The hum of the helicopter was constant. Saejin sat motionless, hands loose over his knees, eyes half-lidded behind the faint glass of his visor. Across from him, the escort clutched a datapad they hadn't checked since takeoff. They didn't speak. No one usually did on these flights but Saejin didn't mind. Silence had its uses.
Outside the window, the terrain began to change gradients. Jagged ridges blurred into the strict geometry of Axiom's upper sectors, where steel structures ran through mountains and domes sat half-buried in stone. Even from this height, Saejin could tell the sectors weren't just built, they were embedded, fused into the earth with a precision that suggested necessity more than design.
Axiom didn't build for beauty. It built for containment.
The helicopter banked slightly, beginning descent. For Saejin most missions blurred together: transfers, evaluations, reinforcement calls. He didn't need the briefing again to know that this one would be different. He had seen it already in the small details: the tension in the pilots expressions as he jumped in, the undisclosed routes, the unmarked helicopter they chose for this mission.
The landing was smooth. As the doors slid open, sterile air rushed in, dry and over-filtered. The escort stepped out first and Saejin followed, adjusting his visor to the change in brightness.
The facility rose ahead, a structure of reinforced glass and matte steel. Inside, the corridors were surprinsingly narrow. The lights diffused into the seams between wall panels, giving no clear source for shadows. It was disorienting by design: if you didn't know the path, you couldn't hold a map in your mind long enough to escape.
But Saejin knew it by memory. Left at the dull-glass mural, skip the central lift, go through the second passage, bypass the main junction. They never routed him through the official pathways.
No one spoke until they reached the third access gate. A woman in a gray field jacket waited there, fingers moving across the control panel like she knew very well what she was doing. She was older than him by a few years, sharp-eyed, yet she didn't bother to hide her frustration:
"He's stabilized" she said not looking up. "Barely... The restraints are holding for now."
Her hands moved across the gate's interface, biometric locks unlocking one by one.
"He rejected Class-A guidance. Also burned through all anchors in under three minutes. The last one barely held."
She turned her head towards him.
"If he breaks containment again before you're finished, we're calling a full freeze."
Saejin's voice barely sounded at all.
"Don't."
She blinked, thrown for a moment by the refusal. "Excuse me?"
He restated but didn't lift his head.
"Don't freeze him. I'll go in alone."
For a second, the tension filled the air. Then she nodded sharply, locking her features back into protocol. The door seal disengaged for him.
The final corridor was quieter. Saejin walked through it with calculated movements.
He could feel it ahead: the unstable frequency, folded in on itself like a wire stretched too much. The familiarity of the pattern underneath bothered him, it was a resonance just out of phase with his own.
He paused at the reinforced door, placed his gloved hand lightly against the cold surface.
Just beyond it: an Esper. Yuwon Sol. High-risk, volatile, already half-burned through anchors and guidance protocols. And this time, Saejin wouldn't have external stabilization units. No secondary comms. No backup.
That was the reality of being a Guide.
People thought Guides were commanders: that they controlled, commanded, forced order onto chaos. It wasn't true. A Guide wasn't a leash. They weren't even protection. They were calibration, resonance stabilizers who aligned with an Esper's frequency just long enough to take off the excess. A Guide didn't tame power; they absorbed its backlash and reflected its pattern, forcing coherence where instability wanted to pour through.
The closer the resonance match, the safer the Esper could operate.
But there were risks. If a Guide misaligned, if they failed to catch the rhythm of an Esper's surge at the right moment, they didn't just break themselves. They could trigger a full resonance break, a rupture that containment protocols couldn't patch fast enough to matter.
This wasn't control. It was coexistence on a blade's edge.
Saejin knew how to listen to instability, because he didn't fight resonance. He warped himself into it until the chaos began to recognize itself in him. That was the difference.
He opened his eyes fully and leaned closer to the door. Listening.
The hum behind the door was strained. Heavy.
Waiting.