The Halo Effect
Noel Arden just wants to disappear.
As a member of a prestigious and influential family known for producing powerful espers and guides, Noel’s D classification is an embarrassment. Determined to work as a guide despite his father’s opposition, Noel spends his days in the D-suite of Halo, the largest, most successful Paradigm agency in the country, keeping his head down and enduring the less pleasant aspects of his job.
It’s not a bad life; he likes his coworkers, he doesn’t have to rely on his increasingly hostile father, and he’s almost never deployed to Fray sites. As long as he steers clear of his S-class esper half-brother, he can just melt into the background and pretend to be a normal, low level guide, just one of hundreds in Halo’s bottom ranks. Invisible and unremarkable. Exactly the way he wants it.
Then an emergency situation during an unexpected deployment forces Noel to shatter his quiet, boring life with his own hands and thrusts him directly into the notoriety he’s worked so hard to avoid.
When he witnesses Jade Ransom, Halo’s star esper and one of the only S-classes in the country, melting down from corruption overload, Noel has no choice but to use the ability he swore to never reveal in order to save both Jade and the city from destruction. Jade, desperate after a life of guiding intolerance, latches onto Noel as the only guide he’s ever properly synced with and insists on being exclusive partners. With his back against the wall and his pesky conscience whispering in his ear, Noel agrees.
Struggling to balance his secret, his normal job, and his connection to Jade, Noel finds the stable life he worked so hard to build crumbling around him. And as he and Jade grow closer, Noel has to reckon with the vast differences between them and decide if he’s prepared to burn himself out just to let Jade shine.
#GUIDEVERSE #ESPER #SLOWBURN
[ADULT LANGUAGE AND SUBJECT MATTER]
*original cover by me
*character portraits commissioned
