“Ugh...! Instructor, stop chasing me—!”

A man in a worn military uniform shouted with pale lips. The trainee ran up the rocky hillside until he was out of breath. He hurdled through brush, skirting moss-covered tree stumps, flashing hand signals to his teammates, but somewhere it had gone wrong—the linked operation was already busted.

The comrades who had tried to smack the instructor’s back were already out of action and captured, and they’d spilled the entire plan after being thrown into the mock jail.

Fuck...! Then I’ve got to live, at least! Only if I get through this drill will I make it to the graduation ceremony in one piece.

“Hah...! Huff...!”

The shiver running through him wasn’t just the chill in the air. The crunch of gravel closing in at arm’s length thudded right behind his back.

Glancing over, face ashen, he saw the instructor charging like a yaksha—his whole face smeared in black camo cream so only the whites of his eyes gleamed.

Fuck...! The distance he’d counted on closed fast, and the instructor swung his rifle.

Instructor Maxim laid into the trainee—smacking his back and thrashing him without mercy like he meant to shatter his ankle.

“This—level of pathetic—I’ve never seen before.”

“Urk—!”

The trainee rolled over the uneven ground and took a defensive posture. After forcing a surrender, the instructor blew the whistle hanging from his neck and called the hidden reserves out from every direction to assemble in front of him.

Young men in uniforms, baby-faced, sidled over wearing tearful grimaces. Lee Wooshin watched their faces, then kicked their shins one after another. A low, chilly foreign tongue spilled from his mouth.

“Sitting around playing friendly tag.”

The mood froze in an instant.

“Where’d you learn the habit of dropping your rifles and running? Instead of rallying the remaining men and drafting a new plan, you bolt alone?”

“I wasn’t the commander today—”

“A unit that panics and doesn’t know what to do, that sits on its hands until an order drops—on a battlefield, that’s a mass grave.”

“......”

“I’ve said it over and over: you solve contingencies on the fly, then you can press the attack with speed. The moment you lot flail around, you’re all wiped out.”

“......”

“Even if the command structure is smashed to shit, someone should have led the unit!”

With the tip of his rifle, Lee Wooshin nudged a woman wearing the armband. The woman, long black hair tied in one, was gulping for breath.

“This unit all gets marked down. And if you’ve got a conscience, take that armband off.”

Fixing her with a cold stare, he turned on his heel and ordered, “Dismissed.”

The moment the instructor left, the trainees who’d been holding themselves ramrod straight all collapsed to the ground at once.

Biting her lower lip in frustration, the woman stared for a long time at the instructor’s receding, coolly distant back.

“Because of the Instructor, we might not even get a graduation ceremony!”

The trainee whose ankle had swollen from the beating wiped his grimy face and grumbled.

The instructor named Maxim had appeared out of nowhere one day. He’d walked into the irregular Gurkha training camp—a jumble of nationalities like Pakistan, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan—and in one stroke rewrote the standards.

It wasn’t about how many sit-ups you could do anymore. He’d devised a devil of a program where you had to cross five miles of brutal terrain: water up to your chest, minefields, and zones ringed with smoke or fire.

And for weapons testing, if you couldn’t handle live fire freely with the RPG-7 anti-tank launcher, the PKT machine gun, the AK-74M automatic, and the Makarov pistol, he drilled you all night until blisters bubbled.

Overnight, the difficulty of completing training had spiked. More chilling still were the four bouts of hand-to-hand you had to fight with the instructors.

“Ah... screw this, I can’t do it...!”

But the tall, lean instructor trained even harder than the men here. His raglan-line performance top was always soaked through. Because he was a merciless instructor to himself as well, everyone went mute as a carp in front of him.

“Have you ever seen Instructor Maxim smile? You haven’t, right...! Total demon!”

“I have.”

The woman, tightening the temporary commander’s armband, spoke up.

“Sometimes he just stares fixedly at my hair.”

“......”

A sudden chill ran through the group. One of the men jeered and flicked a clod of dirt at her.

She brushed her shoulder as if it were nothing and glanced again toward where the instructor had gone.

He’s truly interesting.

For a man with a demon’s reputation, aside from the occasional lash of sharp words, he was blatantly indifferent.

One day, even when some idiot was savaging the Instructor behind his back, Maxim didn’t so much as acknowledge it and walked right past.

In a place where discipline and order were everything, wasn’t that reaction contradictory for the man who’d gutted the training standards?

So sometimes, that mineral-hard gaze provoked her. No matter how she looked, his eyes weren’t rooted here. It put a strange mean streak in her.

