Yihyun’s cold, clear-cut answer changed the look in the Guides’ eyes. Baek Yihyun, whom they had once regarded with pity, had somehow shown them a real act of retaliation that they themselves had never even dared to imagine.
Just then, the sharp click of heels rang out from the cafeteria entrance. Jung Yura, the senior Guide known as the disciplinarian of the Guide Wing and one of the Ability Bureau Director’s closest confidantes, strode all the way to Yihyun’s table with an icy expression.
“Baek Yihyun, you can actually sit there and eat? The medical room is in complete chaos right now because of the Espers you messed up.”
At Jung Yura’s appearance, the Guides gathered around the table grew frightened and lowered their heads. Yihyun, however, merely clicked his tongue and stared straight at her.
“Messed up? From what I heard, they were showing early signs of going berserk from overwork. What kind of power would I even have to take down an Esper in the first place? Isn’t that right, senior?”
Jung Yura’s eyebrow twitched at Yihyun’s shameless smile.
“Ha! I heard you tried to kill yourself with pills. Is this some side effect from that?”
“Must be. After nearly dying and coming back, I started wondering why the hell I’d been living like such an idiot.”
“What? What did you just……?”
Jung Yura stared at him stupidly, as though she couldn’t believe her own ears. The Yihyun she knew would have been unable even to meet her eyes, mumbling in a voice barely above a whisper. This was the first time she had ever seen him raise his eyes at her with such obvious displeasure and talk back so clearly.
Caught off guard by Yihyun’s unexpected forcefulness, Jung Yura missed her chance to respond and could only open and close her mouth like a goldfish.
“You—you really have completely lost your mind. Fine, go ahead. Let’s see what happens to you.”
“Yes, you do that.”
The blatant annoyance in his voice made Jung Yura’s face flush red and blue with rage. In the end, she spun around with an angry huff and stormed away. For a moment, silence swept through the cafeteria as though someone had poured cold water over the entire room.
The sight of Jung Yura, who practically wielded absolute authority over the Guide Wing, retreating without managing a proper retort was nothing short of shocking. The surrounding Guides swallowed dryly as their gazes moved back and forth between Jung Yura’s receding figure and Yihyun, who had casually picked up his spoon again.
“…….”
Yihyun indifferently chewed and swallowed his food. However, his left hand, lowered beneath the table, had been trembling uncontrollably for some time.
It was the price he had paid for forcibly twisting the mana circuits of three A-Rank Espers throughout the morning.
The soul of an S-Rank Esper was still as fierce and sharp as ever, but Baek Yihyun’s body, which had to carry out its commands, was no sturdier than a thin glass cup.
‘Tsk, I only did that much and I’m already like this. What kind of goddamn sunfish body is this?’
To hide the trembling, Yihyun gripped his thigh tightly. Even as sensation began to fade from his fingertips, he forced himself to swallow his soup without showing the slightest weakness before the countless eyes watching him.
“He really has gotten weird. Did you see Senior Guide Jung Yura’s face?”
“Yeah. Serves her right. I feel like ten years of indigestion just cleared up at once.”
“But why did those Espers get carried out? I kind of want to learn how he did it too.”
“……Me too. I got assigned a bastard like Go Cheolsu today. He kept stroking my thigh during guiding. I was so pissed I thought I’d lose it.”
“Don’t even get me started. My assigned Esper is practically pathologically possessive. He even keeps me under surveillance because he’s afraid I might defect to the rebels.”
“……Still…… I heard the rebels treat Guides unbelievably well.”
Yihyun had been eating with the nearby murmurs as accompaniment when he suddenly noticed the surrounding voices drop a notch lower. At the word ‘rebels’ that followed, his eyebrow twitched.
“Right. Did you see that post on UnderArk? They say that on the rebel side, if an Esper so much as lays a finger on a Guide the wrong way, they’re disciplined immediately. Guiding isn’t forced either. It’s strictly contract-based. Completely different from here.”
Unable to listen any longer, Yihyun gave a disbelieving snort and cut in.
“Hey, are you guys naive or just stupid? What are rebels, in the end? An armed organization, aren’t they? You seriously think a bunch of bastards without even a proper national system are going to treat Guides well? If anything, they’re probably worse than this place. Don’t fall for their sweet talk.”
The Guides hesitated at Yihyun’s firm words. Minji, however, bit her lip and quietly objected.
“Still…… I thought it might be better than here. There aren’t enough Guides as it is, but instead of treating us better, they don’t even treat us like human beings.”
Apparently, the shortage of Guides remained a chronic problem for the Ability Bureau, just as it had been in the past. Even in Yihyun’s memories, there had only been three or four Guides for every ten Espers.
