IG Chapter 1

← Incomplete Guide

“Moving in.”

At the man’s words, the Center staff watching the situation grew busy with their hands. Beside him, a young-faced man vigilantly scanned the surroundings and twisted his jaw.

—The safety of the children and guides is the top priority.

At the voice coming over the radio, a pair of eyes, long and slit horizontally, fixed on one point. The middle-aged man looked over his team members spread wide, then at the young man guarding his side.

“Be careful.”

This kid won’t even answer when his elder’s talking to him… Despite the middle-aged man’s muttering, the man gave no reply.

Soon, at the middle-aged man’s signal, the team members moved without a sound.

Just as expected, the espers, who had gone so long without proper guiding, were unstable beyond measure. Not expecting things to turn out like this, they couldn’t coordinate at all and could only take hit after helpless hit.

The man who had fought the espers alongside the middle-aged one wiped the blood from his hands carelessly on his clothes and entered the building.

The old building was dreary. The dark, damp air, nothing like a place where people lived, was unpleasant. The man looked around the interior as his team members passed him and went inside. The cries of children coming from all over were loud.

He pushed open tightly shut doors to check whether anyone was inside. As he was about to move on after giving the rooms a rough check, the doors swinging open on their own without a hand, he stopped at the faint sound of sniffling. As he approached a room with all its lights out, the sobbing grew clearer.

“Hhk… heeu, uhk…”

Black pupils and gray pupils fixed on one spot. As he narrowed his brow, he saw a small body crouched in the corner, trembling. The man pulled his head back, glanced down the chaotic hallway, and stepped inside.

Step, step. At the bold footsteps, the small body flinched. It was a space where the children had lived, so he hadn’t taken more than a few steps before the distance closed. The man tilted his head, feeling a very faint but unfamiliar guiding.

“What the—it’s just a kid.”

A rough guiding was flowing from the child, who sat hugging his knees in shabby clothes, crying. If the rumor was true — that they kidnapped children before manifestation and kept them until they became guides — then guiding could be felt from even this little one.

Since it hadn’t been long since manifestation, the guiding was a mess. The man stared down at the terrified child, then, without a moment’s hesitation, picked him up and slung him over his shoulder.

Even slung over the stranger’s shoulder, the child only kept crying hard. He must not have eaten well while living here; he was far lighter than other kids his age.

The esper, who was used to lifting heavy things like they were nothing, clicked his tongue at the featherlight weight.

“You’re loud.”

“Uhk…”

“I’ll send you home. Cry when you get there.”

The child’s shuddering only grew, but the man paid no mind. As he left the building, on the verge of collapse at any moment, and rejoined the team, the middle-aged man called his name and approached, reaching out to take the child.

“Hm?”

The middle-aged man looked at the child’s hands clutching the man’s clothes so tightly they’d gone white and shrugged. The man, who’d wanted to hand off what was slung over his shoulder as fast as possible, sighed. The clumsy guiding flowing from the young guide felt nothing but awkward.

“What can you do — looks like you’ll be carrying him all the way to the Center.”

And so, from the moment they got in the car, the man had to hold the child all the way to the Center. The child kept sobbing, then, worn out from crying, fell asleep as if passing out — and when he opened his eyes again, he was alone.

***

The world, which everyone had assumed would stay ordinary forever, had gone completely to ruin.

People died in droves every day, and the army faced monsters no one could identify. The government did what it could to resolve the situation, but ordinary people’s strength and wits were not enough.

Once the monsters occupied the cities, people naturally barricaded themselves at home and didn’t set foot outside. The once-glorious city was reduced to a wasteland overnight. No one could defeat the monsters that had suddenly appeared.

While everyone was racking their brains over the strange phenomena witnessed simultaneously around the world, someone proposed an experiment. The subjects: people. People dismissed it as madness before even hearing the explanation, but there was no other way.

After countless failures came successive victims, and researchers who abandoned the research along with their mental trauma.

But people didn’t give up, and at last a test subject appeared before the world — one who wore a human form and used abilities you couldn’t believe with your own eyes, fighting and killing the monsters successfully.

The world called those with superhuman strength espers.

The espers, created through inhumane experiments, had one great flaw: when their condition worsened, there was no way to stop them from rampaging.

And so, to stop the espers’ rampage, guides were born.

Now the generations had turned, and everyone had to undergo trait screening at a certain age — some manifesting as early as eight, some only as adults, very late.

