Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Yoohyun was in a meeting when it came. A system alert out of nowhere.

[Caretaker's Love] has been activated.

That... wasn't one of his skills. He should know. His eyes flickered up, razor sharp, searching for the threat. For whoever had the gall to cast a skill on the Haeyeon Guild Leader. 

Then, the explanation came.

[For 60 minutes following the sacrifice of the caretaker for their affected target, the targets stats and abilities will be strengthened twofold. Target will be able to access the caretaker's memories upon completion of the effect.]

It didn't make any sense. In fact Yoohyun was left with more questions. Sacrifice? Who-? 

...

Where was his Hyung-

And then the power hit him.

His phone disintegrated in his grip. His senses ramped up to maximum, he could feel the power flowing through him, wild and fierce, but tamed expertly under his control. It was so much, he was so much - more powerful than his self of only a few minutes past that it was almost inconceivable. 

Where was his Hyung?

The other people in the room cowered under the pressure of his aura. At the same time, a hurried knock on the door sounded before it was opened without his reply. Suk Simyeong was looking as disheveled as Yoohyun had ever seen him, and he could anticipate what would next come out of the other man's mouth.

"Guild leader, there's been a problem. It's with-" his eyes shifted around the room quickly, "with him."

Voice low and holding onto his control by a thread, Yoohyun spoke. "Where is he?"

Someone was talking in his ear about how the guild leader shouldn't leave so suddenly. Instead of crushing them like a bug, he pulled on the door blocking his way. It was ripped clean off its hinges and went flying somewhere behind him. The voice bothering him stopped. 

Yoohyun's vision felt like it was narrowing to a point. To whatever point would take him closer to where he was supposed to be. To where his Hyung was, waiting for him. 

Yoohyun was barely, barely convinced of getting into a car instead of running the whole way. But the spectacle would form crowds that would ultimately slow him down, and alert his enemies to his movements.

If they hadn't already found out.

Yoohyun put that thought to the back of his mind. It wasn't immediately relevant. Not as relevant as what Suk Simyeong had told him.

"It appears he joined a small company into another gate. D-rank, with a well established attack strategy. According to the attack logs it's been long past time they should have come out, and the updated readings, well."

"Tell me." 

"It's indicative of a tier-1 beast."

Yoohyun's face had hardened.

He knew what that meant.

Undefeatable.

Could an F-rank hunter survive that? Even a weak S-ranks would struggle.

"Guild master." 

Yoohyun would have been hard pressed to survive something of that sort. The chances were... astronomically low.

"I'm going." Yoohyun said. Suk Simyeong closed his mouth firmly, but said nothing.

They both knew what the chances were anyway. If it was said out loud or not.

'The chances of Hyung...'

Yoohyun had to see it with his own eyes. It didn't make any sense. A black plaque in his inventory should attest otherwise. On it: a promise to forewarn Han Yoohyun of any life threatening danger to his brother. 

The words of that system notification pressed against the back of his mind, insistent. Sacrifice, it said. A sacrifice... to give something up. For him.

But he wasn't in danger. How could anything Yoojin do in a dungeon protect him? What could an F-rank hunter even do that he couldn't? 

What was the point of becoming a guild leader if Yoojin was still the one to protect him?

Yoojin must be safe. That damned lizard hadn't said a word about his Hyung being mortal danger. And Yoohyun wouldn't have let that happen. This was a mistake, surely.

In the rush over, Yoohyun absentmindedly felt a little like his child self again. Bestowed upon with unimaginable power and breaking things left and right.

And desperately, desperately trying to think of a way to protect his Hyung. 

There. There was the gate. Sitting neatly in some dusty industrial site as if it hadn't swallowed up the most important thing in the world. 

Some Awakening management centre officials had cordoned it off, but reporters were already gathering, reporting live. None of them had entered the dungeon gate building. The surrounding areas should have been evacuated already. Most likely they too would evacuate shortly, if an S-rank didn't come first. It was all trivial details. Second to the fact that his Hyung was in there.

Yoohyun didn't even wait.

He opened the car door - or rather crushed it in his hands, and made a beeline towards the gate. Voices spiked in response to his presence, questioned buzzing around him, invading his space. He didn't have time for them.

