Chapter 9: A Thousand Years Too Late

At first, he thought there must be a separate supreme commander, but it seemed that role belonged to the Colonel after all.

Well……

In his original era, the position of “person in charge” was usually occupied by a Guide.

Since there were no Guides here, an Esper naturally had to sit in that seat.

In any case, Lee Juju felt like he understood why the Colonel commanded so much respect.

First, instead of abandoning Lee Juju, someone they had just met and who was suspected to be an Esper, they had deliberately brought him back to the unit.

Of course, that might have been because it was their first time receiving Guiding, but it was more likely because the Colonel was fundamentally a kind-hearted man.

Second, he didn’t know exactly what that drug was, but it was clearly extremely dangerous, and yet from what he heard, it was a mandatory vaccination for Espers.

Even so, they had explained the risks and allowed him to choose whether to receive it or not.

Regardless of whether the drug was expensive or cheap, the very idea of explaining its effects and letting someone decide without forcing it on them was deeply altruistic.

Third, he had said that if Lee Juju survived, he could stay with the unit.

It was no different from someone picking up a stray dog, caring for it, giving it vaccinations, and then raising it with affection.

The thought naturally arose: ‘Just what part of me are you trusting?’

That kind of attitude must have shaped the man the Colonel was today.

Lee Juju fell into thought as he looked at the groaning Espers.

Whether he was trying to stop the outpouring Radiation Guiding or something else, Colonel Shan Pei clenched his teeth and rose from his seat, moving toward Lee Juju.

He looked like someone who had just finished a grueling three-day marathon and was barely managing to walk on an exhausted body.

After barely reaching him, Colonel Shan Fei grabbed Lee Juju’s shoulder.

“Stop… it. The more abilities are used, the more overload… builds up. If that happens… everyone… will be in danger…”

‘How can a man like this be an Esper instead of a Guide?’

Lee Juju raised his hand and placed it gently over the Colonel’s hand gripping his shoulder.

He felt like he might cry.

There was no particular reason.

Lee Juju was, at times, overwhelmingly emotional.

If he hadn’t been compassionate, he would never have become a Guide.

He let Guiding flow into the back of Colonel Shan Pei’s hand.

Beyond his throat, he could still feel that cold, gloomy, blood-scented, unstable current.

However, it wasn’t so shocking that it made him gag like the first time he had used Guiding.

Instead, the one who recoiled in surprise was Colonel Shan Pei.

“What? Do you have a Guiding allergy?”

Flustered, Lee Juju stopped the Radiation Guiding.

He wondered if it was some kind of acquired Guiding allergy.

The moment the Guiding stopped, the pained groans vanished completely.

Disbelief and shock spread across the faces of the Espers experiencing Guiding for the first time.

“Th-this. This isn’t a trick, is it?”

Someone shouted.

“After being hit by it twice, I can tell for sure. This is beneficial, without question.”

Even Captain Russell, who had been standing stiffly, nodded and muttered those words.

The Chief Master Sergeant’s head snapped around with an audible sound.

A blazing yearning filled his eyes.

“A-are you truly not an Esper? Even if you are an Esper, that’s fine, give this to our soldiers!”

“This isn’t ‘this.’ It’s Guiding.”

Lee Juju explained calmly.

“I’m not an Esper. I’m a Guide.”

“Right, a Guide. This thing called Guiding…”

The Chief Master Sergeant’s lips trembled with impatience.

He looked to be the oldest among those gathered.

Lee Juju had already wondered how he had survived to that age, and learning that he had simply endured until death made him feel even more sorry for him.

“No. If a berserk incident occurs during Guiding, it’ll only make things more dangerous.”

Colonel Shan Pei said bluntly.

The Chief Master Sergeant’s face darkened in an instant.

“Th-that’s… true. Understood…”

It seemed that under a respected Colonel, respected people naturally gathered.

Lee Juju thought idly.

It was refreshing to see an Esper willing to yield Guiding rather than claim ownership over the Guide after receiving it.

“Looks like no one believes that I’m not an Esper.”

Lee Juju said evenly.

Colonel Shan Pei immediately shot back.

“If you’re not an Esper, then it’s even more dangerous. How will you deal with the overload on your own body while performing this ‘Guiding’? Isn’t that something even our drugs can’t handle?”

It was a reasonable argument.

