Chapter 40 - Escape (3)

Luke and Becky sobbed miserably amid the camera flashes. The woman holding them was sobbing just as hard. Yun passed the familiar tableau without a second glance.

A man in a jet-black combat suit strode across the ruined street. Several cameras hastily swung after Yun, but he walked toward the underground parking garage entrance without so much as blinking at the flashes.

The firefighters had cordoned it off. Yun stepped over the yellow tape, walked down into the garage, and headed toward the rubble.

“Sordi.”

He approached his junior, who stood staring at the rubble.

“Move aside. If you're going to stand there out of it.”

The man turned at his name. Hollow green eyes fixed on Yun, their usual sharpness lost in a sunken stare.

Having known the man for a long time through no choice of his own, Yun could tell he wasn't himself. They had been working in the field together since the Second War; inevitably, he had acquired a rough idea of what set the man off.

“What's wrong with me...?”

“You lose it when someone's trapped under a building.”

Yun casually said what Riccardo Sordi would hate to hear, then stopped beside him.

The garage entrance was blocked by fallen rubble. Cameras flashed behind them despite the firefighters' attempts to stop them. News drones hovered overhead.

The situation wasn't all that bad. The entire building hadn't come down. Only the ceiling over the garage's curved access ramp had collapsed. He narrowed his eyes and studied the arrangement of the rubble.

“Stay out of the way,” Yun told the rigid man. “You'll only get in the way.”

“... How would I get in the way of clearing rubble...? I'm fine. Let's clear it together...”

“With your hands shaking like that?”

Yun countered without taking his eyes off the rubble.

“I suppose you're like this because Jonathan Kudo's in there, but with a collapse this size, he'll be fine even if he's buried underneath.”

Riccardo didn't answer. Yun offered nothing further either. The explanation he had just added was a response to Yehyeon's recurring lessons—be good to your juniors.

Riccardo was always with Jonathan Kudo and Ska Owen, so saying that must count as ‘being good to his juniors.’

His junior bit his lip and thrust his trembling hands into his pockets. Indifferent, Yun began lifting the rubble. He moved the pieces aside one by one, methodically dismantling them from the top like a Jenga tower. Small fragments of cement scattered to the ground like cookie crumbs.

The noise and light of the camera flashes grew more frantic.

“Mr. Sordi, why are you just standing there?”

A reporter struggling with a firefighter behind them raised his voice.

“Both your arms look perfectly fine!”

A Badger who survived long enough became a name etched into the public consciousness. Commander-in-Chief Lee Yehyeon was a figure who defined an era, but he wasn't the only famous Badger. The names of war heroes from the First and Second Wars, particularly those who frequently worked inside the cores, often came up online.

“Couldn't you have prevented the collapse if you'd killed the creature sooner?”

Long accustomed to such pathetic provocations, neither man bothered to answer.

Yun swiftly cleared away the rubble. As he worked, he discovered two people trapped beneath it.

Brilliant white hair caught his eye above an oxygen mask. White hair that contrasted with hazelnut-colored skin. A tall, well-built frame and sharply defined, handsome features.

The junior who had appeared out of thin air one day.

He was still breathing.

Riccardo let out a soft groan.

“Does he think the Badgers are a suicide squad...?”

“Forden. Been a while, hasn't it?”

Yun addressed the man trembling beneath his unconscious junior.

“You've gotten old.”

“Y-Y-Y...”

“Yes. Good to see you too. Looks like this rookie took the full impact of the collapse. All your limbs are intact, so pull yourself together and get up.”

The cameras flashed again. Reporters clamored for the chairman of Cureus while firefighters held back those trying to rush in. Yun swept away the rubble with one hand and lifted his unconscious junior.

PATTER.

Stone fragments fell from Hilde's body.

Yun hoisted his tall junior over his shoulder, adjusting him so his arms and legs wouldn't drag on the ground. He was completely out, but judging by his pulse and body temperature, he didn't seem likely to die anytime soon.

Good. He wanted Hildebert Taleb to last a long time. It had been a while since anything had aroused this much curiosity in him.

“Chairman Forden! Sir!”

“Call an ambulance, now!”

“Jonathan.”

Amid the flurry of voices from Cureus personnel and the chairman's stumbling efforts to get up, Riccardo spoke in a low voice.

Another man, exposed as the rubble was cleared away, lifted his head. His hands were stained black—both hands so black they suggested how frantically he must have been clearing rubble. Jonathan Kudo looked at the men with exhausted eyes.

“What happened to you?”

Riccardo walked past Yun, who was turning away without a care, and approached his comrade. Ignoring the faint tremor still in his own hands, he took Kudo by the arm and pulled him along.

“You look awful... Doesn't look like you were buried like Hilde... Inhaled too many fumes?”

“Yun.”

Instead of answering, Kudo called after his retreating senior.

Yun glanced back as he carried Hilde out of the underground garage. The eyes of those who had been inside the half-collapsed tower darted toward the man slung over his shoulder.

