Chapter 8

There was only one public firing range in the district—a municipal training facility attached to the combined middle and high school Gyu-hwa attended—and getting there from our village took a grueling two-and-a-half-hour round trip by bus. Every teenager living in our rural valley, young Gyu-hwa included, endured that commute five days a week simply because there wasn’t another middle school for miles. Having grown up five minutes on foot from my own middle school in Seoul—and still managing to sprint through the gates late half the time—I belatedly realized just how spoiled my boyhood had been.

“So,” I said as the bus rattled along the coastal road, “what part is giving you trouble?”

Gyu-hwa, who had spent the entire ride staring silently out the window, shifted his gaze but held his tongue, hesitating as if he didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t think much of his silence. The Ji Gyu-hwa I knew was a natural-born prodigy; even at thirteen, his raw talent probably left his peers choking on his dust. Though I couldn’t tell him so to his face, the man possessed all three pillars of true genius: innate gift, bone-grinding effort, and ice-cold resolve.

Months ago, back in my original timeline, our squad had been deployed to a hostage standoff. An armed militant had pinned a civilian in front of him with a pistol jammed against their temple, screaming for an extraction vehicle. Every operator on our perimeter had a rifle trained on him, yet the bastard never stopped shifting behind his human shield, denying us a clean line of fire. Knowing that freezing for even half a second meant an instant bullet to the brainstem, the captor used the hostage’s body to cover every angle.

Command had already green-lit lethal force; all that remained was seizing a window to take the shot. Microscopic openings flickered in and out of existence in fractions of a second, vanishing the instant the eye registered them. The only man who pulled the trigger in one of those razor-thin flashes was Ji Gyu-hwa.

When the terrorist crumpled to the pavement like a puppet with cut strings, I had stared at our team leader in stunned silence. He hadn’t even forgotten to put a second anchoring round into the target as the body fell.

“Phew, that was way too close,” Hong Kwon-jin had exhaled over the comms as the assault element surged forward to secure the room.

Right as we were calling in the all-clear and escorting the trembling hostage out of the kill zone, a low voice had brushed past my ear.

“No.”

Standing half a step beside him, I was the only one who caught it. It took me a beat to realize he was refuting Kwon-jin’s remark that the shot had been a close call. Ji Gyu-hwa had squeezed the trigger because he knew with absolute certainty that the bullet would find its mark—and just as he calculated, the round had punched dead center. It wasn’t arrogance; it was cold, mathematical conviction.

…Damn it all, the man was cool as hell.

My awe must have been plastered across my face in bold print as I gawked at him. Even his refusal to waste breath explaining himself tapped straight into some primal, hard-boiled male romance. Simply put, the Lieutenant Ji Gyu-hwa I knew was impossibly cool, terrifyingly lethal, and the undisputed apex predator of our battalion. A marksman of that caliber had to have been a monster with a rifle since the day he picked one up. Whatever slump young Gyu-hwa was fretting over today was probably the equivalent of an Olympic gold-medalist archer sighing, I meant to shoot a 10-10-10, but my last arrow drifted into a 9. What, was he gunning for a spot on the Hwaryeong Provincial Youth Team? That was how lightly I took his request as we walked onto the range.

Ten minutes later, I stared at the boy in horror. Even if I hadn’t touched a single thing, this timeline was doomed from the start.

At this rate, forget making team leader in the Special Operations Task Force—it was a miracle Ji Gyu-hwa had ever passed basic infantry qualification. Just what kind of blood-vomiting, bone-pulverizing hell had this kid endured between middle school and his twenties to leap from this to the godlike sniper I knew?

Classroom rifle theory began in fifth grade, which meant zeroing a standard service carbine should have been second nature by now. Yet everything about the boy’s form—from the way he seated the buttstock against his shoulder pocket to his erratic breath control—was a complete disaster. Gyu-hwa was two years older than me in the future, which meant he should have been learning the fundamentals since elementary school.

“Were you cryogenically frozen for the past three years?” I asked, staring at his target sheet.

“…”

“Did you just sign the attendance roster in the morning and jump out the back window?”

“…”

“Do you only go to school for the free lunch?”

I wasn’t even trying to be sarcastic; I was genuinely baffled. Having completed the safety inspection and function check slowly but without error, the boy bit down on his lower lip and dropped his eyes to the shooting mat.

“…I couldn’t attend school much during fifth and sixth grade,” he murmured, his voice trailing off with uncharacteristic hesitation.

And the school board just handed live ammunition to a kid who missed two years of safety fundamentals? What a bunch of lunatics. Even in a country where constant creature incursions, cult bombings, and civil unrest had forced the government to mandate civilian marksmanship training and universal firearm proficiency, throwing an untrained thirteen-year-old onto a live firing line was criminal negligence.

“I took a short remedial course when I transferred here and managed to fake my way through until now,” Gyu-hwa admitted quietly, “but I can’t hide it anymore.”

During dry-fire drills and laser-simulation classes, he had managed to scrape by through sheer observational mimicry, copying his classmates’ postures out of the corner of his eye. The moment they stepped onto the live range with real recoil and brass, however, his nonexistent foundation had been laid bare.

“How far back does the gap in your fundamentals go?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Fair enough. That was a stupid question on my part—the equivalent of telling a classroom to raise their hands if they were absent today.

“Have you zeroed your rifle yet?”

“I tried for the first time two weeks ago,” he said, glancing up at me. “What are you supposed to do when your three-round bursts won’t form a group?”

“Fire five.”

