Chapter 25

While the local high school resumed classes after a week of remote instruction, Gyu-hwa’s middle school—which had borne the brunt of the casualties—remained closed for two full weeks. And the very first declaration Ji Gyu-hwa made over the breakfast table during that hiatus nearly made me choke on my rice.

He announced that he had decided on his future career: he was going to enlist in the military.

Wondering with a cold shiver whether fate was a bulldog that refused to let go of its bone no matter how hard I kicked it, I caught Gyu-hwa by the wrist before he could duck into his bedroom under the convenient excuse of logging into his morning online lecture. Beneath my thumb, hard shooter’s calluses had already formed along the pads of his index finger and palm. The last time he brought up enlisting, I had brushed him off with a joke; clearly, it was time for an intervention.

“Sit down and listen to your elder for a minute,” I said, steering him onto the sofa. “Nowadays, every warm body between fifteen and sixty on the peninsula knows how to fire a rifle, right?”

“Yes.”

“Which means if you want to enlist as a career soldier and actually make a name for yourself in a tier-one unit, shooting decently isn’t enough—you have to be a literal monster on the range. The selection cutoff is hellish, the training will grind your joints to dust, and the hours are garbage. Follow me so far?”

“Yes. And my scores are already climbing. In last month’s school evaluation—”

I didn’t need him to remind me; at the end of his first term of eighth grade, the kid had vaulted past ninety percent of his peers to crack the school’s top ten marksmen—an absurd leap from his seventh-grade zeroes, thanks entirely to my world-class private coaching (not that I could brag about that right now).

“Gyu-hwa, Gyu-hwa, my dear Gyu-hwa,” I said, pressing both hands onto his shoulders and looking him dead in the eye. “When a job has an inhumanly high barrier to entry and demands that you cough up blood every day just to survive, what does a smart man do?”

He tilted his head slightly. “Train harder.”

“Wrong! You let some other sucker do it while you sit in an air-conditioned office eating snacks and collecting a pension!”

Something is deeply wrong with this adult’s moral compass was written in bold print across the boy’s deadpan face.

“Look, nobody’s denying you have a freakish gift for a trigger,” I pressed on quickly. “So what’s the sensible career path for a shooting prodigy?”

“Special-forces sniper—”

“National Olympic sports shooter!” I cut in loudly. “You enroll in a physical-education high school on an athletic scholarship, get drafted straight onto a corporate semi-pro shooting roster after graduation, collect fat endorsement checks, and never set foot inside an army recruitment center!”

Even if my meddling had already spun this world off into an alternate universe, there was no way in hell I was going to stand by and watch this boy march into the meat grinder that had turned him into the scarred, sleepless Jaguar of my memories.

“I have zero interest in sports shooting,” Gyu-hwa replied flatly. “I want to enlist. You were a soldier too before you came here, weren’t you, hyung?”

“Me? When did I ever say I was in the military? Never touched a uniform in my life.”

“Last winter, when I asked if you were a soldier, you said Not anymore—which means you used to be one.”

“I misspoke! Total civilian from birth!”

Gyu-hwa looked straight into my eyes, his voice quiet and unyielding. “I want to enlist so that when I grow up, I can become a strong adult like you, hyung.”

My half-open mouth snapped shut.

In the future this boy knew nothing about, he hadn’t grown up to be like me—he had become a man ten times stronger, cleaner, and more noble than I could ever hope to be.

“…An adult like me?” I rallied after a beat, wagging my eyebrows to hide the lump in my throat. “You mean devastatingly handsome, broad-shouldered, and universally beloved by women and elders alike?”

Unable to bring himself to utter a flat No after just praising me, Gyu-hwa’s jaw worked in silent, visible agony before he wrenched his gaze toward the wall. God, middle schoolers really are adorable when they act their age.

“You can grow into a fine adult without putting on combat boots,” I said, ruffling his hair while he scowled and endured it.

“How?”

“Where’s the fun if I spoil the answer now? Figure it out over the next five years.”

“Then I’m enlisting.”

“Hey—if you’re going to keep raising my blood pressure, go into your room and do your homework!”

“Already finished it.”

“Then watch your online math lecture!”

“Watched two units ahead this morning.”

“Then preview ninth-grade English!”

Swallowing whatever retort was sitting on the tip of his tongue, Gyu-hwa rose from the sofa, walked to his bedroom door, and shot me one last look of profound exasperation over his shoulder before I barked at his back:

“Don’t forget you owe me millions of won at six hundred percent interest! Get signed by a corporate shooting team and wire me your signing bonus!”

Click.

As the bedroom door shut behind him, I chuckled under my breath, cracked open a cold can of beer from the fridge, and sank back into the sofa cushions with the television murmuring on low. Yet as the cold malt hit my tongue, a quiet, wistful ache settled into my chest.

Back in the battalion, I had never once thought to ask Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa what he would have wanted to become if the world hadn’t been overrun by monsters and fanatics. Not that Jaguar would have dignified a question like that with an answer—and if he had deadpanned something like ‘A florist’, I probably would have choked laughing behind his back for a month.

