Chapter 2

I’ve slipped through time, haven’t I? I must have. Yeah, definitely. If I’d known this was going to happen, I should’ve memorized the winning lottery numbers.

Staring blankly up at the open sky, I let the thought drift through my head. Then again, surviving a point-blank explosion and getting flung across time only to demand lottery numbers on top of it was probably pushing my luck.

I brushed dirt and jagged chunks of concrete from my filthy combat uniform and hauled myself to my feet. Rising before me was a major landmark that had collapsed in a terrorist attack five years ago, blanketing all of Songpa District in a choking fog of pulverized stone. Right beside it stood a skyscraper whose facade had been renovated in blue glass roughly a decade prior—now standing proud and intact in its old, familiarly unfamiliar gray skin.

Yeah. It was definitely a time slip. Otherwise, there was no way a demolished landmark had miraculously resurrected itself, or a blue skyscraper had shed its renovation and reverted to concrete gray. I decided to accept reality without further fuss.

To begin with, I never should have been standing near an exploding time machine. From the get-go, the mission was weird, the site was weird, and the target was weird. My gut had been prickling with bad omens right from the start. When the target started muttering lunatic equations under his breath, I should have realized what was coming and kept my distance like everyone else. Instead, thinking, The guy might be out of his mind, but his heart’s in the right place, I had brought him water, humored his drivel, and kept him company so he wouldn’t get lonely. What a fucking idiot I was. The second the bastard claimed he was letting me in on a special secret and started rambling about time slips and temporal paradoxes, I should have tossed him straight into solitary confinement.

“Hey, you there!” a voice shouted from the street.

Regret, however, was always a day late, and crying over spilled milk wasn’t going to get me anywhere. First things first—I needed to figure out how far back I had been thrown.

“Excuse me!”

Letting out a heavy sigh, I was clambering over a mound of rubble when a one-ton pickup truck pulled up to the curb. The driver-side window rolled down, and a middle-aged man leaned out, hollering at me over the clatter of his engine.

“Hey, mister! What are you doing crawling out of a condemned building? Are you all right?”

Reflexively, I patted myself down from head to toe. Whether vaporized in the blast or torn clean off in transit, my gear was gone—not the night-vision goggles mounted to my helmet, nor a single pouch stashed on my rig remained. Exhaling sharply, I unbuckled my chin strap and pulled off my helmet. The back of the kevlar shell was split wide open, and the front fabric of my plate carrier had been shredded away, leaving the ballistic plate completely exposed. Sweet Jesus, I was inches from death. Thank God that crackpot’s machine had actually worked, or I’d be six feet under right now.

“Good grief, you’re a soldier!” the driver called out, eyeing my uniform. “What unit are you with? Need a lift?!”

I waved one hand to signal I was fine while frantically patting down my hips and thighs with the other. Scanning the broken concrete around my boots, I searched for my weapons, but neither my rifle—practically a soldier’s lifeline—nor my sidearm was anywhere to be seen. As I stripped off my torn tactical vest and peeled away my balaclava, a thick cloud of gray dust billowed into the air. The last things I remembered were the bizarre device that mad scientist had clutched to his chest on pain of death, a high-pitched ringing piercing my eardrums, and a blinding white radiance that bleached out my entire field of vision. Assessing my current situation was top priority.

“Mister!” the driver barked again.

Limbs all intact? Not bleeding anywhere? Good. Looking toward the pickup cab, where the diesel engine sat chattering and rattling in idle, I called back, “What’s today’s date?”

“Well, listen to you,” the man said, blinking in disbelief. “You sound like you just fell out of the sky.”

A faint chuckle escaped me. Well, pretty much. “A creature snatched me up and dropped me out of the sky, actually.”

“Lord have mercy! Don’t you need to get to a hospital?!”

“I’m fine,” I said, giving him a reassuring wave. “Someone’s on their way to pick me up.”

No one was coming for me, of course, but I brushed off his concern all the same. The driver, who had half-climbed down from the cab to steady me, settled back into his seat. Catching sight of the bewildered look still lingering on my face, he pulled out his phone and glanced at the screen.

“Today is… let’s see, August twelfth!”

“What year?” I asked.

“What an odd thing to ask out of the blue,” he muttered, squinting at me. “It’s obviously—”

Hoooonk—!

