Chapter 10

Looking at him standing there catching his breath and calling my alias, I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that this kid would grow into the ruthless Jaguar—not when he looked this damn cute.

“Wha’ are you doin’?” he mumbled around my fingers.

Before my brain even registered the impulse, I had reached out with both hands and squished his cheeks together like soft rice cakes. Whoops. Reason belatedly flickered back on, yet my palms stayed glued to his face.

“Le’ go,” he slurred, his lips mashed into a pucker.

“Don’t wanna.”

“Le’ go-o.”

“Tsk.”

“…Le’ go ’fore I ge’ mad.”

Reluctantly, I released his warm, surprisingly stretchy cheeks and leaned back on my elbows. “Consider that today’s tuition fee. Deal with it.”

Rubbing the faint pink marks on his face with the backs of his hands, Ji Gyu-hwa shot me a dark scowl. Right as I patted the wooden planks beside me and reached into my bag for the marksmanship theory workbook, a chorus of bright voices rang out from the road.

“Look, it’s Gyu-hwa’s big brother!”

“Hello, oppa!”

“Hello, Tteokbokki Hyung!”

“Hyung, you’re wearing your mask again today?”

“Oh, hey, guys,” I said, looking up as a small group of students from the snack bar strolled over, waving at the two of us like old pals.

One of the girls gave Ji Gyu-hwa’s shoulder a playful nudge as she walked up, though the boy didn’t budge an inch, staring back at her with his usual stone-faced silence. Hold on—what’s this? A girlfriend? I knew the guy had won the genetic lottery, but I hadn’t realized his face had been paying dividends as early as seventh grade.

“What are you doing out here, oppa?” the girl asked, turning to me with a bright smile.

“Just cooling off with some ice cream.”

As if the group had rehearsed a secret plan on the walk over, the girl kept darting frantic, meaningful glances at her friends and nudging Gyu-hwa’s elbow, while the boy stood there like a carved stone post, his lips sealed tighter than a bank vault. Realizing she wasn’t going to get a single syllable of help out of him, she gave up and stepped toward the platform. Before she could ask me to hang out, I beat her to the draw.

“Hate to break it to you kids, but hyung’s flat broke today,” I said, patting my empty pockets. “Next time I run into you, I’ll buy you all ice cream.”

“We didn’t come over for free food!” she protested, her cheeks pinkening.

“Hyung, is it true you hunt creatures for a living?” one of the boys piped up, eyeing my forearms.

I flicked a covert glance at Ji Gyu-hwa. Standing stiffly at the edge of the wooden platform, the kid looked like he wanted the earth to open up and swallow him whole.

“Yeah, I went out with a crew today,” I lied cheerfully, “but the second a monster popped out, I was so scared stiff I just wet my pants and hid behind a rock.”

“Hey, the mister at the dispatch office said that’s a total lie!” the boy shot back.

Seriously, that agency boss had a mouth looser than a broken shutter. Stuffing the theory workbook and training aids back into my canvas bag, I swung my legs off the platform and stood up. At a tiny jerk of my chin toward the side street, Ji Gyu-hwa immediately fell in half a step behind me.

“Well, hyung’s got errands to run today, so I’m taking off,” I told the group, lifting a hand in a lazy wave. “Have fun hanging out with our Gyu-hwa!”

“Wait, oppa, you’re leaving already?”

“Hyung, isn’t Gyu-hwa going with you?”

“Bye-bye!”

Leaving their chorus of farewells behind us, I slung a heavy arm around Gyu-hwa’s narrow shoulders and steered him down the lane. He let himself be towed along against my side without a word of protest.

“So,” I murmured, giving his bony shoulder an approving pat, “who was that girl? Your girlfriend?”

The next second, I went flying sideways as if launched by a steel spring. Ji Gyu-hwa, who had been walking docilely under my arm half a heartbeat ago, had planted both palms against my ribs and shoved me away with every ounce of strength in his body. If I had weighed ten kilos less, I would have gone sprawling flat into the dirt ditch.

“Ow, fuck—I think you just cracked two of my ribs,” I wheezed, clutching my side.

“Quit exaggerating,” he snapped, his ears burning crimson.

“You’re the one overreacting! She was practically shooting laser beams out of her eyes trying to get your attention back there.”

“That’s because she—!” Ji Gyu-hwa cut himself off, glaring up at me before clicking his tongue with the weary, long-suffering disgust of an eighty-year-old clan patriarch gazing upon his most disappointing grandson, which translated as; he thought I was an absolute moron. “Just hurry up and walk. You said you were tutoring me today.”

“Where are we supposed to set up? The store bench is swarmed.”

“The octagonal pavilion should be empty.”

He meant the old wooden gazebo tucked beside the village community center. Its floorboards had lost their varnish decades ago, and ever since the county built a modern, air-conditioned senior lounge next to the township office, even the local grandfathers had abandoned it.

“All right, the pavilion it is,” I said, falling back into step beside him. “And tomorrow, tell your girlfriend not to interrupt our study hall.”

“I told you, she’s not my girlfriend!”

With a spitting, snarling little jaguar cub swatting at my ribs the whole way, I strolled up the steps of the shaded pavilion. He kept throwing bony kitten punches at my arm until I finally pulled the marksmanship manual and mock receiver components out of my bag and tossed them onto the floorboards like throwing meat to a feral beast. Only then did the boy drop to his knees and settle down.

