ABFR 20

Chapter 20

My resolve was clear, but in reality, the things I could do were mostly limited.

I am a woman in my twenties with poor physical health, a freelancer who earns less than minimum wage from royalties and has had more years of receiving tax refunds than paying taxes, and on top of that, I have been a student for eight years.

I have no money, no health, no time, and naturally, even less power.

Fortunately, I have an absurdly capable helper from another world nearby, but there was no way to get a humane and kind solution out of someone who casually declared that there was “no problem” with this situation.

Even if I wanted to accomplish something through Railey, I had to come up with the strategy myself.

If I assumed that all of this was happening similarly to the setting I had created in the first place, then no one else could take my role for me.

When I entered the world inside the book, I had to scrape through my memories and organize everything. Fortunately, in my homeworld, I could do that much more easily.

First, I opened the mail app and downloaded every attachment from the emails I had sent over the past few days.

I needed to go through and review all the character settings and the rough scenario once again.

I wished I had organized everything into one file, but I had not, so I decided to connect everything together and organize it now.

Fortunately, there were some small notepads and pens in the break room. After silently asking for forgiveness, I slipped a few sheets of paper without anyone’s permission and began rewriting the settings that had already been established in a more orderly manner.

There is a gap of some time between the first Gate and the second Gate, although I never described it precisely.

It happens at least after Yellow is taken away by his parents, placed under government protection, and the government roughly establishes its policy for dealing with the Gate incidents and the Awakened.

After it becomes known that a form of protection involving human resources, practically equivalent to isolation and surveillance, will be implemented, the boy who had never been protected by anyone comes to believe that being placed under the watch of the state would actually be a better life for him.

In other words, from the perspective of the boy who would eventually become Green, even the inhumane oppression that Dr. Jeong Sihoon bluntly said he should simply make a quick buck from and run away from would look like decent treatment.

What the fuck kind of setting is this?

Anyway, according to the setting, during the chaos of the second Gate incident, Green kills his father and succeeds in containing the Gate disturbance in an entire district by himself. After that, he throws himself into government service.

From the government’s perspective, he becomes a dangerous person worth keeping a close eye on, while at the same time possessing abilities so valuable that they cannot easily throw him away.

A troublesome asset they cannot get rid of.

For Green, Yellow is younger than him and was even abandoned by his parents.

He also has vague memories of a younger sister who was never born, so he instinctively feels a vague sense of kinship with Yellow and treats him relatively kindly.

However, he cannot properly fit in with the other heroes or with society.

Perhaps it cannot be helped, considering that the state itself regards him with suspicion.

That side of Green also overlaps with Black’s attitude, and at some point, he begins to be treated as the second generation of Black.

Yes.

The reason I had made two of the heroes younger was because I liked the pseudo-family dynamic.

Kim Ajin deserved to regret it after thinking about it a hundred times.

Anyway, the reason Green did not make any noticeable contribution during the first Gate was because he had already possessed something resembling a “superpower” even before the Gate appeared.

You know, the kind of superpower that someone in real life could plausibly claim to have.

Things like clairvoyance or precognition.

There was no way to know whether it had actually been a superpower or simply the result of Green’s unusually intelligent calculations.

Either way, Green had lived with at least the awareness that he possessed a superpower even before the Gate appeared.

So when the first Gate appeared, what Green did was hide himself.

His father had already been exploiting his ability for gambling and crime, so Green had predicted far too early that nothing good would come from letting the world discover his ability.

However, for some reason, Green became even more disappointed in his father and the world than before.

He weighed the treatment of the “young Awakened who caused a catastrophic incident,” which had just been announced, against his father’s abuse, which had become even more severe after the Gate appeared.

And eventually, he chose to kill his father.

Using some kind of monster that looked less like a hero’s power and more like one of the creatures that had emerged from the Gate—something whose only real difference was that its color and atmosphere were slightly different.

So, now that the first Gate had more or less been dealt with, the things that would happen before the next Gate opened were as follows.

One, Yellow’s parents would become afraid of their child, feel uncomfortable around him, and hand him over to the government.

Two, Green’s father would drive Green into despair in an even worse way than before.

Three, the government’s policy for dealing with the suddenly emerging Awakened would become public knowledge.

The problem was that I wanted to somehow fix that very first problem.

If I could solve the problem with Yellow’s parents, there would be no reason for the government’s policy toward Yellow to become headline news.

Then Green might continue trying to hide himself, or he might kill his father and then disappear from society as well.

But well…

That was something I could think about when the time came.

I stared at the ceiling with a dissatisfied expression, let out a deep sigh, and continued organizing the settings.

Then, the immediate task at hand was figuring out what would happen to Yellow—probably—after this.

Yellow—temporarily named as such—had already caused massive damage with his ability.

I had no way of knowing whether there were casualties, but considering the scale of the damage, it would be harder to expect there to be none.

