Chapter 11

Hard work is admirable, sure, but without god-given physical hardware and terrifying athletic reflexes to back it up, no amount of effort will ever get a man through selection for the Special Operations Task Force. The moment young Ji Gyu-hwa’s fundamentals clicked into place, his growth curve went vertical. I had genuinely assumed we’d be stuck doing dry-fire drills on the supermarket bench until the spring thaw, yet before the autumn leaves had even finished falling, we were already standing back inside the public firing range.

Looking back, his rate of absorption was nothing short of freakish. Modeling my coaching after the way my father and the unit’s instructors had drilled me, I never coddled him on the firing line, correcting every millimeter of deviation with brisk, uncompromising strictness. Yet the boy never once sulked or shrank under criticism; his emotional baseline remained flat, steady, and unshakably calm. If I had to name the single most frightening thing about thirteen-year-old Ji Gyu-hwa, it was his concentration. The instant that heavy block of cold steel settled into his palms, the outside world ceased to exist for him. Passing chatter, the bang of neighboring lanes, my footsteps pacing behind his back—none of it registered as he locked every nerve ending onto the paper target downrange.

Watching the hundred-won coin I had balanced near the tip of his barrel sit motionless without the faintest tremor during his dry-fire holds gave off a chilling, unchildlike intensity. It was a silhouette that overlapped so starkly with my future commanding officer that it left a strange, complicated tightness in my chest.

“Ready on the line?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Standard middle-school marksmanship began at ten meters. As a shooter’s proficiency climbed, the target carrier was pushed out to twenty-five, fifty, and eventually a hundred meters, though with iron sights, twenty-five meters was already far enough to blur the bullseye into a pinprick, making ten meters the standard assessment distance for seventh graders. He didn’t need to worry about CQB[1] transitions or combat rapid-fire techniques yet; all he needed was clean, textbook precision, and once his posture locked in, the rest came naturally.

Drawing a slow breath into his belly, Ji Gyu-hwa settled the pad of his index finger against the curve of the trigger.

Although we had spent the past few weeks drilling exclusively with an unserviceable dummy rifle, my relentless adjustments had transformed his shooting form beyond recognition. Naturally, as fast as my daily cash wages came in, they poured right back out to cover two grown men’s worth of restaurant meat and public range lane fees—which were steep even with a student discount—leaving my savings practically nonexistent. Still, I didn’t mind. I was a ghost who was going to vanish back to his own time in less than two years anyway. Watching this scrawny kid stand a little straighter every day filled my belly far better than hoarding paper bills in a drawer ever could.

“What’s with the scowl?” I asked as the target carrier whirred back to the booth.

Gyu-hwa stared darkly at the perforated paper. “I’m missing the mark.”

“Every single round is inside the scoring rings.”

“Not dead center.”

Possessing a fiercely perfectionist streak even at thirteen, the kid wasn’t satisfied with passing marks in the slightest. We had just burned through a full sixty minutes of live-fire drills. Even with fifteen-minute cooldown breaks between sets, holding a live rifle steady and managing recoil took a brutal toll on a middle schooler’s stamina and central nervous system.

Sure enough, on the final round of the next string, his muzzle dipped and the shot missed the black scoring rings altogether. Lowering the barrel toward the floor, Ji Gyu-hwa scrubbed furiously at his eyes with the back of his sleeve as if trying to force his exhausted optic nerves to focus. Watching him suck in a sharp breath and immediately raise the rifle to reset his stance, I clicked my tongue and reached out, pressing my palm flat over the top of the receiver to push the barrel down.

“Stop,” I said.

Slowly lowering his arms, the boy straightened his spine. Even as he rolled his stiff, aching shoulders inside his uniform jacket, his dark eyes remained glued to the target downrange.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I said, stepping around to face him. “What, are you entering the national championships tomorrow?”

Considering he had started two full years behind every other student in his grade, catching up to the class average in less than two months was already a minor miracle. Yet Gyu-hwa’s jaw was clenched tight. Because his five-round groupings weren’t punching through a single ragged hole in the ten-ring the way he pictured in his head, he treated the entire session as a failure.

