After saying that, Do Yehyun relaxed his grip and let his hand slide down my arm, stroking it all the way.
“To what extent?”
“I wanted a situation to co where I’d be absolutely necessary.”
“....”
“When that thought ca first—that even if hyung got badly hurt, it’d be good if I could save you....”
Do Yehyun paused. He was looking straight at , but it didn’t feel like he was observing . It was closer to his gaze being nailed there one-sidedly.
After holding the silence for a mont, Do Yehyun continued in a calm voice.
“I also thought it’d be good if hyung owed your life.”
“Honest.”
“You saved , hyung. Maybe not as much as that, but... just saving hyung wouldn’t be a rescue—sothing a bit more....”
“....”
“I wanted it to have big aning. Even if it wasn’t conscious.”
So he wanted , when faced with death, to think of him instinctively. It was a brazen thought, but it wasn’t impossible.
I really did think of Do Yehyun first whenever I was in danger.
“Yeah.”
“...That’s all.”
“What about the skill?”
If that really was what Do Yehyun wanted, then how the hell the rank shot up so monstrously was what I wanted to know.
“The skill got better. That can’t happen in such a short ti.”
“...I think my Awakening Rank went up. It felt like the god manipulated sothing. Like it reorganized my mana entirely.... It said raising Awakening Rank is actually possible.”
But even so, Gi Cheongmin’s Awakening Rank was still in a disastrous state.
‘He climbed up to B rank during the fight, sure, but there’s a problem calling that “human.”’
There was one thing that bothered a little.
‘The Growth Limit is different.’
Do Yehyun had an originally high Growth Limit of A rank, but Gi Cheongmin didn’t.
‘Did it just pull him up as much as possible within the limit?’
If that was the case, then his rank growth being real was explained in one shot.
‘It stopped at B rank because this dungeon’s rank is B?’
Gi Cheongmin’s bizarre status window had only risen to B rank, after all.
I slowly nodded at Do Yehyun’s words.
“I get it.”
“Yes. ...And when I opened my eyes, I was here. The mont I woke up, I saw hyung... after that, honestly, I don’t rember well. I didn’t think about how I should move. I just... did.”
“Just did?”
“Yes.”
In Do Yehyun’s eyes as he said that, there were no other complicated emotions. Only a bright, unmistakable hunger for recognition glead there.
“Why... are you smiling?”
“Who knows.”
Was I smiling? I absentmindedly raised a hand and brushed at the corner of my mouth. While I slept, it seed Do Yehyun had poured another round of skill into —the wound inside my mouth that had remained like a lingering trace was completely healed.
I looked up at Do Yehyun at an angle and asked,
“Want to kiss?”
It wasn’t sothing I said with any particular reward in mind. Do Yehyun might take it as a “reward,” though.
But I didn’t feel like digging up so long-winded reason either. To put it simply, I guess I was satisfied that after crushing those bastards, things had returned to the original route of my plan.
‘Or is it just... overwhelmingly fun?’
Dopamine that’d been dead even when killing people started to rise slowly. The fact that their plans got twisted and they’d ended up as corpses was fun enough to make laugh, and a bit absurd too.
Maybe it was because there were still things I didn’t understand about Gi Cheongmin’s actions. Why, after becoming a dungeon monster bastard himself, he’d bothered staying to negotiate with a god one more ti. And why he’d taken Do Yehyun and Ryu Taejun and disappeared instead of just killing .
‘Ahn Jinha said it too... the others were calling Gi Cheongmin a psychopath.’
Was it possible that the points that puzzled were so kind of backlash from Gi Cheongmin staying in the maze and gradually turning into a monster?
Now that they were dead, new questions kept piling up, but there was no direction to resolve them. Honestly, I didn’t care at all about Ahn Jinha muttering sothing about his body hurting and his personal circumstances.
‘Whatever. It’s already dealt with.’
Even if the fact that the two of ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) them died was fatal in terms of gathering information, if I handled the remaining guys well, I should at least be able to figure out an exit.
While I was thinking all that and looking at Do Yehyun, he seed to make up his mind about sothing—he put one knee on the bed and leaned forward.
It was a posture I felt déjà vu about.
Reflexively, I grabbed Do Yehyun’s waist, and my hand naturally ended up on his shoulder. Our lips t in an instant.
“Mm....”
