TTOA Chapter 64
by Volare#64
Seo Eui-woo helped Jae-jin up. Only then did Jae-jin have the wherewithal to look around and assess the situation.
This was a hallway in the villa, and spent bullet casings were scattered on the floor. Glancing into the living room, he could still see creature corpses and shattered glass strewn about.
“I’ll clean that up. You should shower first, Jae-jin. You’re so, so cold… Ugh.”
Seo Eui-woo led Kwon Jae-jin to the bathroom, a troubled look in his eyes. His gray eyes were filled with anguish.
They were the only two in the house now, and nothing could threaten them, yet Seo Eui-woo was grinding his teeth as if fighting something alone.
“Cold? Why is that?”
“Being cold is, hard.”
“Why… It’s winter, isn’t it?”
“…Like a corpse.”
Seo Eui-woo began to fill the bathtub with hot water and tried to take Kwon Jae-jin’s clothes off. Seeing the artificially torn mark on the chest of his t-shirt, he frowned fiercely again.
It was clearly a knife mark, enough to drive him insane.
“What is this? What’s wrong with the clothes?”
“Ah… I know, right? They just did it out of the blue.”
“What?”
“I think they were trying to check my Core.”
Every Esper has a Core.
It resides deep inside the heart. It is said that you can feel a resonating wave when you get close.
Of course, Kwon Jae-jin only heard this information from the 1st round Seo Eui-woo and had never directly felt any resonance or waves.
This is because late-blooming mutants, unlike Espers who are born with the ability, have an immature and incomplete Core.
So, honestly, Kwon Jae-jin still didn’t really feel that there was something like a Core inside him.
Also, the Core is a fatal weakness for Espers.
Just like destroying the Gate Core, which is the core when destroying a Gate, Espers also die easily if their Core is destroyed.
Even if the heart can be revived with the Healing Factor, the Core can never be revived.
If the Core is injured, it cannot be restored even with the Healing Factor.
Therefore, the existence of the Core, the weakness of Espers, was not known to the general public at all, and Kwon Jae-jin, who could not directly feel any waves or resonance, still found it unfamiliar.
“They, took off, took off your clothes and checked? Who?”
Seo Eui-woo grabbed Kwon Jae-jin’s left chest. He squeezed and gripped hard, even the pectoral muscles under his chest, with his large hand.
“Who touched your chest, Jae-jin?”
“Ugh.”
Jae-jin let out a slightly uncomfortable moan.
“Answer me. Did they touch you here, like this?”
“Yes, they did, I think.”
“Ha… Was that bastard an Esper? Or a Guide?”
“Ah, an Esper….”
“Shit.”
Seo Eui-woo cursed without even trying to restrain himself and frantically grilled Kwon Jae-jin.
“Who was it? Do you know his name? What ability did he use? What did he look like? Tell me everything you know.”
Even though the bathtub was filling up, Seo Eui-woo showed no sign of stopping his questioning. At this rate, the water would overflow the tub.
He wondered if he should tell him this.
No, he would tell him… He wasn’t going to hide anything. But still… there was such a thing as atmosphere, wasn’t there? Seo Eui-woo was acting strange.
“…Can’t I wash up first and then tell you? And let go of my chest. It hurts.”
Jae-jin took a step back for now.
“You said my body is cold and like a corpse.”
“….”
“You said it’s hard… I’m cold too. And it hurts. Let’s wash up first.”
“…Ha.”
Seo Eui-woo frowned unpleasantly.
He glared at Kwon Jae-jin with fiercely angry eyes, but when the bathtub water finally started to overflow, he turned his head away.
He muttered sullenly.
“Seriously, you know how to drive a person crazy, Kwon Jae-jin.”
Seo Eui-woo took off Kwon Jae-jin’s clothes. His impatient and hasty movements revealed his uncomfortable mood.
Knowing Seo Eui-woo’s gloomy state of mind, Jae-jin reached out and helped him take off his clothes in return, wanting to get into the tub quickly.
The clothes Kwon Jae-jin was wearing were little more than rags, so there wasn’t much to take off. The tattered top quickly fell from his body, and the dirt-covered pants were soon taken off as well.
On the other hand, Seo Eui-woo was still in his armed attire from right after work, so it took a lot of work to take it off. Kwon Jae-jin helped him loosen the harness loops across his chest and take off his arms one by one. Then, he unbuttoned the combat uniform and carefully lowered the zipper.