Looking at the closed door of his room now, though, a quiet flower shop or a plant nursery actually suited the kid remarkably well. Maintaining greenhouse pots took heavy lifting, sure, but I had muscles to spare; I could haul the soil sacks and fertilizer bags in the back while Gyu-hwa stood behind the counter in a neat apron wrapping bouquets with that poker face of his. Or maybe he could go to university and become a veterinarian—a recession-proof career even in a zombie apocalypse. I could introduce him to my parents in Seoul, pretending it was pure coincidence that he shared my father’s given name…

If only I were allowed to stay.

Across the room, my eyes came to rest on the wall calendar hanging beside the dining table—a complimentary calendar stamped with the name of a mountain Buddhist temple that the landlady had handed me at New Year’s. The very first thing I had done after hanging it on the nail was flip forward and circle a single date in red ink.

Counting the squares remaining, my clock would run out midway through the spring semester of Gyu-hwa’s ninth-grade year. Forget seeing him off to university or high school—I wouldn’t even be here to hold a bouquet at his middle school graduation. Outside the balcony window, the autumn twilight was already creeping in earlier than the week before. Less than a year remained to us now.

* * *

Two weeks after the attack, the middle school finally reopened its gates under heavy military guard. Investigators dispatched from the mainland concluded that the aberrant creature had infiltrated the campus through an ungrated storm-drain culvert, prompting a flood of furious parental petitions demanding reinforced steel bars across every manhole on the island.

As reporters from Seoul descended on the county to cover the tragedy and the joint memorial service, one survivor’s name began circulating through every newspaper and neighborhood conversation: Ji Gyu-hwa.

To my fierce, unspoken pride, the boy had remembered a passing remark I’d made months earlier about anatomical trade-offs in subterranean species and applied it in the middle of a massacre. Spotting through the classroom window that the eyeless beast possessed oversized, asymmetrical dish-shaped auricles across its skull, Gyu-hwa instantly deduced that it hunted entirely by sound. Without a single tremor, he had ordered his classmates to strip off their hard-soled indoor slippers, barricaded the front hallway door with stacked desks, and led all thirty students out the rear fire escape in dead silence—making Class 2-2 the first group to reach the underground blast shelter without a single scratch.

That a fourteen-year-old boy had taken command of thirty panicking teenagers and executed a textbook silent extraction while blood ran down the corridors outside seemed nothing short of miraculous to the press—though to me, it was simply the first glimpse of the commander who had kept my squad alive through hell.

In recognition of his actions, the provincial office awarded him the Hwaryeong Governor’s Righteous Citizen Commendation. Out of respect for the mourning families—and because Gyu-hwa flatly refused to stand in front of a camera lens—the presentation was held privately in the principal’s office, and that evening he walked through our front door carrying a glossy navy certificate folder.

Without even opening it, he tossed the folder onto the shoe rack like junk mail.

“I don’t want a piece of paper like that,” he muttered darkly, toeing off his sneakers. “If the attack had happened during sixth-period marksmanship at the range instead of study hall, we would have had live rifles in our hands. We could have at least slowed it down.”

Pausing in the hallway with his head bowed, his fists clenched at his sides. “And if the kids from the next classroom had been in our homeroom… that boy wouldn’t have died.”

He had saved thirty lives with his bare hands, yet all he could see was the single acquaintance from the snack shop whom he hadn’t been able to reach. Watching his rigid shoulders, my chest constricted with an ache that spanned two timelines. How many times did this boy have to strangle his own heart like this before he could stand in a locker room and say ‘Men who were bound to die simply died’?

Why had I been so blind back in the battalion? Just because he wore lieutenant’s bars and towered over us like a cast-iron statue, I had forgotten that the man bleeding in front of us had once been a boy who grieved for every life he couldn’t save.

Stepping into the hallway, I rested my palm squarely on the crown of his head. “You did everything humanly possible, Gyu-hwa. Some things in this world can’t be stopped no matter who’s standing there.”

“It wasn’t everything,” he bit out, his lower lip trembling. “I saw the creature’s ears from the window. If I had slipped out alone and reached the school broadcast room to warn the other floors over the PA—”

“So you’re telling me those twelve deaths are on your head?”

Knowing his logic didn’t hold water, he clamped his jaw shut and stared at the floor.

“Answer me, Ji Gyu-hwa. Is failing to save everyone in that building your fault?”

“…No.”

“Within the range of what a middle schooler with bare hands could control, you went above and beyond the call of duty,” I said firmly, pulling him against my chest until his forehead rested against my sternum. “Remember what I told you when you moved in here? Don’t you ever shoulder guilt that doesn’t belong to you.”

“…Yes.”

“Promise me you won’t forget it.”

“Yes.”

Closing my eyes as the steady thud of the boy’s heartbeat echoed against my ribs, I wondered silently if the Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa I once knew had also stood alone on nights like this—quietly bleeding inside for every life he hadn’t been able to save, and every life he had been forced to sacrifice.