The deafening blast of a heavy truck horn split the air. No, wait—there was no horn. It was just tinnitus shrieking inside my skull. The number that left his lips was so staggering that my brain, flatly refusing to process it, had hallucinated a phantom blare to drown it out.

How many years did he say I went back?

The split helmet slipped from my slack fingers and hit the dirt with a dull thud. Sixteen years. I had been flung backward through time by a full sixteen years.

“Take good care of yourself and get back safe, young man!” the driver shouted, waving through the open window.

His civic duty fulfilled, the good-natured man pulled away from the curb before I could even think to stop him. I blinked dumbly after the retreating white tailgate. Fuck. Sixteen years…? Wait a minute. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to dredge up my final seconds before the blast—the device the mad scientist had clung to as if his life depended on it. Right before the world bleached white and my consciousness cut out, I had caught a glimpse of red digits glowing on its display. What were they again?

Honk, honk!

“Hey, kid! That’s private property! Get on out of there!”

Sixteen years… Sixteen fucking years.

“Lord above, you ain’t a student—you’re a soldier boy!” An old man shuffled up the sidewalk, squinting into the rubble. “What in the world were you doing in there? Saw something pitch-black wriggling around in the dirt and took you for a ghost.”

…Look, give me a damn break. All I wanted was a quiet corner where I could sit down, brood over my miserable fate, and pour my heart and soul into despairing over this sudden time-slip catastrophe, yet the locals wouldn’t grant me a single minute of peace. Couldn’t they just leave me be? I honestly couldn’t tell if the people in this era were overflowing with neighborly warmth or completely devoid of tact.

“Sir,” I called out, stepping out from the demolition site.

“Eh?” The old man halted, blinking up at me.

“…Could you lend me ten thousand won?”

“Lord have mercy!” He recoiled, clutching his chest. “A soldier shaking down an old man for cash in broad daylight!”

“I’ll pay you back in sixteen years.”

“Aish, take it, just take it! Take this and don’t you come back around here, you hear?”

Wearing a sour grimace as if he’d stepped straight into dog shit, the old man fished a crumpled ten-thousand-won bill from his trousers and thrust it at me. When I accepted it politely with both hands and bowed ninety degrees at the waist, a fresh shower of concrete grit and dust cascaded from every seam of my uniform. The old man scrambled backward in alarm and scurried down the street. Paying him no mind, I tucked the precious banknote into the pocket where I had stowed my balaclava.

August twelfth, sixteen years ago. What had I been doing back then? I would have been seven or eight—first or second grade of elementary school. I still didn’t have a firm grasp on how time travel worked, but I wasn’t a complete idiot. I had absorbed enough pop science from movies and TV to know the cardinal rule of visiting the past: under no circumstances could you ever run into your past self. The reason being—

“Depending on whether it’s a single or branching timeline, the disruption of causality triggers a temporal paradox, making it impossible to preserve physical self-identity within a closed timelike curve—in other words, quantum information conservation collapses.”

…Hell if I knew what that meant. The crackpot who had landed me in this mess had babbled something along those lines during transport, though I hadn’t understood a single syllable.

“However, quantum superposition and uncertainty can resolve the paradox. To prevent contradictions, time preserves self-consistency, attempting to carry over the momentum of the timeline’s flow. It’s the inertia of time.”

Everything else that had come out of his mouth was alien gibberish masquerading as Korean. Still, as a proud humanities major, I understood the bottom line well enough: I couldn’t cross paths with my younger self. Which meant I needed to clear out of Seoul immediately and head as far away as possible, somewhere I wouldn’t risk trading glances with little Seon Na-won or anyone who might recognize my face.

Tipping my head back toward the late-summer sky, I let out a long breath. First order of business: find a bus terminal.

Crumble. Clatter. Thud.

Shaking off the last chips of concrete and plaster dust clinging to my sleeves, I unzipped my heavy combat jacket and peeled it off.

“Phew…”

A cool breeze swept across my chest, soothing skin sticky with dried sweat and blood. My high-collared tactical shirt was top-of-the-line performance gear, hugging my frame while wicking away heat in seconds. Just feeling the air hit my skin made me feel half-human again.

If I had slipped through time in the exact spot where the device detonated, then geographically, I was still standing right in the middle of Songpa District. A short walk should take me straight to an express bus terminal. I now had a concrete objective: get the hell out of Seoul, anywhere at all. Agony and existential despair could wait until I was sitting on a bus.

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