TDAV 01

Chapter 01

Deep into the night, the headlights of a passenger car illuminated the long road stretching ahead through the darkness. The car raced down an uninhabited mountain road at such a violent speed that the bodies of everyone inside were thrown about.

The woman in the passenger seat, who appeared to be in her early thirties, looked pale as she glanced at the man sitting in the driver’s seat before shifting her gaze toward the back.

There, she met the eyes of a little girl sitting in the back seat, clutching a small teddy bear tightly in her arms.

The girl’s face was deathly pale, seeming to flash white in the darkness. Yet the woman forced a smile as she looked at the child, pretending that there was nothing to be afraid of.

“Ha-ju, we’re almost there. So everything will be okay now. Just a little… Just a little farther.”

It wasn’t something she was saying to the child so much as something she was repeating to herself.

The girl stared at her mother, who was smiling despite her trembling lips, and squeezed the teddy bear even tighter. She was anxious and frightened.

Her heart pounded violently.

The heart beating so frantically did not belong to the child. It was the woman’s heart—the heart of someone who knew what was about to happen.

Please, don’t nod.

The soundless echo rang through the speeding car.

Then, the girl clutching the teddy bear slowly nodded toward her mother.

At that very moment, her mother gave her a bright smile, as though answering her.

BANG!

Everything shook violently.

Her vision flipped upside down, and the car overturned.

The girl couldn’t even cry. She could only watch in vivid detail as her mother slowly died before her eyes.

Smoke began to rise inside the car after it rolled over once. There was a dark movement outside the window, and the girl called out to her motionless mother.

“Mommy, Mommy… Mo…mmy… Daddy…”

There was no answer.

No one answered the child.

And the terror that no one would ever answer her again finally descended upon the little girl.

Only then did she burst into tears.

And at that very moment, a black shadow reached out toward her.

As the crying girl’s black pupils widened—

“NO!”

With a sharp gasp, a young woman who still retained traces of girlhood shot upright in bed with a scream.

Black hair and black eyes.

The woman had the exact same face as the child from the dream. Her pale skin was covered in cold sweat.

The woman, Betty, gently stroked the old teddy bear lying beside her bed before letting out a sigh.

“Haaah…”

She wiped the cold sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

At that moment, the cellphone beside her bedside table began blaring an alarm.

At the same time, loud hip-hop music thudded through the wall from the room next door.

The pounding music made her ears ring, but thanks to it, the mind that had been trapped in her nightmare snapped fully awake.

Then came another BANG!

Someone kicked the bedroom door.

“Betty! Turn off that damn alarm already!”

At Linda’s sharp voice, Betty realized that morning had arrived once again.

Why doesn’t she turn off that lousy music instead?

It was a hundred times louder than Betty’s alarm.

Betty desperately wanted to shout, Turn off that damn music already, but the words that came out of her mouth were different, as they always were.

“I turned it off. Sorry, Linda.”

As expected, there was no response to Betty’s apology.

Betty wasn’t expecting one anyway, so she began her morning as she always did.

She shook her head, trying to cast off the unsettling dream, then climbed out of bed, checked the time, and entered the bathroom.

Fortunately, Linda seemed to have already washed up and left. The bathroom drain was clogged with ginger-colored strands of hair.

Betty washed her hair and took a shower while quickly tidying up the mess Linda had left behind.

Of course, she didn’t forget to clean the hair out of the drain.

Otherwise, Mrs. Meryl would complain later.

Considering how unpleasant her dream had been, the morning wasn’t actually starting too badly.

Linda had already showered and gone downstairs, so she wouldn’t turn off the hot water while telling Betty to hurry up.

And since Linda would already be eating breakfast, Betty wouldn’t have to go through the trouble of carrying her plate to her.

Betty roughly dried her wet hair with a towel and opened the wardrobe.

It was a little chilly today because of the heavy rain that had fallen yesterday, but Betty didn’t have many coats in her wardrobe that could keep her warm.

She picked one of four pairs of identical jeans, put on a thin plain T-shirt and a pilled cardigan, then tied her half-dried hair into a single ponytail as she headed downstairs.