“Ji Gyu-hwa,” I repeated, dropping my voice an octave.

Picking up on the grave edge in my tone, the boy finally tore his gaze from the lane and bit his lower lip, his shoulders tensing.

“Right now, knowing how to handle a rifle well enough to keep yourself alive in an emergency is plenty,” I told him evenly. “You’ve got years ahead of you to chase perfection. Learn how to separate your immediate objective from your ultimate ideal.”

If a thirteen-year-old kid beat himself up for missing the dead-center X-ring when he had barely learned how to hold a gun a month ago, he was going to spend the rest of his life bleeding himself dry in perpetual dissatisfaction. Feeling a sudden urge to smooth out the stubborn crease knotted between his eyebrows, I curled my middle finger against my thumb and flicked him squarely in the center of his forehead.

Thwack. Clapping both hands over his brow, the boy glared up at me with a startled, aggrieved pout.

“You’re doing more than well enough right now,” I said, softening my tone. “I’m not telling you to lower your standards forever—I’m telling you to climb the stairs one step at a time. Stop punishing yourself for no damn reason.”

“…Yes,” he muttered, rubbing the red spot on his forehead as he lowered his eyes.

“Come on, I’m starving. Let’s pack up and go get some food.”

“Okay.”

Clapping his narrow shoulder, I turned toward the equipment counter to return our ear protection.

Sometimes, a decade of lived experience is the only thing that lets you see the trap someone else is standing in. Selected for the Special Operations Task Force as the youngest operator in its history, I had spent my entire first year frantically trying to prove I wasn’t a fluke—not just to my seniors, but to myself. Even when my combat record spoke for itself, a gnawing imposter syndrome kept whispering that I hadn’t earned my seat, driving me to chase riskier and riskier results just to quiet the voice in my own skull.

Had Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa seen that exact same desperate anxiety in me? Looking back now, he almost certainly had.

“Seon Na-won.”

“Sir.”

Months ago, returning to base after a brutal seventy-two-hour deployment, I had crossed paths with Ji Gyu-hwa in the staging hangar. Like the rest of the assault team, I was practically marinated in gore—caked from helmet to boot in a crust of neon-blue creature ichor and dried human blood so thick it was a miracle he even recognized my face beneath the grime.

Halting in front of me, Ji Gyu-hwa had raked his cold eyes from my filthy combat boots up to my bloodshot eyes, then summarized my three days of living hell in three words.

“What a mess.”

Ever since anomalous creatures first tore their way into the world, the domestic political landscape had fractured into chaos—separatist cult bombings, armed insurrections, and creature stampedes erupting without end. Thrown into the meat grinder of that conflict, I had fought like a rabid dog on every deployment. I wanted to save even one more civilian, serve the greater cause, and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I belonged among the apex operators of this unit.

Yet even standing beside squadmates who had crawled out of the exact same trench, my battered state was a uniquely bloody eyesore. Ji Gyu-hwa had clicked his tongue in open disapproval.

“When a rookie charges ahead recklessly and gets himself killed, there’s no greater nuisance to the team,” he had said, his voice flat as iron. “…Pointless.”

Leaving that single word hanging in the air, he had brushed past my shoulder without a backward glance. He knew damn well how much blood and sweat I had poured into keeping our sector from collapsing over those three days, yet instead of a single word of acknowledgment, he had written off the entire effort as pointless rookie heroics. I hadn’t been fishing for a medal or a pat on the head, but I had craved recognition—one nod from my team leader confirming that I was pulling my weight. I hadn’t thought wanting that was a crime. If the people fighting beside you didn’t acknowledge your competence, what good was telling yourself you were qualified? That was why I had pushed my body to do the work of two, even three men.

“Good work out there, Na-won.”

“Damn, maknae! They say bathing in blood for a hundred days turns back the clock—keep this up and you’ll regress straight into an infant!”

