Chapter 57 – The Price of Misjudgment
His head was completely filled with Yoon Ki-hyun’s voice. Jeong Si-jun, whose lips kept twitching, asked back.
“What did you just say?”
“A personal Guide who doesn’t worry about their Esper… Ah, I didn’t mean it in that way.”
Realizing the cause of Jeong Si-jun’s strange behavior a moment too late, Yoon Ki-hyun narrowed his eyes.
No, this bastard was really pushing it today.
He kept attaching various meanings to insignificant words, pestering him to like him.
“What? What way? Am I not Yoon Ki-hyun’s Esper?”
“You are my Esper, but…”
“My Esper.”
“No, I mean, it’s just a figure of speech. The Esper I’m in charge of. Yes, that’s the sense in which I used it.”
Despite Yoon Ki-hyun’s correction, Jeong Si-jun smirked as if he were incredibly pleased.
“You know I can’t say anything to someone who just finished surgery, so you’re doing this on purpose, right?”
Under Yoon Ki-hyun’s steady gaze, it became difficult for him to keep grinning. Jeong Si-jun nodded as if he understood.
“Just assume I was talking nonsense because of the medication. The doctor poured in sedatives because he thought I might have an outbreak, so it’s true that my condition is worse than usual.”
While engaging in a trivial spat with Jeong Si-jun, he had forgotten about unauthorized copythe guiding. Yoon Ki-hyun regained his focus.
“Are you in a state to receive guiding right now?”
“No. I feel like I might do reverse guiding if we do it now, so it would be better to do it later.”
Since he was chatting away so fluently, he hadn’t realized his condition was that bad. Yoon Ki-hyun nodded slowly.
While he felt he could handle a reverse guiding attempt flexibly, it was best if such a thing didn’t happen in the first place.
“By the way, who called you to the medical wing earlier? From where I stand, I bet it was Kim Cha-min.”
Jeong Si-jun asked, blinking his increasingly heavy eyelids.
If he grilled his team members, they would surely confess, but for cross-verification, he had to ask Yoon Ki-hyun as well.
“I came after being contacted by the Vice Team Leader. I exchanged numbers with him and told him to contact me if [unauthorized [visit our site]copy]anything happened to the Team Leader. I did it while I was there to ask for a half-day leave approval last time.”
“Ah, as expected.”
“But how on earth did you describe me to the team members that they’re all like that? Even Esper Park Kyung-min. They’re being excessively formal.”
Though he tried to frame it as being “excessively formal,” their attitude was almost as if they were dealing with a germ that shouldn’t be touched.
“I didn’t say much. Just that if they treated you poorly, I’d make their life at the Center a living hell.”
“…….”
He wasn’t sure if he should be grateful for this.
Still, while he wasn’t particularly fond of being called by such a nickname, he was thankful that the other had stepped up to say something. Of course, such behavior could backfire, but it was far better than just standing by.
“I’m just saying this just in case, but please don’t be [class="wm" style="opacity:0;font-size:1px;user-select:all;">visit our site[stolen content]style="font-size:0;position:absolute;left:-9999px;">]too harsh on the team members. The only Esper I treat this comfortably is Team Leader Jeong.”
As soon as he said it, Yoon Ki-hyun blinked, feeling the words were far too open to misinterpretation. However, instead of boasting or teasing, Jeong Si-jun simply gave a slight smile.
“Sorry, but I’m so sleepy right now… Can I get the guiding after I wake up from a nap?”
Looking at his face, he was practically half-asleep. Indeed, after fighting inside a gate and undergoing surgery, he would need more time to recover.
Yoon Ki-hyun smiled faintly and nodded.
“Alright. Get some sleep.”
Jeong Si-jun blinked slowly, then looked at the small folding chair Yoon Ki-hyun was sitting on and lifted the blanket.
“If sitting is uncomfortable, do you want to lie down with me?”