Sprawling out on the cool timber deck halfway between sitting and lying down, I propped my head on one hand and began firing off oral quiz questions to map out what he actually knew. On paper theory—operating principles, part nomenclature, and range safety rules—he didn’t miss a single question. The moment I handed him the dummy training rifle for field-stripping and assembly drills, however, his fingers fumbled over every pin and spring. It was painfully obvious he had memorized the textbook cold without ever getting his hands on the hardware.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said, watching his shoulders droop over a practice worksheet bleeding with my red pen marks. “Once your hands get the muscle memory down, you’ll catch up to your class in a week.”

Gyu-hwa stared silently at the red ink for a moment, then gave a small, resolute nod.

And just like that, our after-school tutoring sessions became a permanent fixture on the wooden platform outside the supermarket—or in the old pavilion whenever his classmates were lurking around. Half of me had expected a thirteen-year-old kid to get fed up and quit after three days of grueling repetition, but dogged, terrifying persistence turned out to be bone-deep in Ji Gyu-hwa’s nature.

Since I rolled out with the dawn dispatch crews and wrapped up by mid-afternoon, I was usually the one lounging on the platform waiting for his school bus. Every once in a while, though, the roles reversed.

“What, did you buy that for me?” I asked one afternoon, trudging up to the supermarket bench with dried blue creature blood still crusted across my sleeves.

Sitting neatly on the edge of the platform with his backpack between his knees, the boy wordlessly held out a twin-stick chocolate popsicle—the kind molded with two wooden sticks meant to be snapped down the middle. When he gave a curt nod, I stripped off my work gloves, took the wrapper, and broke the twin bar in half.

“…”

Both of us stared down at my hands. The popsicle had split along a catastrophic fault line at roughly a seven-to-three ratio, leaving one side a thick, double-Barreled slab of chocolate ice and the other a pathetic, thumb-sized nub clinging to a bare wooden stick. Naturally, the three-tenths belonged to Ji Gyu-hwa. Without a flicker of hesitation, I held the tiny stub out to him.

He stared coldly at the offering. “If you’re going to split it like that, just eat the whole thing yourself.”

Considering I weighed twice what he did and burned through three times the calories at work, taking the seventy-percent share was simple biological fairness.

“Now, now,” I chided, waggling the stick at him. “When a generous elder shares his food with you, isn’t ‘thank you’ the proper response?”

“I’m the one who bought it with my own money.”

“And then you gifted it to me, which makes it mine.”

“…Thank you,” he ground out through his teeth, snatching the pathetic stub in a tone that made it crystal clear he was only humoring a shameless adult.

Turning his back on me, Gyu-hwa pulled the dummy rifle across his lap, while I stretched out full-length on the wooden planks behind him, popped the giant seven-tenths chunk of chocolate ice into my mouth in one bite, and closed my eyes. Above the lazy hum of cicadas, the crisp metallic clicks and slides of the boy stripping and reassembling the mock weapon trickled steadily into my ears.

“Didn’t I tell you to break the habit of staring at the receiver while you seat the bolt carrier group?” I murmured without opening my eyes. “You need to find the track by touch alone.”

Behind me, the busy clatter of parts froze dead. Even with my eyelids shut, I could practically feel his gaze darting between my sprawled back and the disassembled rifle in his lap, trying to figure out if I had eyes in the back of my head.

“I can tell just by the sound of the lug scraping,” I added.

After a beat of silence, his hands started moving again. Relying purely on the pad of his thumb and the resistance of the steel, he guided the bolt home, locked the receiver, and dry-fired the trigger to finish the assembly—then immediately popped the takedown pin to strip it all over again.

“Want to go grab dinner once you finish this set?” I asked, yawning.

“I ate a snack after school, so I’m not hungry.”

True to its grand title as the village’s sole supermarket, the store behind us stocked a bit of everything. Because I made a habit of buying fresh seasonal fruit to shove into his mouth throughout our afternoon drills and dragged him to a diner for a hot meal afterward, the gaunt, grayish pallor had noticeably faded from the kid’s cheeks over the past few weeks. I would have preferred to see him pack on some proper chubby teenaged weight, of course, and while a healthy spark had returned to his dark eyes, his frame underneath the uniform remained stubbornly lean.

Still, judging by the solid width of his wrist bones and the length of his neck, the kid was a coiled spring waiting to shoot skyward the second he got enough protein. Wait—if I stuff him full of meat and milk starting right now, could I actually make him grow even taller than he was in my timeline? Back at headquarters, Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa had been a towering colossus just shy of two meters tall. Suddenly seized by a secret, wildly ambitious mission—to feed this kid until he broke past the two-meter mark and outgrew my future commanding officer—I sat up and stared at the back of his neck with grim determination. Catching my intense glare over his shoulder, Gyu-hwa paused with a recoil spring in his hand and asked warily if my stomach was hurting.

“Should we pack up for today and go eat?” he asked.

“No. Finish the timed run.”

Clack.

The instant he laid the final stripped component neatly onto the canvas cleaning mat in sequence, I hit the button on my stopwatch. Five minutes and thirteen seconds. Considering his very first attempt had taken a grueling eighteen minutes, it was a monstrous leap forward. Nobody in the Special Operations Task Force took longer than two minutes to blind-strip, inspect, and reassemble a primary weapon, of course, but thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa was still just a jaguar cub learning how to use his paws.

“Once you shave your reassembly time down under five minutes flat,” I told him, tossing him the stopwatch to see for himself, “we’ll head back to the live range. You can finally graduate from the dummy gun.”

How much longer will that take? I wondered, squinting up at the cooling autumn sky. Hopefully he’d get the hang of it before winter set in and froze our fingers solid outdoors. At a conservative estimate, I figured building up his muscle memory would take at least two or three months.

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