of a percent.
And they had manipulated those ranks artificially?
Yihyun’s brows furrowed deeply.
In an instant, the sensations of the hellish Gehenna Gate from five years ago swept through his entire body.
On paper, it had definitely been SS-Rank.
Elite personnel from the Allied Nations had been deployed, and Han Taeyun had been among them, so mathematically, clearing it should have been possible.
But the pressure and mana corruption he had felt inside had been so absurdly high that they made a mockery of the SS-Rank classification.
‘Could it be… that it wasn’t actually SS-Rank?’
No.
Perhaps they had officially designated it as SS-Rank on paper while the Ability Bureau had artificially created a hell with a corruption level far beyond that.
An experiment in creating specific environmental conditions to amplify corruption, break through the boundaries between ranks, and push Espers all the way to their limits.
‘Those bastards know better than anyone how much the price of a life changes with a single difference in rank….’
Perhaps the Ability Bureau had knowingly sent fifteen elite agents to their deaths just to obtain data from their cores as they burned themselves out through overload, desperately struggling to survive.
Yihyun’s heart rate surged.
He clenched his faintly trembling hand into a tight fist, shaking with rage.
The employee opened a prompt window against the black monitor screen and began entering complex commands with practiced hands.
[Esper Rank Adjustment Pro—]
[ERROR / CORRUPTED DATA]
Before the sentence could fully take shape, the folder appeared on the screen along with an error message.