“He doesn’t bark at me to get out because I’m a woman who shouldn’t be training. He doesn’t discriminate. He doesn’t play favorites.”

“And so?”

“Conspicuous indifference feels like attention in reverse.”

Everyone dusted off their butts as they gathered up their helmets. Some shook their heads like they’d just heard nonsense. Then a limping teammate ripped off her armband and said,

“Sorry to rain on you. But I bet the Instructor doesn’t even know our names.”

“Hey, give that back!”

“Wanna bet, then? Winner keeps the commander’s armband.”

At the sudden proposal, eyes swung to the company’s first and second in rank. The second—her—ran her tongue over her parched mouth, thought a moment, then asked flatly,

“...What kind of bet?”

“You know that photo the Instructor always keeps in his breast pocket.”

At that, the others all went, Ah—, like they knew. It was a photo you couldn’t fail to notice.

The one and only time the constantly training, constantly building-himself instructor let his attention stray—was when he looked at “that photo.” No ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) one showed it, but everyone had wondered what it was.

“Whoever sneaks into the Instructor’s room and steals that photo—wins.”

“......!”

Those who’d been watching from the sidelines sucked in a breath—hkk.

The Gurkha mercenary units, raised in the world’s highest mountain country of Nepal, were famous worldwide.

Compared to ordinary people, they had vastly superior cardiopulmonary capacity, so many Gurkhas were physically exceptional mercenaries.

The British Army ran its own Gurkha brigades; Brunei in Southeast Asia recruited them to form the Sultan’s guard. The Indian Army and the Singapore Police were similar stories.

“Fuck....”

For the past three months, Lee Wooshin had turned up everywhere—Asia, South America, the Middle East—and now he had infiltrated a training camp in Nepal.

But it was miss, miss, and miss again....

He’d been spun in circles so long he’d lost count of how many months he’d been at this.

In the end, the Syria terror warning was fake. By the time he realized it was someone’s disinformation, the second warning message had already arrived.

Messages echoing him poured out in Owl’s voice all over. It was deepfake tech, but because the backer was unclear, counter-terror units in various countries didn’t relax their guard.

Around then, Wooshin instinctively understood this was all Kiya’s handiwork.

Like that time an audio file had come under the name “Kiya.” He was sure the man was obstructing and mocking his search for his wife, but there was nothing to do except be dragged around helplessly.

Cuba, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Chad, India, Turkey—the countries the messages pointed to were, of all things, places with many women in uniform, which made him even more uneasy. Since she had declared she would become Sonia, what if she was among them—his nerves frayed to threads.

“――”

In the worst case, she might be grabbed by some other agency, not his own hands. Misunderstanding and rashness might stack up, and they might even kill her. So Wooshin had to follow wherever the messages pointed, country to country.

Like in childhood, he rolled through civil-war zones; he hopped from battlefield to battlefield on the other side of the earth. He entered the pinned coordinates, confirmed Seoryeong hadn’t appeared, felt relief, and moved on—over and over.

Three months like that. A whole season had passed since he lost her.

The chronic migraines started; sometimes he just wanted to let go of his mind. Day by day his teeth chattered, his words dwindled. His expression grew cold enough to chill the blood, and he didn’t rest for a second.

And yet he couldn’t stop this—

Because if he ignored the boy who cried wolf, and on the third or fourth time she was suddenly there—

That one terrifying possibility kept him from stepping even a single pace outside the trap.

“If you’re not showing up in front of me, that means you’re doing well.”

It felt like proof she wasn’t being swung by Kiya and was living properly. Maybe not meeting was the safest after all.

He wanted to see her to death, but luckily she had never been found in any of the warned locations, and each time—even as pain stabbed his throat—he told himself to be grateful. Above all, what he feared most was losing his wife forever.

“Seoryeong....”

The man lived day to day unable to die. The skin that had slipped from his fingertips, the scent that made his mouth water, the voice that bored into his eardrums—

All of it was fading, little by little. Now she existed only in his head—a wife in memory. A life like a sentence.

Waking in the middle of the night, Wooshin couldn’t fall asleep again and dragged his hand down his face.

At first she’d shown up every night so sweetly he hadn’t wanted to wake, then at some point she cut her visits clean.

Eyes open, you’re not there; eyes closed, you’re not there. As that new sense of loss crashed over him, beyond aggrieved and heartsore, he simply grew angry.

Eventually, even falling back asleep became an ordeal. Desiccated longing drives a person mad. He loved her so much he felt the pain of being alive every moment.

“...Everything is my fault. So please—”

Call me like you used to.

Find me once more.

The useless prayer spread and sank, thick and heavy.