Chapter 4
As if it were not empty talk, Young-woo sat in Jin-wook’s seat.
“Let me use your laptop instead.”
“Uh, use it. Use it all you want! Thank you so much, Young-woo.”
Anyway, all there was to do was monitor the sleeping mercenary, so it did not matter who stayed. And he himself had more days sleeping in the duty room, leaving his house empty.
To Jin-wook, who packed his things quickly and said thank you several times, Young-woo waved his hand, telling him to go quickly.
Dense text filled the laptop screen. With eyes that had become a little more serious than at first, he slowly scrolled down.
After Jin-wook left, for several hours Seo Young-woo searched through awakened-related articles and papers provided by the World Union and found a paper on guiding rejection in awakened and an old article.
Energy Retention Rejection syndrome (ERR)
1. Clinical Characteristics
Energy Retention Rejection syndrome is a functional disorder of the energy absorption and utilization process, characterized by functional blockage during the energy transfer process and a lowered healing response. Accordingly, despite sufficient guiding, patients complain of persistent fatigue, decreased muscle strength, and decreased cognitive response speed for treatment of external and internal injuries.
2. Pattern of Onset
This syndrome occurs in individuals who had been maintaining normal function, after environmental stimulation, and cases of acquired onset have been reported.
Young-woo’s eyes narrowed as he read the paper. Was this really possible? Without reading further, the possibility of unauthorized esper dumping was growing more and more. Raising his eyes, he checked the man who was still asleep, and scrolled down again.
3. Pathophysiology and Causes
The exact pathophysiology of Energy Retention Rejection syndrome has not been clearly elucidated. However, most espers developed it after strong external stimulation, such as attacks by high-grade variants, gate entry, and repeated torture. In the future, at the cellular level…
In the end, he frowned. He had felt it when he first saw him too, but for a mercenary, his body was gaunt and thin. At a glance, he had no body fat at all and was all muscle.
At that moment, the vitals fluctuated sharply. Seo Young-woo jumped up from his seat, braced himself on the desk, and checked beyond the bulletproof glass.
The man was trembling with his face scrunched up as if in pain. As if having a nightmare, he shook his head and pushed at the bed with his feet. Seeing the shape of his moving lips, he immediately pressed the connected speaker.
…ve me, please.
He could not hear the voice well. Hurriedly checking the device, he turned the volume on the left to maximum.
– Save, me… It’s hot, it hurts. Ah, it hurts…
The man, writhing in pain, tried to curl his body, but with his arms fixed he did not know what to do and shed tears. The person who, just a few hours ago, had glared as if to kill him and shouted was nowhere to be seen.
The voice pouring out pain was so very fragile.
***
The man in a hospital gown sat in his seat with his head held stiffly upright. In front of him, the Director of the Special Power Management Bureau and the executives were looking at tablets with serious expressions.
“I have activated the automatic translation function. You can also see it in subtitles. We will begin the video call with the Russian side.”
The large screen in front lit up, and on the screen appeared the face of the Russian mercenary commander in combat uniform.
The meeting, which began with light greetings, exchanged reports on the mercenaries who had lost their lives in this gate and opinions on a compensation plan. After the situation was organized, Dmitry Orlov’s profile and footage of the awakened mercenary were placed side by side on the screen.
“As reported, this is the mercenary who was right before a rampage. After emergency guiding on our side, he woke up yesterday, but… his personal details are different from the person on the mercenary list you gave us. How did this happen?”
– What do you mean by that?
“Can you see the screen? Right now…”
– I cannot understand. We have no foreign mercenaries.
At those words, the mercenary, who had been waiting quietly, jumped up and shouted.
“Boss!”
The face of the man, who until a moment ago had been full of spirit, turned ashen as he shouted toward the camera and began to cause a disturbance. The soldiers who had been waiting rushed over quickly and held the man.
Director Gwak Heon-jae, who had been watching the situation, called the man who was conducting the meeting.
“Turn the camera this way. So his face can be seen properly.”
“Understood.”
Soon the camera, which had been filming the Bureau executives, turned to the mercenary. When his youthful face appeared on the screen, he hurriedly poured out Russian. But the Russian soldier on the screen showed no agitation at all. Rather, a displeased look was evident.
– We sent mercenaries for the Republic of Korea. In that process, there was no mistake of sending the wrong personal details, and we know nothing about that man.
