The SSS-rank Guide Doesn't Need Saving

”Leave me.”

The words came too sudden, almost startling her.

Wasn’t he unconscious?

”I don’t need your help,” he said, voice hoarse like dragged over broken glass. ”Get out.”

The pressure was back again. Sentinels who have higher psychic powers and rank can push back a guide’s ability. It really depends on how different their classes are. An S-rank guide can guide a sentinel with an equal rank or a lower rank. But a lower-ranked guide can never dream of guiding above B-ranked sentinels. It’d be like pouring a drop of water into a water tank.

But if their purification value was higher than 70 percent, the possibility of that drop becoming a small continuous trickle is higher.

Thus, both ranks and purification rates are considered as a guide.

It was also the reason why, despite her rank being D was still considered useless and akin to an ordinary person. Because Aisha Novalis’s purification value was only at 29 percent.

But Aisha wasn’t concerned about this anymore.

She had already proven that Aisha Novalis’s limit wasn’t her own. Not after that burst of light and manifestation of her spiritual beasts that the previous Aisha couldn’t.

She looked at the man in front of her. He was still trapped within the confines of those root-like veins. Yet the pressure oozing out of him was tremendously coming at her.

Unlike the first time she felt it, this barely made her skin tingle.

Aisha’s fingers, still raised in midair, curled back into her palm.

She could. That was the maddening part. She could simply turn around and sever whatever connection had dragged her consciousness into his to begin with. She owed this man nothing. She didn’t even know his name. For all she knew, the moment she left, this miasma and mental pollution would finish what they started and devour everything that’s left of him.

It would be so easy.

But she was already standing in the middle of his mental sea. Retreat really wasn’t an option, not when she was already this deep in.

And the other reason was harder for her to admit and believe.

Because underneath his snarling and his words of not needing help, there was something else. Something she’d seen in her eyes when she left everything else after being abandoned and betrayed—the particularly wordless exhaustion and desperation of someone who wanted, more than anything, for someone to drag them into the light and make the pain simply stop.

He wasn’t fighting her because he didn’t want relief.

He was fighting her because of some deeply buried scars, stubbornly believing that no one was capable of giving him any comfort.

”Too bad,” Aisha muttered under her breath. ”I can’t leave things unfinished.”

She took a step forward.

However, the moment her foot touched the scorched ground again, the roots that had looked seemingly weakened and thinning surged back to life. They lunged at her viciously, yanking her up. Other tendrils snapped around her wrists, waists, hauling her up and away from him in midair, suspending her a few feet off the ground.

Aisha gritted her teeth as pain lanced through her skin where the roots touched her. But she didn’t panic. Instead, she learned her lesson and quickly tapped onto the power within her, reaching for that warmth.

This time, with something close to familiarity, she let it flood outward through her captured limbs.

The roots recoiled instantly, as though she scalded them, loosening their hold of her.

Aisha didn’t waste that opening. She twisted free and kicked out from nothing but sheer will and momentum. She launched herself airborne and headed straight toward the man at the center of the burning space.

She barely had time to think about what she was doing. The roots were still chasing after her while extending their reach, turning into weblike links.

She fell from the air and reached him in an instant.

Her arms came around his neck, wrapping him closely to her body.

And then she kissed him.

It wasn’t anything like what Aisha imagined a first kiss should be—not that she’d spent much time imagining it when the world was busy turning every living being into a mutated creature. She was busier trying to survive. Kissing anyone was the last thing on her list of priorities.

Her lips pressed against his, clumsy with urgency more than romantic. Her hands gripped the back of his neck to keep herself steady and not slip below. It was really difficult to kiss someone a head taller than she was.

But this wasn’t just kissing. This was guiding. It wasn’t about being an expert and whatnot. She poured everything inside her straight into him, past the barrier of skin and mind, whatever was living beneath, filling up every crack where the corruption had taken root.

For a second, everything went still.

Then the compressed mental energy inside him—that same psychic power that every sentinel possessed inside their mental sea—began to calm down.

But the miasma didn’t settle.

It reacted the opposite, more furious and wicked. Aisha felt it thrash as if it had become sentient. It didn’t want to be purified, rather, it wanted to swallow her and infect her.

The black veins snapped and separated from the guided mental energy, wrapping around her back and shoulders, sealing the two of them together in a cage of writhing corrupted flesh.

Aisha gasped against his mouth, breaking the kiss for half a second—

And that was when he kissed her back.

It happened right after their lips parted, startling her more than the veins did. One moment, he was submissively accepting what guiding she was giving him. Then, something in him seemed to break loose entirely, and his hand came up to grip the back of her head, pulling her back in before she could fully retreat.

It wasn’t the gentle kind of kiss. Not like when she kissed him for the sake of guiding. It was rough, desperate, like a man who had been underwater for a long time without air and finally found a pocket of oxygen, taking everything he needed the moment it was finally given.

Aisha barely had time to register the shock of it when his other arm hooked around her waist, dragging her flush against him.

”Mmmph!”

”Ngghh...”

Aisha untangled her hands from him and pushed. But he didn’t even budge.

Her heart slammed against her ribs, adrenaline and something else she couldn’t name made her forget entirely that they were fighting something for survival.

The tiny creature inside her pocket squirmed at the final moment. Aisha could never be more thankful to have it here than now.

That little movement kicked her back into focus.