The Guide is Actually a Body-Switching Esper [BL]
Chapter 328: Disown Me

Chapter 328: Disown Me

Lane lifted his head, meeting Gracie’s grey eyes.

...Of course he had to run into one of the Allens.

Well, it wasn’t particularly surprising, all things considered. During the previous dungeon breaks, the Allen Guild had also sent teams led by family members. As for bumping into each other in the inspection center... There weren’t many people there to begin with. After all, all lower-ranking Awakened had long been withdrawn from the site, by now, they all had been checked and released. Only high-rankers remained. Which was also why Damien and Lane had to wait patiently for their turn - everyone in the inspection center was important, so there was no priority...

Still, what rotten luck. To think that Lane and Gracie had left the battlefield around the same time...

Lane maintained eye contact for a while. The bite of the homemade protein bar he had just taken was melting on his tongue, filling his mouth with strawberries and cream flavored sweetness, but he could hardly feel it. He just stared at Gracie, unmoving...

Then, he swallowed the bite, and casually averted his eyes with a bored look on his face, ignoring the woman.

He wasn’t in the mood to deal with any of the Allens.

But how could Gracie stand being ignored? She had always been too proud and temperamental. And as a daughter of the Allen family, an S-rank Esper and a Commander in the Allen Guild, she most certainly wasn’t used to being ignored. When she had spoken to Lane, but gotten nothing but a bored look in response, she took it as a personal offense... Lane might have as well insulted her directly.

Not that she was entirely wrong. While the main reason why Lane had ignored her was because he couldn’t be bothered, he was more than glad to irritate her. It was just that he hoped that she still had enough functional brain cells to realize that they were in PUBLIC, and there were people from the Association and various Guilds present, so she would know to hold her temper back...

Clearly, he overestimated the woman.

"I’m talking to you!" she stepped forward, raising her voice a bit, her face twisting in anger. "You might have left the family, but I’m still your elder..."

"Disown me, then," Lane clicked his tongue, interrupting her.

"...What?" Gracie was momentarily taken aback. She didn’t expect Lane to talk back to her, let alone suggest being disowned... It seems that aside from her bad temper, her memory also left a lot to be desired. She hadn’t interacted with Lane for a few years (at least not with Lane in his real body), and she completely forgot what type of person he was. Or, well, a bit more than just ’a few’ years, more like fifteen, but still.

"Disown me. I thought that the Allen family didn’t acknowledge me?" Lane said, lifting his brows, the corner of his mouth rising up a bit in a hint of a smirk. "I’ve heard that a few months ago, on the gala at the International Awakened Summit, you insisted that there was no ’Lane’ in the Allen family... I think you said I was a fraud, or something along these lines... Isn’t that right, Damien?" he turned to his boyfriend for confirmation.

It was only then that he noticed that Damien... didn’t seem to be doing well. He had been silent this whole time, all serious, with his brows deeply furrowed, but Lane didn’t think much of it at first. They had just returned from the battlefield, after hours of fighting monsters. While no one from Damien’s team died - or at least Hallie and Arlo did not. Since they had split earlier, and the two of them had just returned, they didn’t know the status of the rest of the team yet - they had suffered casualties among the first responders, and even more among the civilians. It was understandable that Damien would be in a somber mood... But he still appeared calm. When they had entered the inspection center, he had exchanged a few words with the person in charge, and then he had fed Lane the protein bar...

But when Lane looked at him now, he realized that Damien’s face was oddly pale, and his hands were shaky. His forehead was also covered in sweat, but that wasn’t necessarily anything odd, considering the weather... But the lack of focus in his emerald eyes, on the other hand, was concerning.

Did he perhaps need guiding? From what Lane had seen, Damien hadn’t used his ability nearly enough to end up in such a state. He still mostly relied on his sword, especially when fighting those panther monsters, and only scarcely used ice. As a S-ranker, he should have been able to use his ability intensely for a long period of time before suffering any backlash from the wavelength instability... Still, Lane reached out his hand, placing it on Damien’s, and secretly activated guiding.

But that didn’t seem to be it. As Lane’s guiding flowed into Damien, he could tell that the man was still pretty stable. There were some disturbances in his wavelengths, but it wasn’t nearly enough to have any visible effect on his physical state...

Could it be because of those civilians they had ’killed’, then? Lane didn’t think much of it himself, as he had long grown desensitized to death and taking lives... But for Damien, that must have been the first. Even if he understood that there was no saving the infected, it must have been hard on him...

Lane paused, not quite knowing what to do. His experience in consoling people... was pretty much non-existent.

Before he could come up with any solution, though, he himself ended up being distracted. Gracie was rambling something in the background, which Lane let in one ear and then out the other... Until all of a sudden, her words made him flinch.

"...Even Nyla almost got infected. And she is almost an S-rank now!"