Railey had intervened midway, but he had also been roughly cleaning up other areas before finally heading to Songpa, so the incident itself had to be considered something that had already happened.

If Railey had helped with the aftermath, then somehow, things would have worked out.

In fact, the child had been safely transported to the hospital where White was located with much lighter injuries than described in the original setting.

When I thought about it that way, there was definitely a clear difference from the original setting.

My butler was really too reliable.

The problem, however, was what the child’s parents would feel after an incident had already occurred because of their child’s ability.

Could they avoid being afraid of him, blaming him, resenting him, avoiding him, or condemning him?

Since the scale of the damage had changed, I could only hope that the parents’ response would also be different.

But honestly, this might not be something I could solve.

I spent a moment thinking seriously, resting my chin and the edge of my mouth on my palm and groaning softly.

Then I realized that things outside had suddenly become noisy.

I quickly snapped out of my thoughts, stuffed all the notepads I had written on into my pocket, and carefully walked around the break room to make sure I had not left anything behind.

Then I picked up the lunchbox I had left unfinished.

I had eaten less than half of it, and it felt like too much of a waste to throw it away, so I intended to take responsibility for what I had left behind.

I had come without even a bag, but carrying a lunchbox home was hardly a big deal.

So, gently holding the lunchbox in one hand, I stepped into the hallway and hurried toward the source of the commotion.

As expected, the girl had just arrived.

As though some disgusting germ had been placed there, people backed away in fear and formed a large circle.

And in the center of that circle stood a pitch-black doll-like figure, holding a tiny bloodied bundle in his arms.

I knew who it was even from a distance.

It was Railey.

The helmet was really stealing all the attention at a time like this, though…

Anyway, even if no one knew who Railey was, there was no one who could have been unaware that the girl was responsible for the disaster in Songpa.

Even with the internet barely functioning, it was the kind of news that everyone would have picked up through bits and pieces of conversation.

It had been filling the news and newspapers since around noon.

Besides, rumors that this emergency patient had been brought from Songpa and that she was to be entrusted to an Awakened had probably already spread from person to person among everyone in the hospital.

So, just like the girl’s parents and the whole world had treated her in my setting, at this very moment, the girl seemed to have been thrown away and rejected by the world.

For a moment, anger surged inside me, and I almost took a large step forward without realizing it.

Just then, a man in a white coat pushed through the crowd and hurried toward the center of the circle, as if he had rushed there to meet them.

It was Dr. Jeong Sihoon.

Apparently, he had used his ability again for some reason, because his complexion looked even worse than before.

He had the slightly messy hair of someone who had woken up from a sleep deep enough to resemble unconsciousness, and dark, hollow eyes.

Yet there was still not the slightest trace of wavering in his gaze or expression.

Without hesitation or hesitation, he immediately approached the man and the child.

And for some reason, his expression suddenly hardened completely.

Then, just as he reached out without hesitation toward the small figure in Railey’s arms—

A golden-white—

A soft, gentle shimmer, like the rippling morning sun, shook the entire hospital lobby.

Are you crazy, Sihoon?

You really look way too much like a hero.

So even as I instinctively raised my forearm to shield my eyes, I could not help but sigh inwardly.

It was because I had completed the setting of a character with a tragic past, a barren regret, and a heroic kindness built up despite it all just this morning.

Whenever, on a day like today, he showed even a glimpse of surprisingly kind and good behavior, I found myself wondering—or perhaps becoming convinced—that he might have once experienced a moment of misery just as terrible as his.

Because I knew it might be exactly like the setting I had created.

I became overwhelmed by the bone-deep horror of realizing that the one or two lines of backstory I had given my character might, for someone else, have been a real tragedy.

As soon as the child’s treatment was finished, the helmeted man promptly handed the child over to that kind doctor.

This happened after he publicly declared, in front of everyone, “I think I can leave him in your care,” which was the very first sentence he had spoken aloud today like a true person from another world.

When Dr. Sihoon told him, “You’ve been working all day, too. You should get treated before you leave,” the helmeted man simply brushed his hand away and strode out of the hospital.

Then he calmly went to the main road in Sinchon, retrieved the car he had abandoned earlier, and drove back to the hospital.

Yes.

The car I was casually sitting in right now was that very car.

“Is that the lunchbox you left unfinished?”

Finally, after taking off his helmet, the helmeted man asked that the moment he saw the lunchbox tucked under my arm.

Then he promptly stole my lunchbox, clicked open the lid, and looked inside.

An irritated crease immediately appeared between his brows.

“You didn’t even eat half.”

“Store-bought lunchboxes usually contain more food than homemade ones.”

“Didn’t I tell you to eat at least half?”

“I did my best! But I was too worried to eat. Still, I ate quite a lot.”

Despite my defense, Railey merely snorted.

Wait.

Come to think of it, how old was I that I was getting my lunchbox inspected?