Filing into the hangar behind Ji Gyu-hwa’s retreating back, the older guys on the team had clapped my sore shoulders one by one. Forcing a tired grin onto my stiff face, I had swallowed the hot, bitter lump of anger and hurt burning in my throat. Pointless. I hadn’t sprinted through gunfire three times harder than everyone else just to be called a nuisance. I had moved to keep our guys breathing and bring everyone home alive. Having my effort dismissed as pointless cut deeper than a reprimand ever could.

“Finally back on solid ground.”

“Man, I’m heading straight for the base sauna.”

Even though I revered Ji Gyu-hwa more than any soldier alive, days like that left me feeling like I could grind my bones to powder and still never measure up to his yardstick. Whenever operators from other squads joked that Jaguar had a soft spot for his youngest recruit, I genuinely thought they were out of their minds.

“Hey, maknae, you hitting the sauna with us?”

“I’m good, hyung. Think I’ll just wash up in the barracks and crash.”

“Awwww, come oooon, don’t be like that!”

With Park Chan draping his heavy frame over my shoulders like a clinging human scarf and whining in my ear, I had trudged toward the locker room on leaden boots—my legs feeling heavier on that short walk across base than they had during seventy-two hours of live combat.

Pointless. That one word had gouged a raw trench straight through my pride.

“I’ll hit dead center one day,” a quiet voice said beside me, pulling me back to the Hwaryeong-do street. Having chewed over my lecture the entire walk from the range to the diner, young Ji Gyu-hwa looked up at me with calm, clear eyes. “You’re right, hyung. I was being pointlessly hard on myself.”

…Pointlessly.

I blinked down at him. Could that have been what Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa meant back in the hangar, too? At the time, I had taken his cold Pointless as a condemnation of my skill, using the sting as fuel to drive myself even harder on the next op. Looking back now from the other side of the mirror, however—even if his delivery had left zero room for a charitable reading at the time—had he actually been telling me that grinding myself to pieces to prove my worth was what was pointless? That I didn’t need to bleed myself dry just to earn a seat I already held? The realization struck me thirteen years too late—even if part of me knew I might just be retroactively wrapping his harshness in a pretty bow to soothe my own bruised ego.

“Hyung,” Gyu-hwa said as soon as we slid into our usual booth at the diner.

Still half-lost in my memories, I hummed a beat late. “Yeah?”

“Earlier, you said the last person who taught you how to shoot was your commanding officer.”

“I learned from a lot of people. Most recently, yeah—my team leader.”

“Are you teaching me the exact same way he taught you?”

“Pretty much.”

The boy folded his hands on the table. “He must have been really good at his job.”

“The best I’ve ever seen.”

“…Was he a good person?”

Only then did the kid voice the question he had actually been circling around all afternoon. A dry laugh slipped out of me, and I rubbed the corner of my eye above my mask.

Was Ji Gyu-hwa a good person? From the military’s perspective, he was an unmatched commander. He mapped out the shortest line to the objective, executed without hesitation, and brought back mission success even when it demanded ruthless, cold-blooded sacrifices along the way. From the perspective of an operative serving under him, however, you always knew deep down that his top priority was the mission—never the safety of his men, his friends, or even his own life. That chilling impartiality was why I had always felt an unbridgeable gulf between us, and why his gravity stood out so starkly even within a unit of hardened killers. Could a man prepared to feed himself and everyone around him into the furnace for the sake of an objective truly be called a good person? Objectively speaking, the answer was no.

“…Yeah,” I said softly. “He was a good man.”

And yet, I had admired him to the point of reverence—because unlike true sociopaths who spent human lives like cheap coin without blinking, Ji Gyu-hwa knew the exact, crushing weight of every sacrifice he ordered, and he carried that cross forward without ever once retreating a step. Honestly, it would have been a hell of a lot easier to resent him if he really had been a heartless machine. At least then, I wouldn’t have spent every waking hour starving for his approval, or dreaming of the day I grew strong enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside him.

“Is he still a soldier?” the boy asked, tilting his head. “Like you, hyung?”

“He is,” I said, picking up the water pitcher. “Though I’m not anymore.”

Ji Gyu-hwa lifted his dark eyes, a dozen unspoken questions flickering behind his lashes, but I poured his water and looked away without offering another word.

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