Chapter 7

The guesthouse building belonged to a widow whose husband had passed away years ago and whose grown children had long since left Hwaryeong-do for Seoul. Its iron front gate groaned on rusted hinges, the warped window frames popped off their tracks roughly once a day, and the communal shoe rack sat at such a drunken tilt that slippers regularly cascaded off it in a heap.

After I wrenched the gate back into alignment, muscled the stubborn window frames flush into their grooves, and dismantled and rebuilt the shoe rack from scratch, my standing in the landlady’s eyes underwent an immediate promotion—from shady bachelor who works creature-subjugation gigs and is bound to drop dead in a ditch any day now to young man who might still drop dead soon, but is remarkably handy to have around the house. Before long, she was knocking on my door to share sliced fruit and whole rotisserie chickens.

Right around the time I started feeling sheepish about being fed far more than my odd jobs warranted, she mentioned in passing that she had a craving for spicy rice cakes. I volunteered to run the errand on the spot, and thirty thousand won landed squarely in my palm. She told me to pick up a single portion of tteokbokki to go and keep the change as pocket money. When I stared at the hefty bills in surprise, she shooed me toward the gate with a wave of her hand, warning me to hurry before she changed her mind.

Muttering that she really didn’t need to spoil me like this, I headed down the road toward the neighborhood snack bar. Bringing back a lone tub of tteokbokki felt stingy after she’d handed me thirty grand, so I was mentally calculating a full spread of blood sausage and battered fried snacks when I spotted a cluster of school uniforms up ahead. As luck would have it, afternoon classes had just let out.

Being an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, I grumbled under my breath and took my place at the very back of the queue outside the takeout counter. I was just standing there minding my own business, yet whether it was the sheer size of the shadow I cast over the sidewalk, the middle schoolers ahead of me began glancing nervously over their shoulders one by one.

Ignoring the whispers, I stared straight ahead over their heads—and spotted a familiar crown of black hair near the front of the line. It was Ji Gyu-hwa. Even though it had only been a few days, seeing him felt oddly like running into an old friend after ages apart. I’d had no idea Lieutenant Ji had a sweet tooth for after-school street food. Then again, was there a middle schooler in South Korea who didn’t? A faint smile tugged at my mouth at the thought that even the ruthless Jaguar had once queued up outside a snack shop after school like an ordinary kid.

Yet the instant the classmate standing beside him received a steaming paper bowl brimming with soupy red tteokbokki, Ji Gyu-hwa stepped quietly out of line. Unlike his peers, whose cheeks were flushed with the simple joy of after-school snacks, he trailed his friend toward the indoor tables without ordering a single thing for himself.

Tugging my white mask up over my nose, I called out, “Ji Gyu-hwa.”

The boy turned on reflex and caught sight of me. Amid the white steam curling off the iron griddles, the boisterous chatter of teenagers, and the clatter of the afternoon street, time seemed to slow to a standstill. I saw it with crystal clarity—the exact fraction of a second when those numb, chestnut-brown eyes widened and a smile brushed across his lips like a passing breeze. Dry autumn leaves drifted down on the wind like loose threads, grazing the tip of my nose with a faint tickle. Ji Gyu-hwa probably didn’t even realize it himself—that he was glad to see me. The shift in his expression was fleeting, minuscule, almost invisible to anyone else, yet unmistakable to me. I could catch it only because I was an adult who had weathered a wider spectrum of life than he had, and because, above all, I already knew the man Ji Gyu-hwa would grow up to become.

“…Hyung,” he murmured.

Before the word had even faded, everyday noise rushed back in to break the spell.

“Hey, transfer student,” the boy balancing the bowl of tteokbokki piped up, looking between us. “Is this guy your brother?”

Before Ji Gyu-hwa could open his mouth, I beat him to the punch. “What, do I look like his older sister to you?”

A chorus of giggles broke out among the students crowding the counter.

“Whoa, Ji Gyu-hwa’s brother is crazy cool.”

“Oppa, how old are you?”

“Hyung, how tall are you?”

“Why don’t you take off your mask?”

Most of the kids queued up in front of the shop turned out to be Gyu-hwa’s classmates. The schoolgirls who had been casting wary glances over their shoulders at me a minute ago dropped their guard completely, crowding around to bombard the two of us with questions.

“You kids have a great eye for men,” I said, puffing out my chest with shameless pride before looking down at Gyu-hwa. “Why aren’t you eating? Hey, are you punks leaving our kid out?”

“No way, hyung!” the boy holding the tteokbokki protested, nearly sloshing broth over his thumbs. “Gyu-hwa’s the one who said he was full and didn’t want anything!”

“Don’t like street food?” I asked, tilting my head at him.

It might not have been his favorite meal, but the adult Ji Gyu-hwa I knew wasn’t a picky eater in the slightest. In the future, he treated food strictly as combat fuel—eating whatever was set in front of him without a word of complaint until his tank was full, then setting his utensils down with surgical neatness.

“…Just wasn’t in the mood for it,” the boy murmured, curving the corner of his mouth into a vague, noncommittal smile.

It sounded plausible enough on the surface, yet out of the corner of my eye, I caught his fingers curling and uncurling against the seam of his trousers, as if my question had pricked a sore spot.