After a team enters the gate it deactivates after an hour. From then on, it couldn't be entered until the raid was completed or every hunter inside was gone.

Yoohyun wanted nothing more than to enter the dungeon that swallowed up his brother. He wanted nothing less than being able to enter it at all.

He raised a hand to the portal. It was shaking. It felt simultaneously like the longest moment of his life and as quick as blinking. His hand reached the dungeon entrance.

And he went through.

There wasn't anything around the entrance. Just some footprints and the evidence that a small party had entered not even half a day ago. 

Oh.

So it was over.

Like a stuttering breath. The centre of the universe had disappeared, somehow. In that moment, frozen in place, Yoohyun knew.

His world had ended.

He took a ragged breath, somehow still there. Alive, after the world's end. Yet it felt endlessly long, like time had slowed into a slow, sticky treacle. Weighing him down, stopping him from going any further. 

Keeping him from his doom. 

The passageway up ahead was blocked with fallen rocks, but it was barely an obstacle to Yoohyun. He could get through such things like a child tearing through paper. 

But that required moving. Having a reason to move in the first place. To continue to breathe, to think, to put one foot in front of another. To do anything in a world without his Hyung.

His Hyung who had died here, somewhere. Alone. At the very least Yoohyun should have died with him. Like a flame without fuel, he should have stuttered to a stop the moment Han Yoojin left this world.

If nothing else, Yoohyun had to see him.

The passageway opened up finally. From something narrow to a wide, cavernous space. The low growls of a beast echoed throughout the chamber. Yoohyun would usually be using those sounds to locate it. Yoohyun should be doing that. He should be on guard, and ready to fight.

If there was anything to fight for.

Yoohyun dropped to his knees at the bloodied form of his older brother. Not far from the exit - so devastatingly close to freedom - and so incredibly still. 

Yoohyun has seen dead bodies before. He's made dead bodies himself before. He knows what it looks like, knows without a doubt that Yoojin is dead.

But he goes over anyway.

Half-stumbling, half-crawling - if people saw the mighty Haeyeon Guild Leader acting like this they'd laugh themselves to death. Yoohyun couldn't find it in himself to care. He was making too much noise, there was still an enemy about.

It didn't matter.

Yoojin was on his side, his crutches nowhere within reach. Blood had escaped from his broken nose and a wound on his head. It looked like he had been thrown into the wall, and an unlucky angle had him dying on impact. 

His older brother, dead. In a dungeon, having faced an enemy far beyond the capability of his F-rank body. 

His beloved older brother... was gone.The only existence in the world. The centre of the universe.

It was Yoohyun's worst nightmare come true. 

Grief has a strange effect upon people. When something so tragic, so world shattering happens - they can freeze up. Thoughts and feelings put on pause while their reaction is caught in the buffer. Processing doesn't come quickly, and while Han Yoohyun's mind was razor sharp, his heart was slow to move. 

He didn't know what to do.

A scraping sound took care of that for him. Yoohyun looked up, and the eyes of Lauchitas looked back.

Right....

Right.

There was something he could do. Something he had to do. Yoojin couldn't be left in here, but he couldn't safely be taken outside while that beast was on his tail.

So he had to kill it.

That was it. Kill the beast. A simple, straightforward task. Kill the beast... that killed his brother.

Han Yoohyun snapped. 

...

Fighting a monster with three heads is a difficult feat, even for S-rank hunters. Yoohyun found it laughably, disgustingly easy, with the power flowing through his veins. The power gained from his brother's sacrifice. 

Now that it was done... he was back at his first problem. He didn't know what to do with himself. He didn't want to do anything with himself. What he wanted was to sit on the floor and hold his Hyung. 

Slowly the poison from the beast would infiltrate. Han Yoohyun was not concerned about his own safety in the fight, and dodging was not a priority.

But it didn't matter if he was poisoned. He was a dead man walking. A corpse that had forgotten to be still. A candle still trying to burn after being snuffed out. Embers lingering uselessly. 

Yoohyun fell to the floor. He was dirty, covered in blood and muck from the fight. Poison still stained his clothes. Even he didn't know if he had collapsed from despair or if his dying body decided to stop supporting him.

