Chapter 50: Too Gentle to Strike

Ye-seon brushed back his fallen hair once and spoke to Su-ha.

“An official announcement will be coming soon. Once that happens, the attention pouring onto Chaewon will be far worse than it is now. His previous life will be dug up piece by piece as well.”

Chaewon’s lonely life, one where he had no family left, where he had even been a terminal patient, would be torn open down to its very last layer and displayed before everyone.

When even the organization tasked with protecting and managing espers was already considering actively exploiting that past, it went without saying where and how the interest of the media and the public would turn.

Even without seeing it, Su-ha felt as though he already could.

As if countless sharp blades were closing in, his expression grew heavy.

Ye-seon continued.

“At times like this, you know how important your role is, Su-ha. Our management team will do everything we can, but there’s no one who can take care of Chaewon as closely as you can. This is something you have to do.”

Ye-seon’s words were perfectly reasonable.

By the nature of their bond, an esper inevitably came to rely more and more mentally on his guide over time, and caring for that mental state, within proper bounds, was part of a guide’s duties.

And yet, at this very moment, why did those words feel so overwhelmingly heavy, as though they were choking the breath out of him?

Was it fear that this situation, everything that was about to happen, might hurt Chaewon in some way?

Fear that he might not be able to protect Chaewon completely?

“…Yes. I understand.”

Su-ha answered, forcing down the anxiety he couldn’t quite define.

Chaewon standing in the middle of the battlefield, facing the enemy.

Chaewon’s name being thrown defenselessly into the midst of people who would casually dissect his life.

Those images kept filling Su-ha’s mind.

He turned away from the urge to hide Chaewon somewhere deep and unreachable, where no one could ever find him, and simply sank into thought.

****

“…”

Having woken up, Chaewon sat blankly in his hospital room, gathering a round mass of blue energy above his palm and suspending it in the air as he stared at it.

Thanks to Su-ha’s guiding, his physical condition had improved considerably, yet for some reason his mood felt anything but light.

In his mind, the image of the opposing esper he had faced that day replayed over and over again.

More specifically, the sight of the man condensing his power like a bomb and hurling it in attack.

Chaewon quietly glared at the blue sphere of energy before him, pushing it away and then pulling it back again.

The control itself wasn’t difficult.

In truth, during the fight, Chaewon had considered attacking rather than merely defending.

His energy possessed physical force.

In other words, even if he couldn’t make it explode, condensing it tightly and throwing it could still deal significant damage to his opponent.

And yet, for some reason, Chaewon couldn’t bring himself to attack that way.

It felt too directly like an “attack.”

Even if he was using intangible energy, to Chaewon it wasn’t much different, emotionally, from punching someone with his own fists.

Of course, he knew the man had been an “enemy” by any common definition.

He had harmed innocent people and posed an extremely high risk of causing even greater damage in the future.

If Chaewon and Su-ha hadn’t happened to be there, the number of casualties would have been far higher.

Even so, in that moment, Chaewon hesitated to confront him with direct violence.

He couldn’t make the decision easily.

That was why his expression was so heavy now.

“I’m weak…”

His voice echoed forlornly through the empty hospital room.

Yes.

Chaewon was condemning his own weakness.

What, exactly, had made him hesitate?

An instinctive aversion to violence?

Or had he simply grown too accustomed to the social norms he had accepted as natural throughout his life?

No matter what excuse he tried, his heart wouldn’t feel any lighter.

If even one more innocent person had died because of his hesitation in that moment, if their families had been left to live with an unerasable grief for the rest of their lives.

Could he really have excused himself by saying he had no choice?

The weight of what it meant to live as an esper suddenly pressed down on him.

An esper wasn’t simply someone with power.

It wasn’t some fantasy where you gained incredible abilities overnight and became superhuman.

Behind the noble words of “protecting others” lay the inescapable weight of war, and that weight had now become reality, settling heavily onto Chaewon’s shoulders.

‘Could I bear it?’

‘Whether it’s a monster or a criminal…’

‘Could I continue standing there after staining my hands with the blood of a living being?’

‘Could I truly endure a life where, to protect the innocent, I wield power no different from blades and guns against someone else?’

Only now did Chaewon truly understand that the unreal word “awakening as an esper” contained such a cold and difficult reality.

“Chaewon?”

At that moment, a voice he had grown all too familiar with reached his ears.

Chaewon hurriedly dispersed the energy floating in the air and turned his head toward the sound.

Standing there was Su-ha, looking at him with eyes utterly different from when they had first met.

“Su-ha…”

Though he hadn’t meant to, a suppressed tone slipped out.

Su-ha immediately picked up on the heaviness in that voice, hurried over, sat beside him, and naturally took hold of his wrist, checking first to see if something was wrong.

“Are you in pain anywhere?”

“No. No, I’m fine… Thanks to your guiding, I really am okay.”

“Then… then why…?”

Even after hearing Chaewon’s answer, Su-ha didn’t stop examining him, carefully probing deep into his condition.

Because Chaewon always claimed he was fine, Su-ha could never take those words at face value.

Chaewon quietly met Su-ha’s gaze and looked deep into his eyes as Su-ha waited for him to speak.

Strangely, the indescribable loneliness he’d felt just moments ago began to fade.

He hadn’t wanted this to happen.

He knew he shouldn’t.

He had told himself again and again that he was nothing more than a burden to Su-ha, that once things improved he should let him go, that he had no right to rely on him so selfishly.

And yet, in this moment, Chaewon realized he had already come to rely on Su-ha without restraint.

It was irresistible.

There was nothing he could do.

Su-ha was the only person who could find and heal every one of Chaewon’s deepest, most hidden wounds, wounds no one else could ever know.

Even in the worst circumstances, he never pushed Chaewon away.

He accepted him, acknowledged him, and guided him with everything he had.

For Chaewon, to whom everything was unfamiliar.

For Chaewon, who had been thrown into a new world overnight with no family or friends to talk to, forced to shoulder everything alone, how could he possibly endure without relying on Su-ha?

At last, Chaewon spoke in a small voice.

“I couldn’t attack.”

The thoughts inside him weren’t even properly organized yet, but he felt that with Su-ha, he could speak however chaotically he needed to.

It was a strange kind of trust, especially since Su-ha might have been the person in the center who doubted him the most.

Su-ha said nothing, simply holding Chaewon’s wrist and meeting his gaze.

Through their contact, Chaewon could feel Suha’s energy, and it felt like a silent message of encouragement.

A small courage bloomed within him.

“It’s not that I didn’t know how. If I’d wanted to, I could have launched a much stronger attack at that esper today.”

“Yes.”

“But… but in the end, I couldn’t. I could restrain him so he couldn’t move easily, but I couldn’t deliver an effective blow. I couldn’t do it.”

Chaewon fell silent, lips pressed together.

He didn’t know how to explain what came next.

Because he might get hurt.

‘Because I might hurt him. That’s why I couldn’t attack.’

Chaewon knew how ridiculous that excuse must sound.

It was nothing more than a confession of his own weakness.

Su-ha had been there too.

He had directly countered that esper’s attacks.

If things had gone even slightly wrong, Su-ha himself could have been gravely injured.

In that situation, how would his confession, that he couldn’t bring himself to hurt the enemy, be received?

In a place where espers risked their lives to fight enemies, wouldn’t someone like him be seen as unnecessary?

Chaewon’s thoughts once again grew tangled and heavy.

It wasn’t as though he wanted allies or innocent people to be put in danger because he worried about an enemy’s well-being.

He didn’t want that.

And yet, all he could feel was the stark realization of just how difficult it was for him to wield violence against another person.