It was a distorted system in which a single Guide had to handle three or four Espers. The exhaustion created by that murderous schedule and the wounds left by abuse were written across the weary faces scattered throughout the cafeteria.
“They clamp down on us even harder because there aren’t enough of us. So we can’t run away.”
Minji raised a hand and fiddled with the black band wrapped around her neck. It was a choker with an unpleasant metallic sheen, something that did not exist anywhere in Yihyun’s memories. It resembled the vital checkers used to detect when Espers were going berserk, but it was far thinner and more sophisticated.
“What’s that?”
When Yihyun frowned and asked, every Guide around him flinched in surprise. Minji touched the seam of the choker with a self-deprecating smile.
“Maybe you don’t remember this either? They issued them to every Guide after the law was revised last year. The Ability Bureau calls them safety management devices for Guides, but they’re basically location trackers.”
“Location trackers?”
“Yeah. If we move more than a certain distance away from the Ability Bureau or head somewhere we haven’t been authorized to go, the control room gets an alert immediately. More and more Guides started joining the rebels, so they decided to put actual collars around our necks. At least the Espers’ vital checkers serve a purpose by warning people when they’re going berserk. These are just…… leashes meant to keep us from running away.”
Minji’s voice trembled. To Yihyun, the black chokers looked like living snakes constricting the Guides’ throats.
‘If there aren’t enough Guides, they should improve their treatment and give them a reason to stay. Instead, they decided to put fucking collars on them and manage them like animals?’
Yihyun instinctively felt around his own neck.
‘……I don’t have one? Right. This body never had anything like that.’
His fingertips met nothing but smooth, bare skin.
When Yihyun’s hand stopped, the gazes of all the Guides gathered around him simultaneously shifted toward his slender white neck. Even Minji’s eyes, which had been watching him with curiosity just moments earlier, turned cold.
Someone nearby let out a derisive laugh.
“Oh, right. Baek Yihyun wasn’t wearing one, was he? Guess the Ability Bureau Director gave him a special exemption?”
“Whether he’s an illegitimate son or a kept lover, it still means he’s got something going for him. We have to wear ticking time bombs around our necks like collars and work ourselves like dogs. Must be fucking nice.”
Yihyun frowned and muttered under his breath.
“Illegitimate son, kept lover……. They really mixed every filthy rumor they could think of together.”
The Guide sitting beside him overheard his muttering and deliberately added loud enough for him to hear.
“Who knows? The higher-ups keep everything so hush-hush. How are we supposed to know whether the Director keeps you alive because you’re related by blood or, like the rumors say, because you’re his favorite and he dotes on you? Either way, must be nice for some people to live comfortably without a collar.”
The lively mood from moments ago vanished, replaced in an instant by sneers and hostility.
Only then did Yihyun understand why Baek Yihyun had been so thoroughly isolated.
While the Espers treated Yihyun like an easy toy to play with, his fellow Guides regarded him as either a member of the privileged class or a fraud.
‘Baek Seungho, you calculating bastard. You isolated Baek Yihyun so completely he couldn’t even fucking breathe.’
The Guides began picking up their trays and leaving one by one. Even Minji lowered her head and hurried away.
Left alone at the table, Yihyun ran his hand over the back of his neck once more.
It hurt to realize that the Ability Bureau and the Allied Nations he had once fought to protect had deteriorated this badly—that they had made the enemy territory controlled by the rebels seem like paradise by comparison.
‘If Han Taeyun is their leader……. His personality might be fucking awful, but at least he was never the kind of bastard who could stand by and watch the weak get bullied.’
No matter how much Han Taeyun might have fallen into darkness over the past five years, Yihyun knew the fundamental nature of the man himself.
There was no way he would turn a blind eye to bastards sexually harassing Guides.
If what the Guides had said was true, then it meant Han Taeyun had built an order far more reasonable than the Ability Bureau’s atop the wreckage of the world he had destroyed.
Yihyun felt a strange tightness settle somewhere in his chest.
On top of his anger toward Han Taeyun, the tiniest seed of hope had begun to sprout—the hope that maybe that bastard was still the man Yihyun remembered.
***
There was still some time left before the afternoon guiding session.
Yihyun locked the waiting room door and collapsed into the chair in front of the desk. The trembling that had begun in his hands around lunchtime had now spread all the way up his arms.
“Haa, ……seriously, this fucking body.”
Irritated, Yihyun opened his inventory, pulled out a strawberry-flavored mana supplement, and downed every last drop.
A faint warmth gradually began to spread through his body, which had gone as cold as ice water. Only when sensation slowly returned to his trembling fingertips did Yihyun finally take out his terminal.