Se-hyeon had been kidnapped at seven, manifested as a B-rank guide at fourteen, and was rescued the year he turned fifteen. Having never once had a proper screening since birth, Se-hyeon was able to get a proper trait screening only after he’d been transferred to the Center right after his rescue.

When the children he’d lived with at the facility all went to find their parents, Se-hyeon didn’t look for his. While the children returned to the arms of the families they’d missed so badly, Se-hyeon chose on his own to become part of the Center.

After joining the Center, grueling training followed every day. Se-hyeon, now formally receiving guiding training, had stamina at rock bottom. He’d been sickly since birth.

What he was worst at was running and anything requiring strength. Because of it, after entering the Center and receiving high-intensity training, he had to fall asleep every night groaning in pain.

It would have been nice if life had gotten a little smoother after his rescue, but ironically, everything only kept flowing in harder directions for Se-hyeon.

Apart from the intense training, probably because of past trauma, the slightest bit of dirt around him raised goosebumps all over his body. On top of that, the memory of having been forced to guide while at the facility was still vivid, so the instant skin touched someone he didn’t know, his stomach churned — and he felt so awful he wanted to scrub the spot raw.

As the symptoms kept getting worse, Se-hyeon went to the hospital on his own and had to come home with nothing but the fact of his mysophobia and no solution.

Habitually squeezing hand sanitizer, Se-hyeon, lost in old thoughts, recalled the first roommate he’d met when he entered the Center. The man — it was horrifying to even call him a person — would come back drenched in sweat after training and lie down on the bed to rest without showering.

His luck couldn’t have been worse. Se-hyeon couldn’t stand the man’s sweat smell and spent time in the lounge; when the man went to wash, only then would Se-hyeon enter the room, open the windows, and disinfect every corner with sanitizer. Everywhere the man’s hands had touched, he wiped with sanitizer again and again.

When he’d done it for two weeks straight, his first roommate blew up. The man shouted at the top of his lungs — did he look like a bug to him, how clean did he think he was to fuss like this — and Se-hyeon, rubbing his hands together after squeezing more sanitizer even in the middle of it, shot back that a bug would be cleaner than him, and got hit in the face.

Only after walking around with a bruise on his once-fine face did Se-hyeon get free of him. That day, he scrubbed the cheek the man’s hand had touched with soap, again and again.

There were several methods of guiding. Radiation guiding and contact guiding. Se-hyeon mostly used radiation guiding. Even in training, even when meeting espers who needed guiding, he used only radiation guiding.

The advantage of radiation guiding was that guiding was possible without skin touching — but Se-hyeon struggled with it anyway, gagging.

The first thing Se-hyeon did when he entered the guiding room was spray disinfectant. After meticulously spraying every corner without missing a spot, he’d finish the cleaning, wash his hands, come back, and sanitize them.

Sometimes espers who visited the guiding room complained that the smell gave them headaches, but Se-hyeon didn’t flinch and sprayed disinfectant right at them.

‘Really hate this…’

Even after all that, just imagining being with someone else made his stomach churn. It hadn’t been this bad originally, but after the memories of the facility and his first roommate, these symptoms had appeared. To make matters worse, espers would storm out of the guiding room mid-session after receiving Se-hyeon’s guiding.

Espers who’d approached him after seeing his face ended up abandoning the guiding for the same reason and fleeing as if running away.

The guiding is strange. The guiding is too unstable. After receiving his guiding, they’d have to get guiding from another guide all over again. Even if Se-hyeon were the only guide left in the world, no one would ever want his guiding.

Cases where guiding was hard because the wavelength between an esper and a guide didn’t match happened now and then. Even so, Se-hyeon’s case — rejecting guiding with his whole body — left the Center at a loss too.

What had startled the Center one more time, apart from that, was his rank change. Se-hyeon, who’d manifested as B-rank, had his rank change to A-rank. Thanks to that, Se-hyeon had to take the rank test two more times without knowing why.

The official, who’d thought it was an error, only admitted it after the last test result. No matter how you looked at it, Se-hyeon’s rank was A. They’d seen ranks fall plenty of times, but a rank rising was rare, so for a while Se-hyeon walked around trailing the Center’s attention and rumors.

The Center didn’t leave alone the Se-hyeon who’d gone from B-rank to A-rank. A perfectly good A-rank guide couldn’t just be left idle, was the reason. They tried to change his guiding, threw him into operations, but Se-hyeon stayed the same.

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