“Order whatever you guys want,” I announced, waving a hand toward the menu board. “Hyung’s treating today. You too, Gyu-hwa—you’ve got to eat plenty if you want to shoot up tall.”

Gyu-hwa’s eyes flew wide, while his classmates erupted into cheers, singing my praises as they shouted out orders for fried dumplings, seaweed rolls, and fish cakes left and right. Thank goodness I’d brought my own cash along with the landlady’s thirty thousand won. Once the kids had ordered to their hearts’ content, they bowed to me in a neat domino row and hurried inside to claim a table. After ushering his classmates through the door ahead of him, however, Gyu-hwa lingered by the outdoor counter, waiting while my takeout order was packed.

“Are you close with those guys?” I asked, leaning an elbow on the counter beside him.

“No.”

“Were they giving you a hard time?”

“They don’t pick on me,” he said quietly. “They’re good kids.”

“Then why the long face?”

Gyu-hwa glanced up at me from beneath his lashes. “You don’t even have money to spare, hyung.”

“Who says I’m broke?”

“The boss at the dispatch office,” he replied without missing a beat. “He said you grab every dangerous shift on the board like you’re drowning in loan-shark debt. And that you’re washing dishes at two different restaurants on the side.”

Seriously, the gossip network in this backwater town put military intelligence to shame. Worse, not a single word of the rumor was true. Sure, back in my original timeline I carried a hefty mortgage from maxing out my housing loan, but sixteen years in the past I had zero debt, zero savings, and zero legal identity—just an undocumented temporal castaway taking whatever cash-in-hand gigs he could get to stay fed.

“I don’t have a single won of debt,” I told him.

“Then why are you living in a rundown inn?”

“It’s not a rundown inn, for your information—it’s a guesthouse. There’s a world of difference. And I’ve got plenty of cash.”

“Well… I did hear they pay you pretty well,” he conceded after a beat.

Once the local crews saw what I could do in the field, job offers had started pouring in from every contractor in the county. In less than a month, I had climbed the food chain from fourth-tier carcass cleanup to third-tier perimeter security, and my daily rate had jumped by fifty percent. Give me another two months, and I’d probably be running second-tier details.

“The agency boss said you’re such a deadeye shot that every crew chief tries to book you first,” Gyu-hwa added, his gaze lingering on my hands.

“Who told you that?”

“The mister at the office. Did someone teach you how to shoot?”

“A few different people,” I said, a wry smile tugging at my mouth beneath the mask. “Most recently, my commanding officer.”

In my time, Jaguar excelled in every discipline modern warfare demanded, and his field instincts, agility, and tactical judgment were flatly unmatched. Every single mission I ran under his command taught me something new.

“Were you a good shot when you were my age, too?” Gyu-hwa asked.

I blinked down at him, wondering where the sudden interest was coming from—until it hit me. In this era, mandatory military preparedness training started in middle school. While the Ministry of National Defense eventually pushed live-fire instruction back to high school in the future, back when Gyu-hwa and I were students, full-scale rifle drills kicked off right after entering seventh grade.

“How old are you again?” I asked.

“Thirteen.”

First year of middle school, second semester—the exact term students transitioned from classroom theory to live ammunition on the firing line.

“Ma’am, could you pack seven portions of tteokbokki, fried snacks, and blood sausage to go, please?” Handing the bills across the counter, I glanced sidelong at the boy. “Why all the questions about shooting? Want me to give you a few pointers?”

Because student snack bars served smaller portions at dirt-cheap prices, seven orders barely made a dent in my wallet. I had tossed the offer out casually, yet Gyu-hwa didn’t answer right away. Instead, he stared diagonally down at the scuffed concrete by my boots, his mouth pressed into a tight, silent line.

Even though the call sign Jaguar had started as phonetic slang spun off his name, Ji Gyu-hwa, looking at him now as a thirteen-year-old boy, the feline nickname suited his temperament to a tee. The way his desire was written all over his face while he stubbornly feigned indifference reminded me of a wary black alley cat eyeing a saucer of milk. And being far from a mature adult myself, seeing him hesitate like that only made me want to prod him until he admitted what he wanted—charmed, in spite of myself, by the novelty of young Ji Gyu-hwa actually wanting something from me.

“Want to hit the shooting range together tomorrow?” I asked.

His shoulders gave a tiny twitch. “…Is that okay?”

“Sure. All I have to do is skip the morning dispatch call.”

That was the beauty of day labor. If you showed up at the agency office at dawn, you worked; if you slept in, you had the day off. With no contract, no insurance, and a borrowed name on the pay ledger, the only real obligation holding me down on this island was the boy standing beside me.

“Meet me by the bus stop after school tomorrow,” I said, scooping up the heavy plastic bags of hot food from the counter and giving him a shooing wave. “Now get inside before the food gets cold. Your friends are waiting.”

“Okay,” he said, dipping his head. “…Thank you.”

After hearing that clipped, stiffly polite thank you day after day, my ears must have been going defective—because it was actually starting to sound affectionate.

Yet even as I turned and walked down the sidewalk, Gyu-hwa didn’t step into the shop. Stopping a few paces away to glance back, I found him lingering on the curb between the noisy warmth of the snack bar and the empty street—looking back at his classmates inside, then turning his dark eyes back toward me, like a stray cat undecided on whether to follow.

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