Episode 10
āEnough with this pointless stakeout everywhere.ā
āYeah. Let’s accept that it really was just beginner’s luck.ā
āTime to activate Plan 2.ā
Yeongwon came up with a new plan.
It was thanks to the unexpectedly useful information she had gotten, information that everyone else apparently knew except her.
She happened to get it from the Ranker chat room she secretly checked before going to bed. It was basically a chat room full of old-timers.
[Baek Yul (ES2): Is that nephew of yours who hates guiding holed up in the annex?]
[Lee Chang-gyeol (EA7): Yeah, Hyeon is still here. Why?]
[Baek Yul (ES2): Hey, nephew. Answer your friend.]
[Baek Yul (ES2): Answer me, over. The old lady is calling you. If you don’t answer, you’ll get a spanking.]
[Baek Yul (ES2): Look at the chat, answer your phone, reply to the messenger, do SOMETHING, you little punk. Are you even alive?! Your sickly old auntie is personally offering to see your face!!! In this country of courtesy and respect, how can you be this hopeless? Do you know how to respect your elders?! You little brat!!]
[Lee Chang-gyeol (EA7): Hmm?]
[Lee Chang-gyeol (EA7): LOL]
[Lee Chang-gyeol (EA7): Yul, are you trying to pick a fight with me right now?]
[Lee Chang-gyeol (EA7): I’m in the annex too. If you’ve got time, come to my office.]
[Lee Chang-gyeol (EA7): Let’s have a nice little reunion face-to-face after all this time.]
[Baek Yul (ES2): No thanks, no thanks. I don’t like old men.]
[Baek Yul (ES2): Scary.] Boo-hoo.]
Was this really a conversation between a woman in her very late thirties, whose job was department manager, and a male friend of the same age whose job was also department manager?
Was this the arrival of a new normal in 21st-century South Korea?
Yeongwon was thinking about that when she suddenly had an incredible realization.
The “Hyeon” who hated guiding and was staying in the annex was Kim Yeo-hyeon himself.
Now that she thought about it, there was no way it could be anyone else.
The department manager at Yoryeon unni’s team, the one who gave me soda at the Incheon pier, is Kim Yeo-hyeon’s uncle!
The next day, Yeongwon woke up even earlier than Yoryeon.
Then she went to a cafe outside headquarters that opened at six in the morning.
She bought not only the hand-drip coffee Yoryeon had given her before, but also a cookie set.
She emptied practically all the living expenses she had been given as a trainee.
She bought enough for roughly the number of members in Emergency Response Team 2, based on the number Yoryeon had casually mentioned.
Yeongwon was truly desperate.
“What is all this, Yeongwon? You bought all this for our team to eat?”
“Haha. Unni, just for a moment. Could I really see the department manager? Just for a moment?”
“Our department manager?”
“Yeah. Just ten minutes. No, five minutes.”
And after receiving various kinds of help from the Emergency Response Team 2 employees who had eaten her somewhat inappropriate offering, Yeongwon managed to get an opportunity to knock on the department manager’s office.
Knock, knock.
“Manager Lee Chang-gyeol, hello. I’m Guide Shim Yeongwon. We met once before, remember?”
Yeongwon put the thickest possible shameless face on.
For this strategy, shamelessness and smooth talking were more important than physical stamina.
“Oh, yes. Unselected… Guide Shim Yeongwon?”
“Yes. That’s me.”
“What can I do for you? Come in.”
The stakeout strategy has been abandoned.
It was time to move on to the next stage.
Another way to meet the VVIP.
Drop in by parachute and land gracefully right in front of him.
“What can I do for you?”
“Well…”
Round two had begun.
The long, pathetic, desperate conversation that went around and around through countless stages will be skipped.
To summarize it, Yeongwon tried giving an extremely long and passionate speech to Esper Lee Chang-gyeol.
She figured that, as someone from the center, he would naturally have a strong sense of responsibility and want to keep an unselected guide tied to the center.
So she decided to appeal to that sense of responsibility.
She mixed her desperate desire to fulfill her role as a guide, the sad circumstances of being an orphan, and her admiration for Yeo-hyeon, then launched into a long speech.
“…In the same way, the person who saved my country and blessed my life by saving me has become the light of my unfortunate life, and… [omitted] …Therefore, if I could meet Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon in person, I feel that I would want to remain at the center forever as an unselected guide.”
“I can’t believe it. Guide-nim, you really are a person of excellent judgment.”
Manager Lee Chang-gyeol was an even more serious case of a nephew-obsessed fanboy than Yeongwon had expected.
