Pretending to Be the Lover of an Esper C39

Chapter 39

“Shit—!”

If it caught me, I’d be dead. Sea toad tadpoles didn’t just swallow prey—they ate through it, grinding their way inside. A single bite meant no coming back.

Pure survival instinct jerked my body into motion.

I rolled to the side, but it was the worst possible choice. I slipped on the wet reef and slid toward the water, my thigh slashing open against a jagged edge of coral—long, deep, burning.

Crash!

“Ahhhhhh!”

The agony came a heartbeat later—only after Taeon’s lightning struck down, the bolt so loud it erased everything, leaving behind little more than a smoking carcass where the monster had been.

The danger passed in an instant, but my senses fractured under the pain. My vision flashed white. I must have blacked out—one second? Two? Maybe not even that long, or maybe longer. The pain eclipsed everything. Too sharp. Too much—

“Hhng—ahhh…!”

I pressed my hands to my thigh. Both arms shook violently—from the fingers clear to the shoulders. My palms felt simultaneously cold and hot, or maybe neither. My leg was drenched, sticky—blood mixed with seawater, running down the uneven rock as waves slapped weakly against me. The smell was metal and brine and rot. Every tide pool in sight had gone red. Some veins of blood trickled out toward the ocean.

Still hurt. God, still hurt so much.

“Ji Yunseong! Ji Yunseong!”

Every nerve in my body screamed, flooding my head with nothing but pain. The world roared—waves, shouts, the sea—a deafening, tangled mixture. Too loud. Too bright. Too much.

“Can you hear me? Ji Yunseong, stay with me—damn it, the bleeding—”

“Hh—hah—hah—!”

My ragged breath rasped loud in my own ears. When had I ever gasped like this before? My head buzzed, my face flushing hot; even my scalp burned. Somewhere, someone groaned—and then I realized it was me. My clenched teeth caught a whimper as my ankle throbbed and my thigh pulsed with agony.

Instinct made me look down. The black fabric of my soaked pants was knotted tightly around the wound—Taeon’s doing.

My vision blurred—wet, smeared. I blinked until tears spilled down, but more moisture quickly took their place.

“It hurts… too much,” I managed.

I reached out blindly, grabbing his wrist as if it were a lifeline. My blood painted him. My voice didn’t carry far; I barely heard whatever he yelled back. His wrist was slick and red—my fault.

He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were on my thigh, at the gash still pulsing blood beneath the crude tourniquet of his shirt. The edges of the fabric darkened with every heartbeat.

Too wide. That gap… was that… bone?

“…Guide injured—heavy bleeding… wound is… can’t—unpredicted—”

He pressed two fingers to his earpiece, voice tense and rapid.

Suddenly all sound dulled, as if my head were underwater. Faint, muffled. Even the crashing surf dimmed. My vision flickered. My shivering intensified until I couldn’t tell if it came from pain or cold. Couldn’t be cold… but why was I freezing?

The sky looked impossibly blue. Sunlight hit my salt-streaked skin, yet I couldn’t feel it at all.

“Shut up and send a team right now! Damn it!”

His voice thundered through the haze—low, sharp, furious.
Why did even that make my heart stutter? Idiot. Wrong feeling, wrong time. Maybe I even smiled, stupidly, for half a second.

Fading. Drowsy. Too bright. I shut my eyes to escape the light.

Sound bled back in slowly—muffled, far away. My body was heavy, sunk deep into something soft.

“…”

I tried to move my lips; my throat felt scraped raw. What came out was barely a sound, soft and broken even to my own ears.

“Awake…? …Yunseong…?”

A familiar, faintly familiar voice. My head turned toward it by reflex. My body ached everywhere, full of dull soreness as if beaten from neck to heel. The worst was my thigh and ankle—pain that throbbed like something pressing down inside my veins. It spread, pulsing outward.

Somewhere nearby, a faint whine—like a hurt dog—and belatedly I realized it came from me.

“Don’t move. Stay still.”

I tried to lift my hand, but it barely twitched before another, gentler hand pressed it back down. The voice was different this time. Who…?

My eyes refused to open properly, lids swollen heavy. I managed a slit of light, only for blinding brightness to stab through.

“The light’s too strong,” said that first voice again—low, even, unmistakably his.

The brightness dimmed.

Thought unraveled before it could form. Like a tide, sleep dragged me under, washing pain away in its wake.

So warm. So soft. So…

I muttered something incoherent. Fabric rustled. Someone leaned close, their breath stirring faint air by my cheek—they were listening for my words. I knew this instinctively.

But what came from my lips was nothing but faint sounds.

“Guide Ji Yunseong?”

That voice—familiar, rich, calm—right beside me. The same one from before.

I didn’t answer. Something—hands, darkness—kept pulling me back down. I couldn’t fight it.

“Ji Yunseong.”

The sound faded, not because he moved away—because my ears stopped catching it. My fading senses ached with regret.

“….”

My lips moved again, uselessly. Only weak noises escaped. Maybe he called me again—maybe I imagined it.

And then, the fragile light of consciousness collapsed completely.

When I opened my eyes again, a full day had already passed.

“You’re recovering faster than expected. Still, be careful walking for the next few weeks, and don’t strain that leg. Remember, no pressure and no wetting the bandages if you can help it. Now, let’s see… painkillers…”

The doctor’s voice blurred in and out as I nodded along blankly, still fogged from sleep.

“The ankle sprain’s pretty much healed. Still, keep the brace on till the weekend. We’ll reassess then.”
“Ah… yes. Okay.”

After confirming the pain levels, the doctor left.

I stretched once, forcing the stiffness out—

“Argh! Dammit!”

The sharp ache from my thigh folded me in half. I’d forgotten, for one second, that I was injured.

“Ugh…”

I rubbed gingerly at the skin around the wound, avoiding the stitches. Gradually, the sting eased.

Beyond the window stretched a cloudless noonday sky.

“June’s already over,” I murmured.

It’d been two weeks since the reef incident. The West Coast Wave officially ended five days ago. There had been minor injuries across teams, but mine had been the only serious one.

Lucky me—or unlucky. Hard to say.

I barely remembered the moment itself: pain, blood loss, shock. Everything else existed in fuzzy fragments.

What surfaced clearest were simple things.

The tadpole monster. The pain. Taeon’s voice—swearing.

He’d been shouting, not at me but through his comm, furious about the delayed medevac—as I learned later.

Still, that raw anger had imprinted deeper than everything else. I’d never seen him lose composure before.

Aside from that… nothing really stood out.

“Oh, wait. One thing does.”

The image hit me like lightning—the sunlight, his shirt stripped off, the fabric binding my thigh, his torso slick and glistening—

“You pervert!”

I groaned aloud, smacking my forehead. My face ignited with heat, humiliation spreading down my neck.

I glanced nervously toward the door. No sign of anyone. Thank god this was a single-room ward.

Trying to shake off the mortifying image, I grabbed my phone, scrolling aimlessly through news headlines—gave up within minutes and sank back into the bed.

Sleep refused to come. My idiotic outburst had chased it off completely. I couldn’t even go outside with my leg like this.

I let my mind drift, retracing the fragments I could.

That tadpole’s teeth were really disgusting, I thought vaguely.

Pointless memories, but vivid all the same.