Chapter 12

I had fully intended to ease off the gas and humor him if he started whining about how hard the drills were, yet the kid threw himself into marksmanship training like his life depended on it. Within two weeks, the number of afternoons we spent commuting into town for the firing range outnumbered the days I actually showed up at the dispatch office for work. Before long, our daily rhythm locked into a fixed groove: first, I sat him down to finish his school homework—he kept swearing up and down that his teachers hadn’t assigned any, as if a middle schooler in South Korea could ever have zero homework—and then we either grabbed an early dinner before catching the bus to the range, or shot for an hour first, ate near the school strip, and rode the last bus back to the village together in the very back row.

Because I had steadily ratcheted up the intensity of our drills, Ji Gyu-hwa started nodding off the second the bus pulled out of the town terminal. About a week ago, his bobbing head had finally given up fighting gravity and slumped squarely onto my shoulder. The first couple of times he jolted awake at our stop to find his cheek pressed against my arm, his ears had flushed red with mortification, but by now he didn’t even hesitate, leaning into my side the moment the engine began to hum. Honestly, his small head weighed so little I barely felt it there. Tapping his cheek to wake him one stop before our village had simply become part of my evening routine.

“Ji Gyu-hwa. Gyu-hwa, wake up.”

At the gentle nudge of my shoulder, his thick lashes fluttered, a faint clarity slowly returning to eyes shadowed with fatigue. Stepping down from the bus into the crisp night air, I glanced down at him as the taillights rumbled away.

“If you’re worn out,” I said, “want to take next week off from the range?”

The boy shook his head at once. “No.”

At first I assumed he had another practical evaluation coming up at school, until Gyu-hwa quietly mentioned on our walk up the road that a student from another class had been mauled to death by a stray creature along a nearby mountain trail two days ago. While creature attacks near residential zones had become much rarer in my future thanks to expanded defense grids, sixteen years ago they were a terrifyingly routine headline.

“I need to know how to protect myself,” the boy said, staring straight ahead down the dark road.

“Do you think that classmate died because they slacked off during rifle drills?”

“…No.”

It was the second student fatality at his school this semester alone, he added. Was that why he had been grinding his fingers raw on the rifle receiver every afternoon—just to stave off the visceral, ever-present terror of living in a world where death could drop out of the trees at any second?

“I hate being helpless,” Gyu-hwa said, his voice low and tight beneath the hum of the streetlamps. “Whenever something goes wrong, I’m always a step too late, scrambling behind everyone else just to survive what’s right in front of my face.”

If he were stronger, if he were prepared ahead of time, if he had the power to fight back, he wouldn’t be thrown around like driftwood anymore—that was what he meant. And it didn’t take a genius to know he wasn’t just talking about creatures.

“All right,” I said, matching my long stride to his shorter one as the yellow glow of a streetlamp washed over our shoulders like a warm drizzle. “Let’s take it one step at a time, then.”

We walked in silence for a few paces before he glanced up at me. “Hyung, you don’t get scared anymore when you run into a creature, do you?”

“Are you kidding me? Earlier this week I was shaking so hard in my boots I sweated off two kilos on the spot.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I.”

Gyu-hwa shot me a flat, skeptical look that clearly said, Wait a second—weren’t you the one who told my friends I was the one who froze up?

“Look, creatures are terrifying every single time you face them,” I told him honestly, shoving my hands into my pockets. “Training sucks the soul right out of your body, and live operations are always a trip through hell. Life doesn’t magically get easy just because you grow up, Ji Gyu-hwa. Not by a long shot.”

“Even so, you never come back injured, and the crew chiefs say you’re always the first one to charge in.”

Beneath my mask, my mouth twisted into a wry smirk. It wasn’t that I had conquered fear; I had simply grown used to functioning while terrified. Even when my guts were twisting in knots and my pulse was screaming in my ears, my trained hands pulled the trigger on schedule, my eyes calculated trajectories automatically, and my legs moved before my conscious mind could vote to run. When your body charges into the fire on pure muscle memory while your brain is begging to go home, you can’t even argue when people call it a cursed talent.

“You only have to master one of two things,” I said, holding up two fingers in the dark. “Either let your hands and knees shake all they want while keeping your head ice-cold, or let your brain panic all it wants while keeping your hands and feet moving like clockwork. Pull off either one, and you’ll walk out alive.”