Even as he actively pressed his lips against mine, Do Yehyun kept his eyes open.
‘At this distance, you wouldn’t even see my expression anyway.’
I didn’t feel like opening my eyes just to make things awkward, so I closed them willingly. After hesitating for a mont, Do Yehyun tilted his head slightly and pushed into my mouth fairly aggressively.
His soft tongue dug past my rough lips. He tangled with the tongue that had been lying still, rubbed against it, then drew it into his own mouth. The mont the tongue was pulled out, his lips gently bit down on it.
When I felt a slight, dull ache from how hard it was being sucked, I lifted my tongue 그대로 and licked the roof of Do Yehyun’s mouth.
‘He’s gotten a habit.’
It was ridiculous how obvious it was that he’d grown used to it after just a few kisses. I did sotis bite his tongue or suck harder to see his reaction, but that wasn’t my usual kissing habit—he seed to have picked up a weird one.
I tapped at the roof of Do Yehyun’s mouth and the inside of his cheek, then slowly stroked down the waist I’d been holding.
“Mmm, ngh....”
Do Yehyun let out a pained sound and pulled his lips away, shrinking back slightly.
“.......”
I quietly held his gaze. When the eye contact dragged on a bit, Do Yehyun lowered his head and kissed again.
After repeating a few light kisses like that, I twisted my head and broke away.
“Hyung....”
“Just kissing.”
Well, even aside from that kiss, there were plenty of situational reasons to get worked up. We’d just been in a life-threatening fight, and Do Yehyun had even gone to et a god.
‘Perfect setup for a dopamine spike.’
But I had no intention of doing anything beyond this.
“This isn’t a foreign movie. Having sex when you could drop dead any second is stupid.”
“That much... I didn’t think about.”
What, just a handjob then? I braced a hand on the bed and jerked my chin at Do Yehyun to tell him to back off.
“That’s enough.”
Do Yehyun nodded obediently and took a step back.
I also got up from the bed, gave Do Yehyun’s cheek a couple of rough taps, then properly started rummaging through the tent.
‘Sothing wearable.’
I didn’t have a top at the mont, so I desperately needed sothing to throw on. After digging around the tent for a good while, I found a hoodie with an awkward fit.
I didn’t particularly like wearing other people’s clothes, but I had no choice, so I pulled the hoodie on over my bare body and zipped it up.
‘Co to think of it, what ti is it?’
It had been daylight while the fighting was going on, so now the question was when night would co again.
Since the sun wasn’t clearly setting, it was impossible to estimate the ti.
‘Handle what I can first.’
I finished off the remaining water, found so snacks stored in the tent, gave half to Do Yehyun, and ate the other half myself.
‘Feels like I ca here to loot.’
Watching Do Yehyun slowly chew and swallow a biscuit, I had a pointless thought and turned my head.
And right on cue, the sound of a siren began to ring in my ears.
However, it wasn’t the sa siren we’d heard yesterday—it was the sa type as the one from the day before that.
“Looks like soone new ca in.”
“...Are you going to look for them?”
“No need. I’m not Gi Cheongmin.”
Whoever ca in was irrelevant now. I had a single objective.
‘I need to et this “god.”’
The reason I’d joined Cheonmyeonggyo in the first place was to sohow make up for my shitty base stats. If rank growth was actually possible, there was no reason not to et it. Plus, I wanted to know why it deleted Do Yehyun’s perfectly fine skill.
More than anything, the decisive factor was this: if it was sothing capable enough to call itself a “god,” I was certain I could squeeze at least so information out of it about my situation.
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Finding the god is the goal.”
“.......”
“We’ve co this far. Might as well et it once.”
Yeah. After coming all this way, I couldn’t go back empty-handed.
***
Leaving imdiately wasn’t an option, so after forcing Do Yehyun to rest, I ca out of the tent and looked around the area.
For the record, Do Yehyun said he’d dumped Ryu Taejun into a nearby tent while I was dealing with things.
‘I moved him. Sowhere close to here.’
‘Good. He’s not dead yet, right?’
‘Yes. He’s fine.’
Luck really couldn’t get any better than this.
I stopped myself from checking Ryu Taejun’s tent and headed toward the largest tent, where people were all gathered together.
Well, everyone could probably guess already, but there should at least be soone to deliver the definite bad news.
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