He hadn't been there in time. His brother had gone cold with nobody beside him.

Yoohyun felt unworthy to even face his brother. His brother's body.

Like a sigh, the power faded from his veins and Yoohyun was back to being a regular S-rank hunter. Sixty minutes had passed. 

The memories hit him out if nowhere. A tidal wave of thoughts-feelings-images. It was disorienting to the point that Yoohyun was sick. 

Yoojin, looking at him with the accompanying sense of love. Seeing his own life as he grew up in flashes. Yoojin bragging about him. Yoojin showing off his pictures. Yoojin thinking about him, every day of military service. Collecting clippings about him. Sending letters left perpetually unanswered.

Yoojin... becoming sad. Angry. Bitter.

And still... so painfully full of love for his only brother. Hurt by his rejection but trying. Always trying. To catch up. 

Yoohyun slumped, gasping like he had run a marathon. Was that- had that been...? 

"Hyung." He choked out, his quiet voice breaking on the syllable. 

He wanted to explain. To say that he was sorry. That all his plans to protect had backfired. Beg for forgiveness that wouldn't, couldn't come.

Ding!

Dazed, Yoohyun looked up. A window was floating above him. A useless distraction. His brother was right there, waiting for him. At the very least Yoohyun could die in his arms.

[Impossibility achievement unlocked! You have single handedly hunted a dragon!]

The message popped up in front of his face, almost insistent.

[You have earned a Legendary title...

...

...

... And a Wish Stone, that will grant any wish once!]

He was ready to dismiss it. To stumble over to his brother and lay down besides him - let the wounds take him over. Some instinct, some persistent thought at the back of his mind made him pause. To check. He had never heard of a wish stone before.

His heart stuttered in his chest, like a dying man on the verge of resuscitation.

"My brother-" 

Surprisingly the system responded.

[Anything but bringing back the dead.]

The ground under him cracked under the pressure of his fists. What was the point? Han Yoohyun was a facsimile of a person. It was a simple veneer of humanity stretched thin over a creature that wanted nothing. In the whole world, the only thing he needed was his Hyung.

He just needed to try-

"Again. Let me try again. To save him."

[Do you wish to try again?]

"Yes." Han Yoohyun said, resolutely.

And then the world turned to white.

Chapter Text

Yoohyun was a unique existence in the world. Unique even amongst multiple worlds. A being so close to the power of the source that he was barely human. A burning flame given flesh and physical form. He didn't have a human's needs and instincts. He didn't cry for attention, laugh, smile, beg to be held. From birth he was uninterested in everything and everyone around him. They were beings entirely different to himself.

"Yoohyun-ah..."

But amongst them was someone even more unique. A child, barely older than himself. Weak and unremarkable to look at, and yet. Somehow with the ability to love a thing like Yoohyun. Able to make him real.

Everything and everyone in the world was uninteresting, except for Han Yoojin.

When he jerked to awareness he was sitting in his penthouse. Papers slipped from his slack hand as he tried (and failed) to calm his racing heart.

That... was real. And yet it had played out like so many of his nightmares.

It was real. The phantom feeling of his brother's body still weighed upon him.

Which means he's already on the clock.

A deep, selfish part of him wanted to pause for a moment. To peruse the memories he'd been imparted, to slowly pick them over, consume them bit by bit until those parts of his Hyung had been so thoroughly devoured they became part of Yoohyun himself. He was tempted, but not tempted enough to let his brother suffer even a second longer.

Yoohyun got up, sparing a brief glare at his sock covered feet. He had dressed as per usual for his upcoming meeting just before leaving, but - he glanced at the clock - two hours before the meeting he had been in casual wear. Reviewing paperwork.

While his Hyung was battling for his life.

Briefly he considered going in regular clothes, but the lack of protection wouldn't be worth the handful of minutes saved. So he got ready, quickly and calmly and not at all like his world was at stake here. Which it wasn't. He wouldn't fail. Not again.

Now that he knew that Yoojin was in danger, there wouldn't be a problem. Yoohyun wouldn't allow there to be.