“And if five rounds won’t group either?”

“Then you fire ten.”

“…”

Gyu-hwa stared at me with an expression that practically asked if he had made a terrible mistake entrusting his life and education to a brute like me. I gave him an unapologetic shrug. What else was I supposed to tell him? When your shots are scattering across the paper like buckshot, you keep squeezing the trigger until your body learns how to group them.

“Stay off the live range for the time being,” I instructed, tapping the barrel of the training rifle. “Review the theory manual at home and stick strictly to dry-fire posture drills.”

“We don’t have a rifle at home, though.”

I blinked. “Your house doesn’t even have a standard-issue K2C3?”

While my generation had mostly transitioned to the updated K2C4, men of our fathers’ era almost universally kept a battered K2C3 in the household gun locker, swearing up and down that the rifle they’d carried during their own service felt best in the hands. In South Korea, the K2C3 was practically a household appliance. How could his home not have one?

“We had one,” Gyu-hwa said flatly, “but my father took it with him.”

“And your old man rarely comes home?”

“Yes.”

A vicious curse climbed straight up my windpipe. In a countryside crawling with stray anomalies, how the hell was a thirteen-year-old boy supposed to defend himself if his deadbeat father wandered off with the only household firearm?

“All right,” I said, forcing my voice level. “We’ll figure out the equipment later. Since we already paid for the lane today, we might as well make the most of it. Assume your stance.”

Stepping up behind him, I reseated the rifle butt firmly into his shoulder pocket and tugged his crooked earmuffs down until they sealed properly over his ears. The boy drew in a slow breath to steady himself. Although his logged range hours were pitifully short compared to his classmates’, once I manually adjusted his grip and elbow angle two or three times, his silhouette stopped looking like a total lost cause. Even so, he had miles to go.

The man who first taught me how to handle a gun was my father. A veteran of the Special Operations Task Force himself, my old man had been my boyhood hero. After retiring from active duty, he had taken a post coaching a competitive marksmanship team, and from the time I was old enough to hold a stock, he had drilled every last nuance of ballistics and shooting mechanics into my bones. Later, after I enlisted at eighteen and arrogantly assumed I was already a finished product, the man who shattered my pride and forced my second great leap forward was none other than Ji Gyu-hwa.

“Steady. Keep your composure.”

To Lieutenant Ji, of course, those words had probably been nothing more than a routine, mechanical command over the net.

Suddenly, an operation from several months prior flashed vividly across my mind. While our assault element was locked in a close-quarters firefight below, Park Chan and I had scaled the adjacent high ground to provide sniper overwatch.

“—Alpha 2-4, this is 0-7. Report status on Alpha 2-1.”

Had Park Chan not taken a high-caliber round straight through his right shoulder during the exchange, I never would have touched the primary sniper rifle.

“0-7, Alpha 2-1 is…”

Flat on his back behind the parapet, Park Chan gasped raggedly up at me, dark blood welling through the torn fabric of his uniform. There was at least one enemy marksman entrenched across the sector; the supersonic crack of incoming rounds snapping past the concrete was unmistakable. Seizing Park Chan by his drag handle, I hauled him out of the exposed line of fire.

“Alpha 2-1 is hit—primary sniper is out of action,” I keyed into my mic. “Requesting instructions. Over.”

“—Copy. Alpha 2-4, what is your current status?”

“Relocating to secondary cover in the rear.”

“—Alpha 2-4, prepare to assume sniper duties.”

My bloodied hands froze mid-wrap over Park Chan’s shoulder dressing.

“—Reposition to the primary firing nest and report when set.”

“Copy,” I breathed.

Hoisting the groaning Park Chan under one arm, I scrambled toward the secondary vantage point, my thoughts churning violently the entire way. Ji Gyu-hwa was putting me on the long gun because he knew the ground team couldn’t advance an inch until the enemy sniper was neutralized. It wasn’t my lieutenant’s tactical judgment I doubted—it was my own hands. Sure, nobody passed selection for the Special Operations Task Force without top-tier rifle scores, but dedicated counter-sniping in a live kill zone was a different beast altogether. There was a reason designated marksmen trained separately from assaulters.

Reaching the new nest, I settled the heavy rifle onto its bipod and keyed my mic to report ready. Beside me, Park Chan—pale as chalk as he swapped roles to act as my spotter—gave a tight nod. I ran my tongue over bone-dry lips and dragged air into my lungs.

“—Alpha 2-4, can you make a rapid egress immediately after taking the shot?”

“Affirmative. Route is clear.”

My pulse, hammering from the sprint across the roof, refused to settle. I forced myself to take slow, measured breaths, fighting to bring my heart rate down manually. True confidence meant knowing the exact borders of your own capability—and Park Chan, one of the sharpest long-range shooters in the entire battalion, had just been picked off by the bastard across the street. Cold self-doubt collided violently in my skull with the military doctrine drilled into my marrow: What you feel doesn’t matter. Execute the mission.

My breathing rasped loud inside my headset. My heartbeat thudded against my eardrums, slow and deafening, like a sledgehammer striking iron. Hooked inside the trigger guard, my index finger felt cast from solid lead, dragging my wrist and shoulder down toward the concrete. Gravity seemed to double its pull on every joint in my body as dread coiled tight around my throat.

“—Alpha 2-4, this is 0-7. Send traffic.”

What yanked me out of that bottomless spiral was Ji Gyu-hwa’s crisp, glacial voice.

“Reading you loud and clear, 0-7. Send.”