It was a period of days that were peaceful yet fraught with a deep, underlying tension.
How vast and dangerous would the gate be that arrived at the end of this Gate Rush?
Suhyeon wondered today as he fiddled with the soft tentacles of the Cotton Ball, which had transformed into a monster.
But today, as always, he felt no surge of fear.
Suhyeon sighed at the strange sensation.
Lately, he had been feeling an intense familiarity with the gates and the monsters.
It felt as if something inside him had broken his sense of perception regarding gate sites and monsters.
That sensation, which had been gradually shifting from fear for some time now, became starkly clear once Suhyeon began handling the Cotton Ball.
A few days ago, when he went out to a site for guiding duties, he was able to experience it vividly.
While waiting for the Espers in the tent, he had felt a sudden impulse to reach out toward the gate itself and the monsters pouring out of it.
-Suhyeon?
That day, Suhyeon only snapped back to his senses when another Guide called his name.
He found himself having taken several steps out of the tent toward the gate.
What had once been a source of extreme trauma and terror was now enchanting him.
-…Really? Isn’t it because of that thing?
When he worriedly mentioned it to Hajin, Hajin immediately glared at the Cotton Ball as if he wanted to kill it.
However, Suhyeon’s intuition told him the Cotton Ball wasn’t the problem.
He wondered if his sense of fear had simply been dulled entirely, but whenever he thought of Shin Seojun, his faded scars throbbed and his body shook like a leaf.
His emotions weren’t numb.
Ring-ring—.
…Ah, Shin Seojun.
Suhyeon wrinkled the bridge of his nose.
Just thinking of him in passing caused the faint sound of a broken music box to echo in his ears.
Thoughts of the gate were instantly pushed far away.
Right, this was where his true trauma lay.
Suhyeon slowly inhaled and exhaled.
Just as quite a bit of time had passed since the first day he transformed the Cotton Ball into a monster, time had also passed since the day he escaped Shin Seojun.
If there was one thing he disliked about the Association, it was their subtle attitude of trying to gloss over the fact that Suhyeon had been kidnapped by Shin Seojun using the Cotton Ball as an excuse.
Security had increased, but that was all; they didn’t seem to be thinking about catching the culprit.
Instead, it was Hajin who kept his eyes peeled, chasing after Shin Seojun.
One day, while Suhyeon was idly playing with Hajin and his phone, he saw a report regarding Shin Seojun fly in.
As it turned out, Hajin had been pursuing him all along, and since the incident where Suhyeon was almost in grave danger, he had doubled the manpower to scour the entire country.
However, Shin Seojun seemed skilled at hiding; just when it seemed his tail was in sight, he would slip away the moment they tried to catch him.
-…Still, his tail is becoming more visible than before…. I’ll kill him soon.
Suhyeon’s body trembled just thinking about the man, but Hajin seemed more than just angry when the topic came up—he looked unstable.
In those moments, Suhyeon would simply hold him.
Hajin always leaned into the embrace submissively.
This seemed to give his lover more strength than any clumsy attempts at consolation, and Suhyeon was also able to calm his heart through Hajin’s warmth.
Gates, the Cotton Ball, the Association, Shin Seojun… the list of things to worry about was growing by the day.
“Suhyeon.”
Suhyeon, who had been stroking the Cotton Ball that had shrunk back to its small size while lost in thought, turned around.
It was Hajin.
“Aren’t you tired?”
They were standing in the fields of Chungnam, the very place where they had first shown the Cotton Ball to the Espers.
Hajin pressed a bottle of ice water into Suhyeon’s hand, though where he found it in the middle of nowhere was a mystery.
A kiss on the forehead was a bonus.
“Thank you.”
“Suhyeon!”
While Suhyeon was leaning against Hajin and sipping the water, a loud shout reached them from afar, accompanied by the rattling sound of a truck engine.
Ryu Yihan, wearing a white lab coat, was beaming and waving his arms energetically from the top of a Bongo truck.
He was one of the few welcome faces Suhyeon hadn’t seen properly for a while due to a series of academic conferences.
Was it Paris?
After the final conference ended, Ryu Yihan returned to Korea and boldly joined the group of people at the Association researching the Cotton Ball and Suhyeon.
He said he had become one of the people leading the researchers.
He wasn’t originally an employee of the Association, but he had signed a short-term contract.
Because of this, Suhyeon had been seeing Ryu Yihan frequently again lately.
Smack!
“Aaaah! Damn you, Shin Hajin!”
Along with this familiar (?) sound.
Ryu Yihan, who had hopped down from the rattling truck, tried to hug Suhyeon but let out a cry of pain after being struck by Hajin.
“Where did you dump the Association vehicle?”
“The tire blew out on the way here, so I ditched it. Suhyeon, can I touch it?”