The gate was somewhere on the other side of the city. It had taken maybe half an hour of driving? The roads had been pretty clear, Yoohyun remembered, because otherwise he would have jumped out the car no matter what anyone would have said.

It was near a construction site. There were lots of those, but an S-ranks memory was impeccable. Even if he focused to the point of ignoring everyone around him, his senses were naturally sensitive. Details would be noticed and stored regardless, so Yoohyun knew exactly where to go.

For a while Yoohyun had considered his impeccable memory a curse. No matter how much he would like to forget, every fight with his brother lay waiting in his memory in crystal clarity, ready for him to come back to them. Every sigh, curse, expression twisted in anger. Every bit of pain he had inflicted, unintentionally or otherwise, on his Hyung would haunt him. Forgetting was a luxury that Yoohyun hoped that Yoojin at least enjoyed, if only for his own sake.

Even if it hurt though, or the memories were unpleasant, Yoohyun couldn't bear to part with any part of his Hyung. If he could forget, he wouldn't. Instead the memories would stay like painful, open wounds. Their sting was no less than what he deserved for being unable to protect his brother.

Now it was a blessing. Yoohyun didn't need to coordinate with anyone else, all he needed was to go down to the underground parking lot and take a car.

While he was driving his phone started to ring. Yoohyun didn't even glance at it, but the ringing was an annoyance. A moment later the phone was in pieces, crushed and unable to bother him.

All dungeon gates have a small entrance built around them. They were there for a good reason, like allowing only the persons with the rights to raid the dungeon enter via passcode. Or giving people a place to rest, recover, or clean up afterwards. Like the last time, the building was simply another obstacle in his way.

For something as minor as this he didn't even need to use his black blood flames. The building crumbled under his hand, and continued to crumble until there was a direct path to the dungeon gate.

It was here that he paused. He'd done this before, too. Made a pathway to the gate, paused, and entered. At which point he knew for certain that his Hyung was dead. 

That skill wasn't his. Presumably it belonged to Yoojin. But Yoohyun didn't really know the activation requirements - the brief summary he was given was outside of his understanding. Perhaps it was a one-off, a single-use fluke that wouldn't happen again. Perhaps that had been the warning about his Hyung being in danger that the lizard promised him. And now that it was over, he had no way of knowing, and no chance of winning.

He hesitated then, at the gate. For a moment so brief it would barely be noticeable. Yet within that moment lay a gulf of anxiety - the fear and anticipation mixed together in a nauseating combination. Yoojin couldn't be dead... but that was something Yoohyun had thought wouldn't happen. Could never happen.

And it did.

If Yoojin was dead already, Yoohyun was done for. The fear of having failed once had hit him like a freight train. The grief, delayed and arrested before it could really set in: locked and loaded to unleash upon him the emotional devastation that was waiting behind the dull glassy eyes of the one person he cared about.

Then the moment, stretched to infinity, ended and Yoohyun's hand made contact with the gate portal.

And it didn't go through.

It didn't go through! 

Yoohyun felt a weight lift from himself. His wish had worked. He had one more chance to try again. 

This time, he wouldn't waste it. 

He pushed his hand harder.

And it wouldn't go through.

Right. It wouldn't... go through... until all party members were dead.

Yoohyun had been a hunter for over a decade, but somehow he had forgotten the basics. So caught up in worrying if his brother was still alive to save, he had forgotten the main obstacle in actually being able to save him. Yoojin was in the dungeon, maybe even fighting for his life. And Yoohyun was outside, useless, so close but entirely too far away to do anything that mattered. 

Yoohyun exploded.

Fire rose, melting the pavement around him. The rubble of the building that once surrounded the dungeon gate turned to ash. The air distorted, the ground warped. Yoohyun was fire personified: a blazing star on earth, bending the very world around him.

And his hand wouldn't go through.

Yoohyun yelled, pouring his power out. His flames rose higher, burned hotter.

The gate rejected him. It remained unchained, a calm swirl of energy that seemed to mock him with his indifference.

An attack came from behind him, and Yoohyun dodged. He turned around, not expecting to see the face of Choi Sukwon. 