Kudo said, “Don't send a junior with poor healing into the field.”

“He left me behind!”

Having recovered his senses, the chairman raised a finger and shouted over Kudo.

“He left me behind even though I begged him!”

“If you've made yourself a nuisance, you should keep your mouth shut, Forden,” Yun said indifferently.

“The garage ceiling probably collapsed because you panicked and started firing some useless civilian self-defense gadget. A portable laser cannon or something, I imagine. Didn't I tell you those things were utterly worthless?”

“I-I never even took it out of my pocket until that bastard abandoned me! Even though I begged him desperately...”

“What do you mean, abandoned you? How does a man who abandoned you end up unconscious on top of you?”

At that flat observation, the chairman pressed his lips into a line. Yun sighed, conveying just how exhausting it was to talk to someone with nothing in his skull.

“I'm leaving.”

His two juniors looked at him.

“You two can do what you like. I have to take him to the hospital. I'm taking the two-tone-haired recruit's vehicle. Come if you want, or don't.”

“Take this one too. He's not in his right mind after inhaling toxic fumes...”

“I'm fine.”

Yun and Riccardo ignored Kudo's surly reply.

Riccardo tugged his disgruntled comrade along by the arm. Even as his fellow recruit dragged him away, Kudo kept glaring sullenly at Hilde. He continued shooting those surly looks until Yun's expression conveyed that he didn't care and they could sort it out themselves.

Then he suddenly spoke.

“Teach him not to rush in without thinking if he doesn't heal well.”

“Tell him yourself,” Yun countered flatly.

Walking out into the frenzy of camera flashes, he added, “Though I doubt he'll listen.”

* * *

In the end, everyone boarded the ambulance Shu Diamond had brought.

Riccardo and Kudo laid the unconscious Hilde down and settled onto the seats opposite him. Yun climbed into the passenger seat and took out his phone. Silence descended abruptly as the ambulance doors closed.

Reporters swarmed around the ambulance, but no one looked outside. Shu calmly pulled away.

“I'll take us to the headquarters hospital.”

The vehicle pushed through the crowd.

A heavy silence lingered inside for a long time. Only Hildebert Taleb's steady breathing rang clearly through the ambulance.

Two Badgers leaned against the wall with their eyes closed. One drove in silence. One stared at his phone screen. The atmosphere that followed the end of a major ordeal settled over them.

After a long while, it was Hilde's voice that broke the silence too.

“...rry.”

Heads lifted at the faint mumble.

“I'm sorry.”

His seniors stared at the recruit murmuring weakly in his sleep. A very different silence fell, the stillness of everyone looking at the same thing.

Riccardo spoke.

“I don't think he's apologizing to us... Yun. Any idea?”

“None.”

Yun narrowed his eyes at his unconscious junior.

“I'd have to know something about him.”

“Still, don't you spend the most time with him?”

“He knows how to use a sword, and he's quick on the uptake.”

Despite his casual explanation, Yun never took his eyes off Hilde.

“Which means I know next to nothing.”

“He has a good reputation, though.”

Shu joined the conversation in her husky voice. She murmured while watching through the windshield.

“Karl said that, contrary to his worries, he seems perfectly decent...”

“He himself isn't going to hurt anyone. He goes out of his way to do things that'll only hurt him.”

“Well. We'll have to wait and see whether he's truly harmless.”

Yun's voice was thoughtful.

Heads turned at the incongruous remark. But he was staring at Hilde and missed both Riccardo raising an eyebrow in disapproval and Shu blinking.

“He shows no malice at all, but sometimes there's this odd feeling...”

He trailed off and said no more. It was exceedingly rare for Yun to trail off. Riccardo blinked his green eyes in surprise.

But Yun remained silent. He sat motionless for a long time, never taking his eyes off the unconscious Hilde. Just like Jonathan Kudo, who sat motionless, glaring at him.

“Do you even know his name?”

As the ambulance reached the headquarters' main gate, Riccardo directed a pointed question at his friend.

“Remember anything the head of HR said in the auditorium? Well... I suppose you don't care who he is as long as he's alive.”

“Hildebert Taleb.”

“Oh, you remember his name. What about the rest?”

“I don't care about any of that.”

No one was surprised by Kudo's matter-of-fact reply.

“As long as he's all right, it doesn't matter.”

Again, no one was surprised.

His indifference toward new juniors was nothing new. A different sort of indifference from Yun's. That distinctive boundary he drew. That distinctive lack of interest.

He wasn't someone who took an interest in a person just because they had been on one mission together.

So no one was surprised when Jonathan Kudo left the moment he confirmed that Hildebert Taleb would receive treatment safely. Nor were they at all surprised that he never once showed his face after Hilde woke up safe and sound.

What surprised them instead was the media's reaction.

* * *

As soon as I woke up, I heard that a bombshell had dropped.

“You're in the news,” Samuel Han said ominously. “Want to see?”