“Kyuuu.”
Ryu Yihan gave Hajin a half-hearted answer and asked Suhyeon.
The Cotton Ball, perhaps sensing something ominous, dug into Suhyeon’s palm and cried.
Seeing the Cotton Ball hide, Ryu Yihan lowered his eyebrows pitifully.
“Why does that thing hate me so much? I don’t think it was like this at first…. Are you all finished?”
Suhyeon nodded at Ryu Yihan’s tearful question.
The Espers who were with them had just left, and Suhyeon and Hajin were waiting for Lee Jeonghyeon to return.
That was when Ryu Yihan, who had briefly gone down to the countryside, had joined them.
“We’re moving now!”
Esper Lee Jeonghyeon, who returned quickly, habitually transported them back home.
Suhyeon bowed to the departing Lee Jeonghyeon and followed the two men up to the second floor.
The room, filled with various medical devices where Suhyeon had once lain when his chest hadn’t recovered, had now become the place where Ryu Yihan observed the Cotton Ball.
He had called both Hajin and Suhyeon together, saying he had discovered something more about Suhyeon’s power today.
As soon as Ryu Yihan entered the room, he busily turned on the computers and monitors with messy, tangled wires.
While waiting for them, Hajin found a small sofa from somewhere and dragged it over.
He sat down heavily and pulled Suhyeon by the waist to sit between his legs.
“Kyu!”
As Suhyeon sat, the Cotton Ball popped out of his pocket and comfortably buried its face in front of Suhyeon’s stomach.
Ryu Yihan watched this, blurred his focus as he usually did, and then busily clicked the mouse as the monitors turned on.
“Here.”
At the sound that everything was ready, Suhyeon turned his gaze to the monitor and then froze.
It was footage of a gate accident.
“Why this all of a sudden?”
Hajin also seemed to recognize it immediately and made a displeased sound.
“Just wait a second. While I was researching our Mr. Cotton Ball, I did some thinking about what Suhyeon’s power might be.”
Ryu Yihan soon played the video.
The low-quality, silent footage captured the situation when the gate had burst open right in front of Suhyeon.
“Until now, the Association assumed that the Cotton Ball was something Suhyeon created. I did some work to try and figure out its true nature, and…”
The resolution of the heavily pixelated video suddenly improved drastically.
Ryu Yihan pressed the pause button and zoomed in on the screen.
Suhyeon flinched at what appeared after quite a bit of scrolling.
There he was, held in Hajin’s arms in front of the gate that seemed to be shrinking as it closed.
And next to them was a massive monster.
As Ryu Yihan slowly and repeatedly pressed the skip button, the monster—moving very slowly like stop-motion—glowed white and then transformed into the familiar white ball of fluff.
Suhyeon blinked.
“The Cotton Ball isn’t something you created or something made in response to your power; it was actually just a real monster from the start.”
Ryu Yihan replayed the scene of the monster turning into the Cotton Ball two or three times.
Suhyeon’s memory of that situation was very hazy and fragmented.
He remembered reaching out his arm and a burst of light exploding when the monster touched him, but… was that the Cotton Ball?
“And… if we go back a bit.”
The giant monsters that poured out of the gate in the footage hesitated and did not attack Suhyeon.
They attacked everything around them, but Suhyeon was oddly excluded from their targets.
Suhyeon, who had never seen this footage in such detail, watched blankly.
He remembered that several monsters were around him, but he had no idea they had so blatantly avoided attacking him.
Had the Guides present at the scene described it as if Suhyeon had closed the gate?
They weren’t wrong.
The hesitating monsters were soon subdued by Hajin, and the gate closed, ending with the Cotton Ball transformed by a large white light.
“No one had thought to analyze this footage to this extent, so I felt a bit proud while watching it. Everyone else is still distracted by that Cotton Ball, the idiots.”
Ryu Yihan closed the window and looked back at Suhyeon.
“If we try to define your ability based on that video…”
Suhyeon blinked for a moment before meeting his eyes.
“It’s either an ability to tame monsters or an ability that prevents monsters from feeling hostility toward you. But you handle this through guiding, don’t you? Same with the Cotton Ball.”
Suhyeon nodded.
“And you awakened as a Guide immediately after coming out of the gate. My theory is that it’s some kind of power that came from within the gate. It is guiding, but it’s an out-of-spec guiding with a power linked to the gate.”
-What happened inside the gate?
It was the moment when the words of the man who had poured verbal abuse on him during his previous summons rang true.
Now, Suhyeon also thought there was no other probable cause besides this, but the idea that his guiding wave itself was different from other Guides… this was a part he hadn’t thought about deeply.
“Of course, there’s no precedent or anything, so I can’t say for sure, but several things click if you think of it that way.”
Ryu Yihan continued.