So Yeongwon didn’t stop.
“Yes, exactly! I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t praise the greatness of Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon as much as we do.”
“Exactly. Our Hyeon really is very cute and pretty. I’m so glad you recognize that so well!”
Cute… pretty…?
His hands were certainly more elegant than any beautiful hands I’d ever seen in my life, but calling him cute and pretty overall is… quite a stretch…
Yeongwon desperately pushed down the rebellious thoughts rising inside her.
At the same time, she desperately repeated the words of the department manager, who was genuinely, truly, unbelievably obsessed with his nephew.
“Yes, cu… pre… I see.”
Logic wasn’t necessary when it came to fan devotion.
Yeongwon repeated that fact to herself over and over.
“So I would really appreciate it if you could arrange for me to meet him in person just once. Even today, if possible!”
However, ten minutes of mutual fangirling wasn’t enough to obtain a ticket to the 60th underground floor.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do that.”
The rejection was firm.
The desperate pleas that followed, one after another, were all met with rejection after rejection.
In the end, Yeongwon sighed inwardly and decided to pull out another card.
It was a risky move because it could make him question her true identity.
Of course he would be suspicious.
How could an unselected guide who had been almost completely isolated from the outside world until being rescued a few weeks ago know something like this?
But no matter how risky it was, it couldn’t compare to the danger of “going to work at nine and never going home.”
“Manager. Do you know about rank increases? I mean being reassigned a higher rank by the World Tree.”
Why was this girl suddenly speaking so formally and changing genres out of nowhere?
Manager Lee Chang-gyeol had exactly that expression on his face before answering.
“Yes, well… I know it’s rare, but apparently it is possible to raise your rank through effort. Normally, it doesn’t happen automatically. I’ve heard that special conditions are required.”
“Yes. If, as the result of an awakened person’s blood, sweat, and effort, the World Tree decides that their rank should be increased…”
Yeongwon looked directly into Lee Chang-gyeol’s eyes and paused for a moment.
“The World Tree stops increasing that awakened person’s ranking and instead gives them a quest to fulfill those ‘special conditions.’ Did you know that much about it?”
Lee Chang-gyeol neither confirmed nor denied it.
“The special condition, whatever it may be, that was given to you, Manager, you’re not planning to fulfill it for quite some time, are you?”
“Very intentionally.”
In an instant, the keywords of the conversation changed from:
#NoLogic #RomCom #HopingToMeetAnIdol #Fangirling
To:
#ForeshadowingPayoff #SeriousMode #Mastermind #Blackmail
“Manager.”
Click.
Yeongwon placed the piece of the car wreckage she had picked up at the Incheon pier on the table.
She had been constantly researching because she wanted to understand the true nature of power.
Thanks to that, she had learned many things.
She had even realized that the power of the A-rank physical-type Esper she had seen that day might have been only the tip of the iceberg of an S-rank’s power.
Even if it wasn’t on the same level as Kim Yeo-hyeon’s, whether or not there was one more S-rank physical-type Esper could shake the entire world’s diplomatic situation.
Why had he hidden it?
Even at Ilsan Gate, he showed S-rank power, but he didn’t use it to help Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon.
There was no way the reason was something trivial.
“I happened to see it from the side, but the reports being sent up to the higher-ups seemed to seriously underestimate your power control abilities and those of your team members. They’re adjusted downward to match each person’s official rank exactly.”
It wasn’t just Manager Lee Chang-gyeol.
Yeongwon had already reached the same conclusion about Yoryeon.
She was absolutely not a C-rank-level guide.
Manager Lee Chang-gyeol, Yoryeon, Professor Yoon Hee-yu, and many others at the center had made the same mistake as the manager at the rehabilitation hospital.
They had underestimated Shim Yeongwon, who was watching them.
They hadn’t even noticed how obsessively she was watching them.
Thanks to that, Yeongwon was able to gain the strategic upper hand once again.
“It seems there’s someone you don’t trust nearby.”
“And it looks like the members of Team 2, Professor Yoon Hee-yu, and Manager Baek Yul are all on your side.”
Manager Lee Chang-gyeol’s expression gradually hardened.
It was the moment vague suspicions became certainty.
“I’m not offering to expose your secret and go to the afterlife together.”
“Not everything I said earlier was true, but, indeed, I think highly of Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon. That’s why I’m interested in becoming his dedicated guide.”
Manager Lee Chang-gyeol watched Yeongwon with a cold expression.
“…Guide-nim.”
“Yes.”