Listening to the conversation, Director Gwak Heon-jae hummed low with a troubled expression. In the end, researcher Park Jin-wook could not hold back and cut into the conversation.
“What do you mean by that! Didn’t you see the video we sent you?”
– He is not one of our mercenaries. We will not answer any further on this matter.
The mercenary kept shouting at the screen. His movements grew so rough, as if he might lunge at any moment, that the soldiers barely held him back.
“Chief Kang, what is that mercenary saying right now?” Director Gwak asked a staff member who could speak Russian to interpret separately.
“……He is shouting, asking if they are abandoning him.” After thinking something over, the Director finally opened his mouth.
“We will return the mercenary to Russia. We will bear the cost.”
– We have already processed all of our mercenaries as dead. If you send us an unidentified soldier, we will regard it as terrorism.
“Colonel Anatoly!”
– I will say it again. We in Russia find this situation extremely unpleasant, and we cannot accept an unidentified soldier.
At the firm words, frustration settled over the mercenary’s face. Seo Young-woo, who had been watching the situation from the very end, could not take his eyes off the man.
Empty sighs burst out here and there at the meeting that had ended one-sidedly. It was the first time anything like this had happened, so everyone looked dumbfounded. Just then, Seo Young-woo raised his hand. When Director Gwak nodded, the microphone in front of him
“Team AXIS leader, Guide Seo Young-woo. I have something to report.” At the same time as the words ended, a notification sounded on each tablet with the report he had sent. The executives’ faces gradually twisted as they checked the document.
“The mercenary is presumed to have ERR syndrome. It is short for Energy Retention Rejection, and as the name says, it is characterized by the body being unable to absorb guiding, and even if it does, having difficulty retaining it. It seems this was the cause of the mercenary’s rampage.”
“Then are you saying only Team Leader Seo can guide him?” “At present, yes. Of course, guiding was not easy for me either.”
“Hmm. So what is it you want to say?”
“Management will be difficult, so……”
Seo Young-woo met the eyes of the mercenary, who was looking at him not knowing what to do. Doing his best to ignore the frustration and fear spread across that face, he continued.
“It seems they dumped an esper.” At the same time as the words ended, the man’s head dropped with a thud.
***
With the repeated adoptions and disrupted adoptions, even the expectation that he might get a family had now disappeared.
The reasons for the disrupted adoptions were varied. Because he was quiet and gloomy, because he was mature in a way that was not childlike. Dressing up the words “my feelings have cooled” in other words, after as short as a month, as long as half a year, he always returned to the orphanage.
It was not that he had not tried. He took on housework he had not been told to do, and he endured and bore verbal abuse that crossed the line, but all that ever came back was cold stares.
Then, when Baek Jin was in his first year of middle school, a chance for overseas adoption came. As he got older, domestic adoption became difficult, so the orphanage actually welcomed overseas adoption.
His new parents were an elderly couple who ran a motel in a rural part of Alberta, Canada. He was given the new name Connor Cassel, and he was homeschooled by them. When the English lesson of about an hour was over, he would clean the rooms people had stayed in and left, in the couple’s place, and then a meal was given to him like a reward. The menu was nothing special, but he could eat steak until he was full.
It was an awkward relationship to call family, but as the years passed, one year after another, he grew satisfied with life in the country house. But after the woman suddenly fell ill and passed away, the man sold the motel and headed somewhere with Baek Jin.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Connor, you are going to a better place. Do not worry. They say there are lots of friends your age there, too.’
‘Can’t we just live together?’
No answer came back. In the quiet silence, Baek Jin realized he was being abandoned again.
The place they arrived at after driving for a whole day was an unidentified facility located in the mountains. The old man handed Baek Jin over to that place and left without looking back once.
The place he had to adapt to anew was so strict that he needed permission even to smile, and everything was set, tactical education in the morning and combat training in the afternoon. To escape a reality like a cesspool, he needed ‘awakening.’
Time passed before he knew it and he became an adult, but with the result of non-awakened again and again, Baek Jin could not leave the facility. It was only natural that his emotions dried up more and more.
The days grew shorter and shorter and the temperature dropped sharply, and winter came. Snow fell from the sky like rain, and before long it began to pile up on the ground.
On the way back to the dormitory, stepping on snow piled a hand’s breadth deep, his frozen hand clutched his fortieth awakening test sheet. When again he did not get the result he wanted, emptiness pressed down on his shoulders.
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