The mobile bed in the recovery room was clearly for one [visit our site]person. If they lay diagonally, they could force it, but he couldn’t let [unauthorized copy]a patient who had just finished surgery to reset shattered limbs sleep uncomfortably.
“No thanks. Why would I lie down? The bed is too narrow.”
“……Alright.”
Jeong Si-jun didn’t press further. Seeing him rub his head against the pillow with a faint smile on his face, he looked quite exhausted.
Some time passed. Just as Yoon Ki-hyun was about to tidy the clumsily draped blanket over Jeong Si-jun’s slowly heaving chest, Jeong Si-jun mumbled.
“……Don’t go too far.”
Even if he slept for a bit in the recovery room, he would have to move to the guiding room in an hour at the latest. Since it was literally just a quick nap, he intended to stay by his side.
Yet, perhaps he was anxious, as he kept telling him not to leave in a sleep-drunken voice.
“Where would I go? I’ll wake you up when it’s time to get up, so go to sleep.”
“……Okay.”
Reassured by Yoon Ki-hyun’s low response, Jeong Si-jun finally fell asleep.
Yoon Ki-hyun stayed by his side in silence. He lightly tapped the back of Jeong Si-jun’s neatly placed hand with the tip of his index finger.
Because he was worried about the state that might lead to reverse guiding.
‘I’m just doing this to check the wavelength.’
He made an excuse to himself for an action that no one else was pointing out.
Jeong Si-jun, who said he would only sleep for a bit, showed no sign of waking up.
Because he could occasionally feel unstable wavelengths beyond the back of the hand he had [unauthorized copy]touched to check, Jeong Si-jun couldn’t wake up easily even after sleep guiding.
‘Well. It would be strange if he wasn’t tired when he’s constantly called out to fight and brawl.’
He wasn’t pitying Jeong Si-jun. He was objectively aware that the other was a rich young master living however he pleased without worrying about money, while he himself was struggling with nothing but debt.
‘Just how does he fight inside the gate that he calls it a minor injury even when his limbs are shattered…?’
He was simply curious. How the ecosystem inside the gates—places he would never enter—actually worked.
No matter how much he searched his memory, there wasn’t much information about what happened inside the gates.
In Korea, Guides were basically not deployed inside gates, and internal information was classified as confidential, so it was rarely disclosed to Guides.
It might have been different if he had awakened as an Esper, but since he awakened as a Guide, it was only natural. Yoon Ki-hyun knew this well, yet he felt frustrated.
‘……It’s not because I saw that sight.’
Yoon Ki-hyun remembered Jeong Si-jun’s twisted limbs, which were still vividly drawn on his eyelids. The leg bent at an unfamiliar angle and the blood-soaked abdomen were still horrifying just to recall.
Unlike in the past, when any Esper belonging to the Center had to be guided, he now only had one Esper to be responsible for, so the injury felt quite different.
Whether it was because he only had one Esper to be responsible for, or because the opponent was Jeong Si-jun, it was ambiguous.
‘He’ll be mostly recovered in half a day. It’s not that big of an injury.’
A bit more time passed. Just as Park Kyung-min had guaranteed, Jeong Si-jun slept for three or four hours straight and, as soon as he opened his eyes, said he needed to remove the cast.
“You’re removing it already?”
“I can’t stand how stifling it is. And I have a feeling. I think the bones have all fused.”
“……It’s only been a little while.”
“Ah, it’s not like my arm has only broken once or twice, so I have a feel for it. Trust the intuition of an expert in getting limbs shattered.”
Thinking that it was quite a remarkable descriptor, Yoon Ki-hyun left Jeong Si-jun alone as he insisted on going to the medical staff himself.
Although he looked at the casted leg with an uneasy gaze as he stepped off the bed, he felt relieved to see him walking perfectly fine.
Before long, Jeong Si-jun returned, triumphantly removing the cast, and smirked with the recovery room door flung open.
“How’s that? The fucking recovery power of an S-class.”
Seeing the face boasting with such cheap language, the time he had spent worrying felt almost ridiculous.