“A B-rank guide’s guidance can’t help an S-rank Esper at all. Especially Yeo-hyeon.”
“Manager.”
Didn’t you hear what I just said?
Yeongwon said that with her expression.
Then she added,
“The reason you can’t see my rank isn’t because the World Tree hasn’t assigned me one yet.”
For unselected guides, there was always a time gap between awakening and their first ranking update.
On average, it took around two months.
If the World Tree’s alarm came late for an unselected awakened person, or if the unselected awakened person refused to register, the ranking update could be delayed considerably longer.
In the latter case, even if an unselected awakened person didn’t know their exact ranking, they could still know their rank.
Lee Chang-gyeol, who had been the first person in South Korea to go through that process, knew this better than anyone.
A flicker of confusion crossed his face.
Yeongwon didn’t give him time to organize his thoughts.
“Outside the annex, hyenas have been camping out for days without even going to the bathroom, just hoping to get a picture of even one strand of Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon’s hair.”
“If I go out there and give them something worth writing about, that would be a huge problem for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Let me meet him. I won’t do anything that harms anyone you care about.”
And just like that, Yeongwon managed to strap a parachute tightly onto her shoulders.
Ding.
Underground Floor 60.
At last, Yeongwon had reached her destination.
An enormous space appeared before her, with such an incredibly high ceiling that it was hard to believe she was this far underground.
If every underground floor was this large, then Underground Floor 60 would be basically the same as Underground Floor 120.
“AI, call.”
Beep.
An unauthorized outsider has been detected among the group.
Confirming identity. Registered guide, trainee, Shim Yeongwon.
“Temporary access authorization under Manager Lee Chang-gyeol’s authority.”
Authorization granted.
Beep.
Temporary access granted to Guide Shim Yeongwon. Please leave within five hours.
All the thick steel doors opened smoothly one after another.
Knock, knock.
Only the final door wasn’t automatic.
Knock, knock.
Esper Lee Chang-gyeol knocked on the door again.
“Hyeon.”
“Hyeon. I’m coming in.”
Click.
Esper Lee Chang-gyeol motioned for Yeongwon to go in first.
Yeongwon swallowed once and stepped into the space where Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon was.
Ah…
Yeongwon stopped breathing for a moment.
The smell of medicine…
In the center of the space, which was divided by white walls, was a black sofa large enough to cover half of Yeongwon’s dorm room.
Kim Yeo-hyeon was leaning against the sofa as if lying down.
There were an enormous number of IV lines connected to his body.
At a glance, there seemed to be more than thirty.
When she counted them one by one, there were exactly twenty-nine tubes connected to his body.
The liquids inside them were all difficult to identify.
Some were red, some blue, some transparent, some white, and some cloudy.
But Yeongwon wasn’t completely unfamiliar with those kinds of machines.
She had learned a little about them recently.
Beep. Swish. Beep. Beep. Swish.
Among all the strange, colorful fluids rushing through the machines with constant beeping sounds, Kim Yeo-hyeon was the most still of all.
“He’s perfectly awake. He’s not sick either.”
“Ah, yes…”
“He came out of the gate quite a while ago. He’s just resting.”
“He also refused guiding from other people because he really hates it.”
After hearing the explanation, it did seem as though he wasn’t being swallowed up by all those machines.
Rather, it looked like he was commanding and controlling all of them.
His expression was calm too.
Most of his face was covered by a mask, so only one eye was visible, but at least from what she could see, he looked calm.
If those machines are what I think they are… how can he look that peaceful?
His clothes were different from the casual outfit he’d worn a few days ago.
Instead of a classic suit, he was wearing the much sharper uniform of an Esper.
He was only wearing a shirt and vest.
His jacket had been thrown somewhere far away, so he didn’t look too constricted.
His physique was still overwhelmingly impressive.
His shirt sleeves had been rolled up to make room for the needles.
The veins on his arms stood out clearly.
His tie was half undone…
Hmm. In so many ways, he’s on another level…
To look dangerously sexy, the other had to look restrained.
A deep, heavy atmosphere that fit that exact idea seemed to surround him.
“Hyeon.”
Even when Manager Lee Chang-gyeol called him, Yeo-hyeon didn’t move at all.
But everyone knew he wasn’t asleep.
He simply didn’t feel the need to react, so he remained still.
Yeongwon understood him.
Part of her wanted to leave him alone and let him lie there, ignoring every disturbance around him.
“Esper Kim Yeo-hyeon. It’s me again.”
Even so, she couldn’t let him rest peacefully for now.
“Please listen to me for a moment.”