If Guides suffered overload just like Espers, that is.

Lee Juju shrugged once and tried throwing out a line of nonsense.

“I could’ve already been injected with a drug like that when I awakened as a Guide.”

“Is… is that truly the case?”

Just as the Chief Master Sergeant looked at Lee Juju with desperate hope-

“That is a lie.”

A stiff voice rang out.

He had tried to gloss over things with a plausible lie, but he had forgotten there was a mental-type Esper who could detect truth.

Watching the Chief Master Sergeant swing from hope to despair, despair to hope, and back to despair again, Lee Juju let out a deep sigh.

“Everyone, have you really never even heard of Guides before? I honestly can’t believe it. Is there truly nothing left behind – documents, records, anything?”

At Lee Juju’s words, the Espers fell into silence all at once.

Unexpectedly, the answer came from the Colonel.

“There are documents presumed to be from before the Great Explosion that contains similar descriptions. However, there’s no way to verify their authenticity, and even those are likely nothing more than a utopia imagined by Espers of that era.”

“The Great Explosion? What’s that?”

“You don’t know about the Gate Great Explosion?”

Colonel Shan Pei closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and continued.

“It was a worldwide catastrophe of unknown origin. No one knows where it began or when it ended… yes, in the end, most nations were destroyed by it. Only recently have we managed to reconstruct fragments of the old civilization, but the previous one lies buried underground.
It’s been about a thousand years since then.”

‘A thousand years?’

His mind went blank for a moment before slowly coming back.

“Haha. I need to go home.”

After a thousand years, not even concrete would remain.

When he muttered that without thinking, the Espers who heard him panicked, at a loss for what to do.

Some of them looked at Lee Juju with resolute expressions.

Only Colonel Shan Pei stared at him with an unreadable face.

“I think I’m from before the Great Explosion.”

“……”

At Lee Juju’s bright, casual tone, the Espers stared at him.

They all wore the exact same expression.

The expression of someone who had just heard the most innovative nonsense of the year.

‘Well, I don’t believe it myself, so how could they?’

But it was the truth.

When Lee Juju looked at the lie detector, everyone else’s gaze shifted to Lieutenant Frank as well.

In a barely audible voice, he testified.

“It’s…… true.”

“See?”

“But that can’t possibly be real, can it?”

Lieutenant Frank muttered quietly, avoiding Lee Juju’s eyes.

“If it means distributing this Guiding to our soldiers, I’d sell my soul for it.”

The Chief Master Sergeant said.

“No.”

Colonel Shan Pei shook his head.

Lee Juju watched the Espers argue among themselves about whether to accept Guiding, as if the person offering it weren’t standing right there.

Then Colonel Shan Fei spoke in an unshakably firm voice.

“If it’s all going to return to how it was anyway, then it’s right not to begin at all.”

A deep melancholy lay beneath his voice.

It wasn’t hard to understand.

For Espers who had never experienced Guiding in their lives, Guiding could feel like a drug.

If they were going to return to that horrific reality anyway, they would end up resenting the handful of Guiding they had tasted.

They might curse the Colonel for allowing them to have hope in the first place.

That would be true if Lee Juju disappeared.

It might even have been true if his Guiding ability were consumptive.

But Lee Juju was an S-class Guide, someone capable of suppressing an Esper’s berserk state simply by staying close, as long as he lived.

“Honestly. It’s not like I’m charging money for Guiding.”

‘If they lived day by day properly receiving Guiding, maybe they’d learn to look at life more positively?’

At Lee Juju’s sarcastic tone, Colonel Shan Pei’s eyebrow twitched.

Lee Juju had been poking at him to gauge his reactions, but a sigh slipped from his lips.

An Esper’s gloom always stemmed from a lack of Guiding.

Still, after hearing the Colonel’s words, Lee Juju felt the need to properly explain what Guiding was.

And he should probably stop provoking the Colonel as well.

If he kept pushing, the man might finally snap and rebound like a rubber ball.

“In the era I came from, whenever Espers were born, Guides were born alongside them. In the early days, Guides were far fewer in number, but soon they began to outnumber Espers. By my time, for every ten Espers, there were about a hundred Guides.”

Of course, that didn’t mean every Guide was high quality, but that didn’t need to be said.

In any case, when there were enough Guides, one or two were bound to awaken as truly exceptional ones.