“Even if it’s an aberrant species you’ve never seen in the textbook?”

“Yeah.”

Truth be told, out in the field, nine out of ten creatures you ran into looked nothing like the neat diagrams in the government manuals. Scholars tried to classify them by whether they had endoskeletons, compound eyes, or external vocal organs, but every live encounter was basically a blind gacha pull from hell. All a soldier could do was pray he drew a physiology he knew how to bleed.

“Say you’re walking home down this road right now and a creature drops out of the bushes,” I said, quizzing him on the fly. “No eyes, dish-shaped ears the size of wok pans, and a body covered in feelers. What’s your very first move?”

Recognizing the pop quiz for what it was, Gyu-hwa thought for a second before venturing, “Hold my breath and freeze…?”

“Bingo. If you panic and bolt blindly against a sound-hunter, you’re serving yourself up as the first course. Problem is, standing dead still when a monster is ten paces away goes against every survival instinct wired into a human brain. That’s why I told you to pick one switch: even if your mind is screaming at you to run, lock your muscles in place—or if your legs try to bolt on reflex, use your head to pin them to the dirt.”

“Give me another one,” he said quickly.

When I glanced down, the boy’s dark eyes were shining in the lamplight as if someone had scattered a handful of fireflies inside them.

“All right. What if it’s a six-legged quadruped-style crawler, jaws lined with serrated teeth, drooling acid and barreling straight at you like a runaway dump truck?”

“Shoot its head?”

“Cut the shit and run for your life,” I corrected briskly. “And use the vertical terrain while you’re at it. If a beast has six limbs built like spades, it’s evolved to burrow through dirt and wedge itself into low crevices—which means scrambling onto a roof or up a tree gives you way better odds than ducking into a ditch. Same rule applies when you’re the one ambushing it: burrowing predators rarely check above their eye line, so taking the high ground wins half the fight before you even pull the trigger. …Wait, don’t they cover this in seventh-grade survival class?”

“Right now we’re only memorizing how to classify species by the color and placement of their nuclei.”

“Well, that’s the stuff that’ll keep you breathing in a pinch, so don’t you dare nod off during lecture.”

“I don’t sleep in class.”

Always has to get the last word in. Chuckling under my breath, I reached over and gave the back of his head a playful shove, ruffling his soft hair in the process.

“Can’t you teach me more field tactics like that anyway, hyung?” he asked, straightening his cap—or rather, smoothing his hair back down.

“No reason I can’t.”

While the Church of Truth hadn’t yet reached the monstrous, state-toppling scale it boasted in my future, transnational apocalyptic cults were already sinking their claws into vulnerable, isolated teenagers across the countryside. Along with anti-creature survival, I was going to have to drill Cult Defense 101 into his skull.

Ratting off a dozen practical rules of thumb—including a strict mandate to run the other way if any smiling stranger on the street ever offered him a “free psychological temperament test” or invited him to a “spiritual healing seminar”—we reached the concrete courtyard of his low-rise villa before I even realized how far we’d walked.

“Head on in,” I said, stopping by the gate.

Gyu-hwa bowed politely at the waist and stepped through the ground-floor entrance. Ever since I had dropped that casual “cut the shit” back on the road—or honestly, even before that—the tight line of his mouth had been softened by a faint, lingering curve. Only when I flapped my hand to shoo him upstairs did he finally turn his back to climb the steps.

Pivoting to head back toward my guesthouse at the same moment, I suddenly halted mid-step and glanced back over my shoulder.

Through the smudged glass of the villa’s entryway door, all I could see was the back of his dark head and his narrow shadow stretching up the concrete stairwell as the overhead motion sensor flickered on. Yet in the split second he had turned his back to me, every trace of that boyish smile had vanished from his profile as if wiped clean with a sponge. How can a thirteen-year-old kid’s eyes go that dead the instant he steps through his own front door?

If I called his name right now, told him to pack his bag, and offered him a corner of my cramped room at the guesthouse—if I told him I would be an adult he could actually lean on—what kind of expression would cross his face?

Biting down hard on the inside of my lip, I forced myself to turn away and drag my heavy boots down the dirt lane, one step at a time. I must not get any deeper into this child’s life. I was nothing more than a stranded traveler passing briefly through his thirteen-year-old world. I had no right to make myself a pillar he couldn’t stand without when I was doomed to vanish into thin air.

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