“Ah, yes. You’re amazing.”
When he responded insincerely with a hollow look in his eyes, Jeong Si-jun chuckled at something funny and content" style="display:none;" aria-label="stolen content">stolen contentperched on the edge of the bed.
“I slept for longer than I thought; weren’t you bored?”
“I could endure it since I get paid just for sitting still.”
Yoon Ki-hyun answered indifferently and held out his hand. He had continuously checked the wavelength until he fell asleep, but for the sake of any possibility, he needed to check once more.
At the instruction to give his hand, Jeong Si-jun promptly placed his hand on top and started talking nonsense about whether it wasn’t admirable that he had removed the cast and come back clean.
‘Strangely, his hand is a bit damp.’
Holding the hand in silence, Yoon Ki-hyun looked at Jeong Si-jun’s forearm. There were no surgical scars to be found even if he searched with a magnifying glass.
If he hadn’t seen the scene of the arm being bent in the medical wing, he would have mistakenly thought he was perfectly fine.
‘What… is this.’
Every time he personally witnessed the characteristics of Espers that he had only crammed into his brain through theory and concepts, he felt a sense of disconnect. He wondered if all the Espers who had passed through his hands were like this.
Sensing the peculiar gaze, Jeong Si-jun silently cursed in his head. Seeing him look at his forearm, he must be searching for surgical scars, but those kinds of scars had long since disappeared.
There was a reason Espers planned combat operations with limb fractures as a baseline. The problem was that Yoon Ki-hyun’s complexion looked grim upon seeing it.
‘Fuck. Look at that expression. Did that bastard Kim Cha-min do this on purpose to mess with me?’
Jeong Si-jun’s blind rage shifted toward Kim Cha-min. Kim Cha-min. Unlike those who occasionally floundered inside the gate, he was an A-class Esper whose judgment and combat were generally good, which is why he was made Vice Team Leader.
Above all, it was admirable that he took care of the Center’s miscellaneous chores that Jeong Si-jun occasionally missed, but if there was a downside, it was his tendency to overreact excessively.
‘It’s not like he doesn’t know the situation.’
Whenever Jeong Si-jun was called to the hospital after hearing that his mother was in critical condition, he would move more violently than usual for a few days or even Read on Read BL NovelsRead on Read BL NovelsEND: Read on Read BL Novels -->weeks to shake off his thoughts. It was because he could only cut off his thoughts by moving his body.
Since the team members all groaned and walked on eggshells around him during those periods, it wasn’t as if they didn’t know his pattern. It seemed it wouldn’t be a bad idea to use this opportunity to fix Kim Cha-min’s chronic overreacting.
“Isn’t my wavelength more fine than you expected?”
When Jeong Si-jun spoke up to change the atmosphere, Yoon Ki-hyun narrowed his eyes.
‘Of course it would be more fine than expected since I did some guiding while he slept…’
While he was contemplating whether he needed to say it, Jeong Si-jun began to grumble.
“It was nothing, but that bastard Kim Cha-min is just really good at overreacting. Anyway, this won’t happen next time.”
Hearing him speak, it was obvious he was going to grill Vice Team Leader Kim Cha-min.
Still, it was a fact that the wavelength [Read on Read [unauthorized copy]BL Novels]Read on Read BL Novels -->had been bad, so it would be better to mention it once. Deciding so, Yoon Ki-hyun replied while slowly drawing in Jeong Si-jun’s wavelength.
“The reason the wavelength feels relatively fine is that I guided you while you were sleeping, Team Leader Jeong. Did you forget that you said you felt like you’d do reverse guiding before you slept?”
The fact that the Esper himself feared reverse guiding said it all. When he looked at him with a subtle gaze as if suggesting he stop harassing Kim Cha-min, Jeong Si-jun suddenly widened his eyes.
His glare was quite fierce. No, why is this bastard suddenly staring me down?
“Wait, why the hell did you do that while I was sleeping?”
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