After taking off everything except for the Esper Identification Tag around Seo Eui-woo’s neck, the two got into the bathtub together. The water was hotter than he expected.
No, maybe it just felt that way because Kwon Jae-jin’s body was so cold.
The blood that had been chilled from being constantly pushed to the limit was gradually warmed.
As time passed while submerged in the bathtub, Jae-jin’s tense mind began to calm down.
The incident of being chased by the creature, the flesh being torn and wounded, the encounter with the Esper Special Forces unit and almost being killed… The anxiety and fear he felt at that time slowly faded.
Looking back now, these were sudden and terrible events that Kwon Jae-jin, an ordinary person, could not have handled. He tried to cope with it calmly, but still, it was an overwhelming experience for an untrained ordinary person to fight with a gun and confront death alone.
Thinking about it now, he seemed to have put off the conversation because it was hard to explain those things to Seo Eui-woo. He would ask him to release him from confinement first, and then tell him after washing up. He was procrastinating like that. Even if a disaster victim decided to report the situation at the time, he could only do so after calming down a bit.
But now it was okay. He could be okay because Seo Eui-woo was by his side.
Kwon Jae-jin found stability by Seo Eui-woo’s side. Just being with Seo Eui-woo was reassuring.
However, strangely, it didn’t seem to be the same for Seo Eui-woo.
As time passed, Kwon Jae-jin became more stable, but Seo Eui-woo became more anxious.
Even though they were hugging each other, he kept touching and holding Kwon Jae-jin as if he couldn’t be at ease, trying to confirm his existence.
He grabbed Jae-jin’s hair, repeatedly pulled his arms toward him, and held him tightly around the waist, treating Kwon Jae-jin like a phantom that would soon disappear. Anxiously and restlessly. Frantically.
Seo Eui-woo acted as if he was with Kwon Jae-jin but not with him.
“…Jae-jin.”
Seo Eui-woo, who kept messing with Kwon Jae-jin, finally couldn’t stand it and called out to him. He whispered as if collapsing, trapping him in his arms with great force.
“Tell me now.”
His gray eyes, which had sunk miserably, were dark. As if trapped in a small, dark room without a single ray of light.
“Tell me, say something. To me. Huh?”
Kwon Jae-jin nodded.
His agitated mind had calmed down a lot, so he felt like he could talk about it now.
The terrible things that happened to Kwon Jae-jin when Seo Eui-woo was away, and the feelings he felt.
“…So, it started with a creature… that thing lying in the living room broke the window and came in. I thought Seo Eui-woo would come back, but the security system was broken, so he didn’t come, so I somehow shot and killed it with Seo Eui-woo’s gun. I was lucky. Really.”
Jae-jin calmly recounted what he had experienced. Seo Eui-woo put strength into the arm hugging Jae-jin and listened to the story with a serious expression.
“I thought that was the end of it after catching the creature, but another one appeared outside the window and ambushed me. I was thrown away as it was and rolled down to the edge of the canyon, and I was badly hurt. I thought I was going to die….”
Even though he was telling him all the facts now, Seo Eui-woo seemed to be getting more excited rather than calming down as he listened to the story.
Even though he knew it was all over, and he was confirming with his eyes and body that Kwon Jae-jin was alive and well, the veins in his arms were bulging and his muscles were twitching in response.
Seo Eui-woo clenched his fists tightly and scattered fierce eyes.
It seemed that there was no way to calm him down no matter what he did. He didn’t calm down even after confirming Kwon Jae-jin’s safety, he didn’t calm down even when he was with him, he didn’t calm down even when he heard the story… Only a passion that could not be subdued by any means covered and dominated him.
“At that time, the Espers who were searching near the Gate found me… They mistook me for another Esper and gave me Healing Factor. Thanks to that Healing Factor, I was saved, but it was soon exposed that I was a mutant….”
“Right. That must have been when. That’s when that guy touched your chest and found out.”
“…Yes.”
“This, damn… Who the hell is that bastard? Huh?”
Seo Eui-woo growled and rolled his eyes. His ability boiled unconsciously.
Perhaps because of the aftermath of properly unleashing the power in the depths that he had only suppressed usually, a denser aura than before was emitted as he became emotionally excited.
At this rate, it was as if the terrain near the canyon had been completely destroyed, and this house was about to have its pillars pulled out and blown away.
Jae-jin sighed and told him everything he had heard and seen as he knew it.