Yoohyun focused back on the gate, like the weight of his stare would disintegrate the barrier between him and his Hyung.

"What the hell are you doing?" Choi Sukwon yelled, sounding like a dog barking. Yoohyun glanced at him before dismissing him altogether.

"Hey, don't act you're better than me!" Choi Sukwon grit his teeth hard enough that Yoohyun could hear it over the flames. And the sirens. When had those started? Irrelevant.

"The association has given me permission to bring you in any way I can." The threat was clear.

The association was in shambles, a sad husk of it's former self. Yoohyun only continued to allow it to exist to assure the public. With Sung Hyunjae out of the picture, anyone with any power knew that Yoohyun would be the one running things now. 

"Stop pretending to be Song Taewon." Yoohyun said. That seemed to have struck a nerve. 

Choi Sukwon attacked again. He was a pathetic excuse for an S-rank hunter, but he'd hidden his support hunters somewhere in the vicinity. It wouldn't be enough to stop Yoohyun, but it did slow his victory down. Annoying.

"What's so special about this dungeon anyway?" Yoohyun didn't answer. 

"Someone annoy you so much you couldn't wait to kill them?" Yoohyun sent a flaming punch the other man's way.

"What, someone precious to you stuck inside?" Choi Sukwon threw the suggestion out mockingly, as if Yoohyun having the capacity to find someone precious a ridiculous notion. 

Yoohyun blinked. Choi Sukwon, of course, picked up on it. He barked out a laugh even as he sustained burns all up his side.

"Should have given them a gate stone you stingy bastard." Choi Sukwon was losing and he knew it. 

But Yoohyun was getting emotional, and he also knew that too. 

Choi Sukwon grinned like he was grimacing, and mocked. "I can't believe you're so cheap, but whoever that is will die because of it. There's no way to enter, you know this. They'll die in there alone and it's all your fault-" 

Yoohyun's next punch got him in the throat. Choi Sukwon went flying to the ground, bleeding up and barely able to speak. 

He stepped forward, ready to end the existence of this petty, insignificant man when it happened.

A system notification.

Yoohyun's eyes widened, despair set in. He knew what it would say before he even read it. Something in his heart had already told him.

Still, he wanted to deny it. Wished he could say "no" and have it not be real. A simple, childish part of him that only wanted his Hyung and nothing and nobody else. 

...

[Caretaker's Love] has been activated.

Power rushed through Yoohyun's veins, the burst of it killing Choi Sukwon immediately. Flames rose higher and higher.

And he screamed, and he screamed, and he screamed.

Chapter Text

The familiar surroundings of his house appeared before him. It occurred to him that he's back again.

He's back, he's back, he's back. It wasn't over, the world wasn't finished yet. He could try again-

He'd failed. Again.

His legs thumped as he fell to his knees. His surroundings seemed strange and distorted, like they weren't real. Blood rushed in his ears, only drowned out by the sound of his choking breaths. The weight of the world beared down upon him. Lightning seemed to dance down his spine, the rush of fear tensing his muscles to the point of pain. He felt like an animal, wounded and cornered. He felt like he was falling apart, that everything was too much, impossible to achieve, just outside his grasp.

He was having an anxiety attack. 

Yoohyun hadn't had one of these in years. They were entirely unfamiliar to him before he left home as a teenager, at which point he was shown time and time again how powerless he really was. How easily it could be for someone else to destroy his world, to snuff out the life of the only person who mattered. Yoojin had gotten into trouble before, and despite everything he had done or tried to do, sometimes he was just too late.

He couldn't protect Yoojin from everything, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn't even protect Yoojin from himself - apparently having hurt his brother over and over to no avail. Every report that told him his brother had been in danger had his stomach swooping down to his feet. In the dark of night, in the privacy of his own room, he would be overwhelmed with it. Fear over his brother's safety, over his own inadequacy would overwhelm him. 

It had been eight years, and every time he still wanted to just go home. Return to his brother and tell him what was wrong. Feel the loving familial comfort of his hug, and relax knowing that it all would be fine in the end, because Hyung would take care of it.

Hyung couldn't take care of it this time. He'd already died to it. Twice.

