* * *
“Are you curious about it?”
“Ah, yes. A little.”
Noticing his gaze, Liran asked Ben, and he answered honestly.
“It’s bad luck.”
Of course, after hearing that answer, he simply shut his mouth.
“Seriously, why do they make me do crap like this? I can’t figure out what the hell that old hag of a director is thinking.”
She aggressively pressed the radio’s music channel button, her irritation showing, then grabbed the coffee cup resting in the holder and downed the last drop.
There hadn’t been much left to begin with, and after tapping the empty cup a few more times, she crushed it roughly before finally starting up the trailer.
The route to the warehouse on the outskirts of Hermansen took about 30 minutes from the city.
In a small town like this, there was no risk of traffic, so they would likely arrive without any trouble.
The streets were relatively quiet in the early morning, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
But for Ben, the stark contrast between Liran’s aggressive coffee-crushing and the serene classical music playing in the vehicle made the atmosphere unbearably awkward.
“Seeing that donut shop makes me hungry. But inside, they’re having a meltdown because they ran out of oil for the morning.”
At a red light, Ben’s gaze naturally drifted toward the donut shop in front of them.
However, all he could see were a few part-timers busy cleaning inside and the owner chatting with them through the glass door.
To an ordinary person, that was all there was to see.
“…Are you an Esper?”
“So what if I am?”
However, if someone had heightened senses beyond normal human limits, overhearing conversations inside a donut shop was nothing.
“Ah, it’s just that you don’t see Espers around here often.”
As expected of Central. Espers were rare in small towns like this, and aside from a few intelligence-related Espers affiliated with the Hermansen Agency, encountering one from the outside was almost unheard of.
As the light turned green and Liran stepped on the accelerator, Ben spoke up as if something had come to mind.
“I hope this isn’t rude to ask, but… shouldn’t your Guide be with you?”
“What would they come here for? Besides, I’m well-adjusted. What, are you worried?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
Espers were extremely sensitive when it came to their Guides.
Ben had heard that over and over while studying them.
Espers, who possessed abilities beyond human comprehension, could easily suffer mental and physical breakdowns.
Guides were the only ones capable of stabilizing and synchronizing them.
The stronger the bond between a properly matched Esper and Guide, the more stable the Esper’s abilities became.
For someone like Ben, an F-class Guide who had never even served as a temporary one, it was a distant, irrelevant subject.
“…Hey?”
As Ben was lost in thought, Liran suddenly reached out and grabbed his cheek with one hand.
It was such an unexpected action for people who had just met that he was momentarily at a loss on how to react.
But while pressing and squeezing his cheek as if it were mochi, Liran nonchalantly muttered,
“You’ve got such an annoyingly kind face.”
…Was that a compliment or an insult?
It seemed like she had done it just to snap him out of his thoughts, but her approach was wildly different from how a normal person would go about it.
He was seriously debating whether people these days just acted like this or if she was simply unique when his phone suddenly blared, just like it had this morning.
Pulling out his smartphone from his pocket, he checked the screen.
It was his superior, whom he had just parted ways with earlier.
Thinking it must be something urgent, Ben quickly answered.
“Ben Plaskun speaking.”
— You! It’s me! Are you passing through Rosie Street right now?!
“Yes, about halfway through, but…”
He had his phone volume turned down low, so normally, people around him wouldn’t hear the conversation.
But the person next to him was an Esper. She could probably hear everything.
Sensing that it was something urgent, Ben spoke carefully, but his superior cut him off with an urgent tone.
— You know the road that branches off to the warehouse on the outskirts? Looks like an Esper is causing a disturbance there! We’ve already sent personnel to block off civilians, but you two might arrive first. I was going to tell you to take a different route—!
“An Esper, you say? In Hermansen?”
Ben rarely questioned his superior, but this was too unexpected.
A violent Esper incident in peaceful, quiet Hermansen?
That was the kind of thing you’d expect in the capital, not here.
— That’s what I’m saying! I don’t want to believe it either, but hurry and pass the message to Liran!
“Uh, Liran—”
“Would it kill that damned old man to tell me sooner?”
Apparently, she had been listening the whole time.
Liran snapped irritably, slamming the brakes.
The abrupt stop was punctuated by the clash of cymbals from the classical music still playing in the background.
Her superior quickly began apologizing, layering his words with flattery, but with the loud cymbals ringing in his ears, Ben could barely make out what was being said.
“That’s gotta be it, don’t you think?”
Ignoring her superior’s apologies, Liran sharply furrowed her brows and stared straight ahead.
Ben followed her gaze.
Through the window, he could see a traffic light spewing smoke, a few crashed and shattered cars, and a single teenage girl with faded gray hair standing there.
“What the hell is that brat doing? Anyway, we can just take the side road.”
“Yeah, that’s true, but… I don’t recognize her uniform. That’s odd.”
Though the girl’s uniform was tattered and torn in places, it was still intact enough to identify.
And as far as Ben could remember, it wasn’t a uniform from any school in Hermansen.
But Liran seemed uninterested in that detail as she casually started maneuvering the trailer again.
“…?”
Just as she turned the wheel, the girl grabbed the front door of the white sedan among the wrecked vehicles and started dragging it along with her.
For a moment, the scene looked like something out of an old TV stunt show.
Ben blinked, then suddenly felt like something was very wrong.
The girl ripped off the car door with one hand,
Kicked off the dangling bumper,
Then lifted the entire vehicle with both hands—
“Liran—! Look out—!”
And threw it.
BANG—!!!
Before Ben could even finish speaking, an earth-shaking impact and deafening crash engulfed them.
He instinctively ducked, shielding his head.
The massive trailer hadn’t completely overturned, but the truck tilted dangerously to the right before slamming back down with a heavy thud.
“That crazy—!”
The next thing he heard was Liran cursing, her voice brimming with anger.
If the driver had been an ordinary person, they would have been hit directly.
But an Esper’s instincts, far surpassing normal human reflexes, had allowed her to swerve the trailer at the last second, barely avoiding a direct hit.
Though the white car had struck the connection between the truck and the container, considering it had been a surprise attack, the fact that they had avoided the worst was a relief.
“Are you alright?!”
As he lifted his head, the first thing that caught his eye was the shattered windshield, cracked in a radial pattern.
Beyond that, he saw a deranged girl spinning the detached front door of a car as if it were a mere pebble.
“You have a license, right?! A license?!”
“I have a Class 1 standard license—.”
“Then come here and step on the accelerator!”
“I said, it’s Class 1 standard?”
“A car is a car! As long as you step on the accelerator, they all move the same way!”
Even if he had passed the test on his first try without failing, suddenly driving a trailer truck was definitely beyond his capabilities.
He might be desperate enough to borrow even a cat’s paw for help, but this?
This was absurd!
“Wait, wait, wait! Hold on a second!”
Regardless of Ben’s frantic protests, Liran Siu forcefully unfastened her seatbelt and squeezed into the passenger seat where Ben was sitting.
As a result, he was inevitably pushed over to the driver’s seat, forced to grab the massive steering wheel—easily twice the size of a regular car’s.
Just as he took a deep breath, facing forward, the detached front door suddenly flew in through the shattered windshield and crashed inside with a deafening noise.
CRASH—!!
“Oh, come on! You’ve got to be kidding me?!”
SCREEEEECH—!!
Pressing the accelerator was an instinctive act of survival.
The massive wheels spun wildly, spewing smoke, and the more desperate Ben became to escape, the harder he pushed down on the pedal.
Yet, the truck refused to budge.
* * *