“Early this morning, villain Jeffrey McQuire and two other members of his remaining gang attacked the Chet Bank New York branch. But these villains were extremely unlucky. You see, the hero James happened to be nearby at the time. We at NPE have exclusively obtained footage of the villains being completely subdued by Hero James before the police even arrived. Let’s watch it right now!”

The moment she entered the living room, Betty heard the gossip news anchor’s voice and turned her gaze toward the television mounted on the wall.

On the large screen, a scene that was both unrealistic and strangely realistic played out—a stream of water had lifted the villains’ bodies upside down and left them dangling in the air.

Humans who possessed powers beyond those of ordinary humans.

It had already been ten years since Betty had fled Korea.

On October 17, 2040, the world had become one where superpowered people, once seen only in movies, were everywhere.

This world had begun ten years earlier, in 2030.

Rapid climate change.

New viruses that descended upon humanity.

Amid the great changes occurring across the planet, a doctor specializing in genetics declared that humanity needed to create a new kind of human—one with an enhanced body capable of surviving in any environment.

But the research he proposed was unethical and so absurd that no one was willing to support him.

Then, in 2029, he discovered an unidentified meteorite that had fallen from space, almost as if by fate.

After bringing the meteorite home, he witnessed his dog, which had repeatedly licked and consumed the meteorite, grow to an abnormally large size.

He mistakenly shouted Eureka and proceeded to do something that should never have been done.

In an utterly insane manner.

At the time, he worked for the largest pharmaceutical company in the United States.

He secretly introduced a tiny amount of a substance extracted from the meteorite into a newly released antibiotic produced by the company.

He carefully controlled the concentration, adding only the smallest amount.

Fortunately, the antibiotic passed every approval process.

And so, the dangerous drug created by the doctor was released onto the market and rapidly exported not only throughout the United States but around the entire world.

Then, one year later.

As the meteorite’s substance accumulated inside the bodies of people who had unknowingly taken the drug, strange reactions began to occur.

Superpowers.

They weren’t exactly the invincible bodies the doctor had originally envisioned, but humans began appearing who could wield powers beyond anything an ordinary human should have been capable of.

People across the world began awakening their supernatural abilities, and society descended into chaos almost instantly.

But the chaos didn’t end there.

Before the shock of the superpowered people had even faded, they began dying in droves because they couldn’t control their own abilities.

The bigger problem, however, was that when powerful superpowered people went berserk, it didn’t simply end with the death of one superpowered individual.

Entire areas extending dozens of kilometers around a rampaging superpowered person could be reduced to rubble.

And because no medicine could stop a superpower rampage, governments were unable to control these explosions of power.

As the world descended into an absolute nightmare, Guides suddenly appeared.

Guides who could control the powers of superpowered people.

Guides were also a side effect of the drug, but they were different from superpowered people.

They possessed no special abilities of their own.

They could only heal the bodies of superpowered people.

But that alone was enough.

The world was collapsing beneath powers that people couldn’t control.

Unfortunately, however, Guides were far fewer in number than superpowered people.

Furthermore, Guides could only treat superpowered people with whom they were compatible—with whom they had been matched.

And the higher the superpowered person’s rank, the more sharply their matching rate with Guides decreased.

From F-rank all the way to the highest S-rank.

Superpowered people were assigned ranks according to the abilities they possessed.

F- through C-rank, the lower-ranked superpowered people, had relatively high matching rates with Guides, meaning a single Guide could control several of them.

But once someone reached A-rank or higher, the matching rate dropped by more than half.

As a result, not only was it difficult for A-rank and higher superpowered people to find a Guide match, but a single Guide couldn’t guide several high-ranked superpowered people either.

The problem was that the abilities of high-ranked superpowered people were simply too valuable to kill them before they went berserk just because there were no Guides available.

And the highest rank, S-rank, was even more impossible to give up.

An S-rank possessed enough power to destroy an entire city alone.

Therefore, in order to preserve the high-ranked superpowered people whose abilities could benefit their military forces, countries around the world established Guide research institutes under the leadership of the United States, which had the largest number of superpowered people and Guides.