Yoohyun didn't have the benefit of falling apart right then. Not when his brother was fighting a battle that he was slated to lose, and would lose without intervention. Nobody else could help them now. Yoohyun had to get it together, push it aside and go.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and go already.

Yoohyun shakily inhaled, breathing in and out until he had pieced himself together just enough to stay functional. 

He got ready on autopilot. Slipping on his combat gear, putting his phone on silent, and ready to go.

To go do what?

He had seen last time that he was in a catch twenty-two. If he arrived early enough to save his brother he couldn't get inside the gate. If he could get inside the gate, he was too late to save his brother. 

The weight of it all threatened to overwhelm him once again. This wasn't a problem he could burn into submission. There was a solution, somewhere, that allowed his brother to come out of this alive. 

There had to be.

Yoohyun tried not to think of the alternative. That there was no way to save his brother, and no way to stop trying. He was grateful for the chance to try again, but if it was a doomed quest from the beginning... if he had doomed his brother to suffer dying over and over again...

Yoohyun's stomach lurched with nausea, and he only just held back from emptying its contents. No. There was no way that would happen, there was no way he'd allow that to happen. Yoohyun would fix this, somehow. 

It was the only option he had left.

So he had to figure out a way to get inside that dungeon.

Desperately, he set his mind to work. Thinking of everything that might work, and even several things that probably wouldn't. He tried to stay focused, tried not to linger on 'what if's or 'if only'. 

Unbidden, thoughts still crossed his mind. Wishing he had done things differently, done things better so that this situation didn't have to happen in the first place. Choi Sukwon's voice echoed in his head mockingly. 

They'll die in there alone and it's all your fault.

Yoohyun clenched his fist. He regretted it. He really was a "stingy bastard." If he had only given Yoojin a gate stone-

Yoohyun blinked.

A... gate stone. The one thing that let people out of a closed dungeon. Something that could bypass the barrier somehow.

And if it could let people out. Perhaps... maybe... it could let people in.

There was no other option but to try.

Yoohyun set off, retrieving his personal gate stone from his inventory and rolling it around in his hand. He felt the edges of it, the smooth polish of an object that didn't belong to this world. He sensed the mana within the item, focused on it, trying to understand the intricate pattern within. 

Yoohyun had no great affinity for craftwork or objects. He was suited to burning things down, meant for destruction. His nature was to consume, not to create. 

Even so he would try. Would push his senses to the max, try his best to imprint the make up of that one small stone onto his mind. It was a thin, tentative hope, unsubstantiated and unreliable. But Yoohyun grasped onto it like a dying man. It was his lifeline. 

Yoohyun finally arrived at the gate. He left his car a short distance away, neither bothering to park nor turn off the engine. As soon as it stopped being useful in his task of saving his brother, it left his thoughts. Irrelevant.

Choi Sukwon was a weak, cowardly excuse for a hunter. But he also was annoying, and most importantly, would waste Yoohyun's time. So instead of blasting his way through and reducing the building between him and the gate to rubble, he was more discrete. Round the side and away from sight he melted a hole in the exterior wall, and walked in. 

It was laughably easy how simple it was for him to get inside. No man-made obstacle could last in the path of his flames. It was the supernatural obstacles that were the problem. Not, however, for much longer.

The gate loomed before him. Yoohyun was certain he'd be seeing it in his nightmares. Such an insignificant D-ranked gate was a bigger problem to him, the highest ranked hunter in the country than any of the S-ranked dungeons he had faced. It sounded like a bad joke.

Once again he checked the most important thing. Would the gate let him inside? He had roughly been plotting the timeline of events based on his past attempts, approximating how much time he had to get things done. Even his minor emotional hiccup hadn't set him back too far, and he knew this. But he still didn't feel reassured, couldn't feel settled until he got confirmation once again that there were people inside that dungeon who were alive. 

As before, the gate rejected him. Yoohyun's tense muscles relaxed for a moment, before he got down to business.

Mana was difficult to explain. It has been part of him for his whole life, even before the dungeon break occured and people awakened. It was a sense as familiar to him as sight and sound. That familiarity sometimes meant he didn't pay much attention to it, didn't focus in on the details of mana flow in everyday life. 

