A blizzard rages.
The wind is so strong it’s hard to even stay upright, and the feeling in my hands and feet had disappeared long ago. With every ragged breath, I can feel my lungs freezing little by little.
The path I walk is a thorn-strewn road of ice.
The wind, as if it held every ounce of the world’s chill, lashes at me violently. With every step forward, sharp frost cuts at my skin, and the blood seeping from the wounds crystallizes into bright red shards that scatter into the storm.
Even so, I pushed forward desperately.
Because I could not stop here—at the end of this path was my damned esper.
“Vasily Kairov!”
I screamed his name until my throat nearly tore, at the faint silhouette visible in the distance.
An esper who had trapped himself inside a massive glacier. Once his rampage began, everything around him instantly turned to ice.
Even the monsters could not approach and froze solid at the mere attempt. The fact that I, his guide, was still alive proved that some sliver of Vasily’s consciousness remained.
Clenching my teeth, I forced myself to keep walking.
Vasily Sergeyevich Kairov.
A Russian S-class esper, wielder of ice. From the first day he was recruited into Korea, he set a monstrous record—single-handedly clearing dozens of gates that had opened across the country. At a time when the rapidly increasing gates had become unmanageable, people hailed him as a savior, a ray of light.
But reality was different.
Vasily was a cold-blooded man whose emotions themselves seemed frozen. Around him, corpses were always piled high, and the places he lingered reeked with the stench of blood. The ice born at his fingertips only destroyed everything in its path.
He immediately removed any obstacle that stood in his way. Civilians, espers, even Association officials. From what I knew alone, dozens had died by his hand.
The only reason I had survived at his side until now was because I was the sole guide able to endure his waves. But to him, I was nothing but a consumable. A crude disposable item that would eventually break.
Maybe that was why—he always dragged me into the gates with him. He forced weapons into my hands, made me fight monsters, and when it was over, pressed me down with merciless guiding. No matter how much I refused, ran, resisted, the outcome was always my defeat.
I couldn’t understand him, and he couldn’t understand me. For the rest of our lives we would never understand each other, only hate. That much, I was certain.
Today, too, I had accompanied him to attack a gate, and as always I was tense.
The atmosphere was even colder than usual. It wasn’t hard to guess why. Because I had told him that once this gate was cleared, I really would quit being his guide.
Vasily had brushed it off as if I’d said something useless, but in his head he must have recalled my past attempts to break the contract. Maybe that was why the ice that assaulted the monsters today was unusually violent.
As always, Vasily froze the gate in an instant, and in the end defeated even the boss lurking at the lowest floor. I barely managed to pull together my body, exhausted from fighting monsters.
“…Guide Kwon Gidam.”
A voice reached me quietly from afar. The tone was colder than usual, settled into an icy calm.
“Are you truly going to quit being my guide?”
Instead of answering, I slowly raised my head to look at him. Reading the answer in my silence, Vasily murmured softly.
“I see. So that’s how it is.”
With that, Vasily fell silent. The waves around his still figure began to ripple unevenly. By the time I realized something was wrong, his rampage had already begun.
“Ugh…!”
The closer I drew to him, the fiercer the storm became.
Once his rampage started, a blizzard surged with the force to freeze the entire world. The only saving grace was that this was inside a gate. Had it not been cut off from reality, the whole Earth would have been frozen solid.
I somehow reached him and collapsed before his feet. Perhaps unable to withstand the deepening cold, every sense in my body had gone numb.
But I could not give up, not after coming this far. With the last of my strength, I stretched my arm forward.
Thunk—the ice touched my fingertips.
‘…Can guiding even pass through the ice? I can’t tell with no sense left.’
I lifted my head, thinking.
If guiding worked, maybe Vasily would come back to his senses. Clinging to that faint hope, I stared at him, but the man imprisoned in the ice did not open his eyes.
“Ha… haha…”
A laugh slipped out in despair. The ice at my fingertips began to swallow my arm as if refusing to let me go. My legs were already frozen, and my numbed hands couldn’t even feel the cold anymore.
My body froze rapidly. The ice spread from my fingers up my arm and reached my chest in an instant. The chill seeping deep into my lungs choked me. My blood vessels froze, my heart slowed.
My vision grew hazy. My body no longer obeyed. Time itself seemed frozen, the world at a standstill.
“Vasily…”
As my consciousness dimmed, I thought—
If I returned to the past, I would never again become his guide.
***
“Hhhup!”
I drew in a sharp breath and my eyes snapped open.
The first thing I did was check my body. The numbness in my frozen hands and feet was gone. The blizzard had stopped, the chill vanished. When I inhaled, warm air filled my lungs.
Warmth. As if spring had come.
‘Where am I?’
Staying prone, I cautiously raised my head.
“Ah…”
I’d braced myself, scanning my surroundings nervously, but what entered my sight was a familiar studio apartment. Relief and emptiness washed through me at once, draining all strength from my body. But unease followed quickly.
When had I escaped the gate? That had been a situation with no possible rescue. And this place—this was the studio I’d lived in before awakening as a guide.
—Beep-beep-beep.
Only after my tension ebbed did I notice the noise blaring nearby. I’d thought it was a warning siren, but it was just a smartphone alarm.
I reached for the phone to silence the distraction. And froze. It was the model I’d used years ago. And when I dismissed the alarm, the lock screen displayed the date—
“Six years ago.”
My brow furrowed on its own.
That’s when I realized. This was a dream. Waking in the old studio I’d long since moved from, the phone reverting to my old model, the strange date on the screen—all of it was a hallucination as I died.
It must have been the result of the wish I made in my last moments. They called this kind of thing the final flicker of life. Realizing that, all the strength left my body.
“Haha…”
A hollow laugh escaped me. Even if I vowed never to be Vasily’s guide again if I returned to the past, nothing I did in a dream would change reality.
I would die alongside Vasily inside that gate. Once I died in reality, this dream would end, and my family would bury an empty coffin without ever finding my body.
“So this is how I die…?”
I murmured, running a trembling hand down my face.
Ha, my life really was pathetic. To be matched with a lunatic like that, suffer endlessly, and die.
Before I awakened as a guide, I never imagined my fate would twist this way. I had been a normal twenty-year-old in Korea, just entering university. If I had known that awakening late as a guide would ruin my life, I would have done anything to avoid meeting Vasily.
“No point regretting now.”
I was already Vasily’s exclusive guide, awaiting death inside the gate.
I’d always known I’d die because of him. Vasily was the first and only esper insane enough to drag a guide into gates, and I was the first and only guide to enter. I could never forget the horrified looks I got walking into gates beside him.
“But for a dream, this feels way too real…”
I lay on the bed, glancing around the room. Laundry tossed everywhere, the kitchen half-cleaned, the worn pajamas I had on.
“…”
This was truly strange.
I sat up with a jolt.
Dream or not, could it really feel this vivid? The things I used to own were all in the exact places I’d left them, and my senses were crystal-clear. When I pinched my cheek, pain stung sharply.
Don’t tell me… I really went back?
From some day onward, gates had begun appearing worldwide. Espers awakened to special powers, and guides arose to rein in their rampages. With so many unexplainable phenomena that defied modern science, maybe this wasn’t impossible.
I thought hard, face grim. For all the world’s madness, no one had ever claimed to regress. Following Vasily around, I’d overheard all kinds of top secrets, and I was sure of that. But what if I was the first?
And I had something no one else did.
I was the first guide to ever die inside a gate.