They gathered Guides together to create a treatment for superpowered people.

The authorities of each country received Guide blood-testing machines developed in the United States and conducted large-scale investigations to locate Guides, bringing all of them to the research institutes.

At first, everyone believed them.

They were told that although they were called research institutes, all they would do was collect a small amount of blood from Guides and use it to create medicine that could save superpowered people.

Naturally, the authorities reassured the Guides and their families by promising enormous salaries, massive bonuses, and even national medals.

They even launched extensive public-service advertisements declaring that Guides were heroes of their nations.

But every bit of it was a blatant lie.

The research institutes didn’t merely take a little blood.

They strapped Guides down like blood donors hooked up to transfusion machines and drained their blood.

They also carried out all kinds of unethical experiments in an attempt to find a way to match Guides with high-ranked superpowered people.

The Guides screamed.

They cried out in agony.

But under the control of the governments and research institutes, their suffering was completely concealed and never allowed to reach the outside world.

Under the pretense of protecting the Guides, the research institutes prohibited all outside access.

Amid those brutal experiments, the research institutes eventually succeeded in developing a drug capable of controlling the powers of superpowered people.

It was called Guiding Medicine.

Of course, the drug was incomplete, and its effectiveness decreased as the superpowered person’s rank increased.

Even so, it could delay a rampage.

As research accelerated, the United States—which was the furthest ahead—eventually succeeded in forcibly matching a Guide with an S-rank superpowered person.

Everyone celebrated.

But that was where their glory ended.

Because a Korean politician exposed the truth behind the Guide research institutes.

The revelation in Korea spread throughout the world in an instant.

When it was announced that more than ten thousand Guides had died in research institutes around the world, massive protests erupted in countries everywhere, condemning the unethical experiments.

The protests grew beyond anyone’s control.

Beginning with Korea, the Guide research institutes were shut down one after another.

Along with the punishment of those responsible for establishing them.

Two years later, a new Guide institution was established, one that would provide proper welfare benefits to every Guide except S-rank Guides under state protection.

Everyone trusted the new Guide institution because everything was supposedly being disclosed transparently.

But Betty did not.

“The people who were punished as the ones responsible for those inhumane experiments—they aren’t the real people responsible. They only cut off the tail. The truly evil bastards are still sitting up there. So never, ever trust the Guide institution.”

Her uncle had been certain that the situation could change at any moment.

And Betty trusted her uncle’s words more than the government’s.

Because her uncle had been a researcher at that very horrifying Guide research institute.

“Uncle…”

Just as her uncle’s face came to mind and Betty’s expression darkened, a sharp voice broke through her long train of thought.

“Betty, are you going to eat breakfast?”

The owner of the voice was none other than Meryl Steffan, Linda’s mother and the owner of the house where Betty was staying.

Mrs. Meryl glanced at Betty with an expression full of annoyance.

She was worried that Betty might say she wanted breakfast.

That would only be a hassle.

Betty shook her head at Mrs. Meryl, whose eyebrow was slightly raised.

“…No. I’ll just go. I’ll be off.”

“Okay.”

Apparently satisfied with Betty’s answer, Meryl quickly cleared the table.

The lingering, savory smell of freshly baked bread made Betty’s empty stomach ache for a moment, but she deliberately ignored it and picked up her outdated backpack.

The clock announced the exact hour.

Seeing the large number 7 displayed holographically, Betty hurried out of the house so she wouldn’t miss the school bus.

She quickened her pace toward the yellow school bus.

If only a sleek sports car hadn’t suddenly sped dangerously across her path.

“Ah!”

Startled, Betty fell backward.

Ginger-colored hair fluttered across her field of vision.

“You idiot.”

Linda’s laughter, as she sat in the passenger seat watching Betty, lingered in the air like a trace left behind by the passing car.

She had deliberately waited for Betty just to harass her.

Seriously, she’s so diligent when it comes to useless things.

Betty shook her head and quickly got back on her feet.

Her life had never been easy enough for her to be discouraged by this level of bullying.

Betty simply took a deep breath and ran toward the school bus.