As he brought the gate stone up to the gate, his entire being was precision focused on the flow of mana. 

Gates generally preferred to flow energy from inside to out. This was what allowed people to measure the level of a gate by measuring the amount and quality of the mana it leaked. It helped people measure how close a gate was to bursting open, and even help locate gates that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. 

When someone entered a gate, it stopped radiating as much mana as it usually would. The presence of a hunter would disrupt that energy, allowing the gate to be sealed so long as there was someone inside still alive. When he brought the stone up to the gate, Yoohyun could sense how it wanted to activate. It appeared to play upon the natural tendencies of the gate, slipping through the cracks to allow energy to flow from inside to out. The gate stone would cover whoever activated it in that energy so they could traverse those cracks. Temporarily, those hunters' own mana was masked and they would escape like a stray breeze forcing its way through the crack in a windowpane. 

What Yoohyun wanted to do was to fight against the normal way gates worked. He needed to reverse that flow of energy entirely if he had a chance of going inside. It would be like swimming upriver, expending energy not only to get inside but to stop himself getting thrown out. 

He familiarised himself with the energy of the gate stone, allowed it to cover his hand, and then used his mana to force it in the other direction. 

Immediately sweat beaded on his forehead. The level of concentration required was immense, and any lapse of focus would allow the flow of energy to snap back to the way it wanted to be. Yoohyun pushed his hand against the gate, stone grasped within it, and poured his mana into making it work.

There was resistance. The same resistance he had felt before. For a moment he was scared. Scared that it wouldn't work, that this was not the solution he'd been hoping for. But then the gate started to give, the resistance starting to falter. His hand slowly started to sink into the gate, and through it.

It was working.

The burst of elation gave him the strength to push harder, get his whole fist through up to his wrist. It was tiring, it was painful, it was difficult.

But it was working. And that's all that mattered.

The ground around him started to shake. Walls cracked and bricks fell loose at the volatile energy which escaped. Time had ceased to exist for Yoohyun, the steady, incremental progress being the only thing that mattered. Cracks formed on the gate as the energy became more chaotic, pushing against him harder. Yoohyun dug his feet into the ground, not giving an inch. He poured all his power into it, pushed further and further until his whole arm was through. He was almost there, he could feel it. 

Almost. Almost there-

For a moment, everything seemed to freeze. Yoohyun, the gate, the roaring energy. On the very brink of collapse, between one breath and another, something else happened.

A power, deeper than anything found on earth appeared. On the side of the gate, it heaved, pushing Yoohyun back with such force he went flying backwards, crashing through walls until he was outside.

Yoohyun blinked, dazed for a brief moment before the events hit home. He was close, he had been so close he could feel it, almost able to see his brother, hear his voice. It echoed in his ears like a phantom cry.  

It hadn't worked. Some... thing had intervened to stop him. 

As if Yoohyun would allow that to happen.

Anger burned in his veins, summoning his characteristic flame. He got up from the ground, ignoring the sharp spike of confused voices. Instead he stepped forward, determined to try again. Again and again, as many times as it would take. Nobody and nothing would be enough to get in his way.

Yoohyun jerked to a pause, eyed widening. The calm, tranquil blue of the gate had shifted. Changed to become darker, the colour seeping through the centre like blood leaking through a wound until the entire thing was red.

Then the gate broke.

One head emerged, followed by another, and finally by a third. The gate building was crushed like a piece of tissue. Acid dripped out of its mouths, disintegrating the ground at its feet. People screamed. Some civilians ran, some tripped, some stayed locked in place, eyes wide with horror at they stared frozen at the beast before them.

Yoohyun stared too, a chill in his heart. His eyes wide with despair. 

But it was not the beast before him that elicited this response. Instead he stared at something nobody else could see, an alert so damming it caused him to shake. 

[Caretaker's Love] has been activated.

The beast roared in anger. It was larger than life, powerful and imposing. Several people fainted.

From the depths of his soul, a spark ignited. It rose up within him, a feeble voice that got louder and louder until it burst from Yoohyun's mouth. An answering roar, filled with pain and just as inhuman. 

Yoohyun gazed into the face of his despair and attacked.