My Younger Sister is Terrifying in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department
One month of strangely enjoyable training camp life had finally come to an end.
On graduation day, my younger sister mercifully refrained from saying anything about my underwear. Instead, she stood behind our parents and made a finger heart at me. I pretended not to notice.
I had assumed I would be sent straight to my unit. That was the usual route, after all.
But that wasn’t what happened.
I was assigned to the Armed Forces Medical School in Yuseong-gu, Daejeon.
Even though I had enlisted as a conscript, I was lucky enough to be placed as a medic.
According to the instructor, from now on medics would only be recruited through the volunteer system. In other words, I was the last person to become a medic through conscription.
It really was a stroke of luck.
If I had gone in as a combat soldier, I would have been carrying a rifle, hiking up mountains, standing guard, and doing endless marches. Just imagining it was horrifying. But a medic?
I didn’t know the details, but surely it meant no marches and just treating patients indoors, right? It felt like winning the lottery.
At the Armed Forces Medical School, we had to undergo what they called “latter-stage training.”
There was still no civilian phone access and no personal phones allowed, but the environment itself was far better than basic training.
The barracks were modern and clean, with single beds instead of bunks, and each of us even had our own locker.
What impressed me most was the wake-up call.
In basic training, we had to leap out of bed at the sound of a bugle that felt like it would tear our eardrums apart.
Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ra-ba-ba-ra-ba-ba-bam.
Even now, just hearing that melody makes my heart drop reflexively.
But here it was different.
On the first morning, what came out of the speakers was a girl group song from a few years ago.
♫~
……What?
I doubted my own ears at first. This was still the military, right?
When I looked around, everyone else was getting up with equally bewildered expressions.
Was the military allowed to be this easy?
That question only grew as training continued.
Medic training consisted of things like hemostasis, emergency first aid, and CPR.
Since it was all new to me, I paid attention, but nothing was physically demanding. There were no marches, no drill training, no marksmanship training.
Moreover, they said failure was impossible. The system guaranteed everyone would graduate.
Even if you failed the test, you could retake it. Fail again, retake it again. They would keep teaching you until you passed.
This was the military?
It was nothing like the image I had in my head.
Another month passed without incident. Once latter-stage training ended, I finally received my unit assignment.
On the last day of training, I boarded the bus heading to my new base.
The destination was Pocheon, Gyeonggi-do.
It was a place I had never visited in my life. Honestly, I had barely even heard the name before.
Pocheon? Where was that? Somewhere near Seoul?
I rested my head against the bus window and looked outside.
At first, the scenery was familiar. Apartment complexes lined up along the highway, signs for big-box stores, buildings under construction.
But as time passed, the landscape changed.
The apartments disappeared, replaced by rice paddies and fields.
The stores vanished, replaced by greenhouses.
The high-rises gave way to mountains.
Even though it was still Gyeonggi Province, geographically it felt almost like Gangwon-do.
Outside the window, all I could see were mountains, mountains, and more mountains.
The mountains in March, winter not yet fully gone, still showed nothing but bare branches.
The occasional villages we passed were small and quiet. Every time the bus drove by, one or two dogs would bark.
I had no idea what the local specialties were or what the area was famous for.
Oh, Pocheon makgeolli? I thought I had heard of that somewhere. Or maybe not.
Either way, it was meaningless information since I couldn’t drink in the military.
The bus kept driving deeper and deeper.
The roads narrowed, streetlights grew sparse, and signs of people became rare.
Only then did it truly sink in that this was the middle of nowhere.
After driving for who knows how long, we turned onto a dark mountain road and I finally saw barbed wire in the distance.
The bus stopped briefly in front of the guard post. After inspection, it started moving again.
8th Division military base.
The iron gate opened and the bus drove inside.
Outside the window, I could see drab green buildings, rows of barracks, and a wide parade ground that looked like a school athletic field.
This was where I would spend the next year and a half.
Staring at the scenery outside, I let out a small sigh.
Fortunately, I hadn’t been assigned to a small frontline medical office. Instead, I was sent to a fairly large medical battalion.
They said a single medical office only had one or two medics, which made the work lonely and grueling. At the medical battalion, there were dozens of us, so the workload was spread out and the atmosphere was better.
My assignment was to assist the radiology military doctor.
In simple terms, I helped take X-rays.
When patients arrived, I guided them to the imaging room, positioned them for the scan, and assisted the doctor during interpretation.
Occasionally, I was also in charge of applying gel during ultrasound exams.
At most, we saw about twenty patients a day, and most cases were simple things like suspected sprains or fractures.
After seeing a dozen or so patients in the morning, the afternoon was basically free time. The military doctor was a good person and didn’t interfere much.
Life at the unit flowed smoothly as well.
There was nothing difficult, and there wasn’t much to do.
Every day was the same routine. Wake up, morning roll call, assist with patient care, lunch, afternoon standby, dinner, end of duty.
And finally.
The phone.
Once duty hours ended, we were allowed to use our phones.
We had to install that virus-like national defense app and put a sticker over the camera lens, but it didn’t matter.
After more than two months without touching a phone during basic training and latter-stage training, the feeling when I finally held one again was indescribable. It was like finding an oasis in the desert.
As soon as I returned to the living quarters, I turned on my phone and launched an auto-battler game.
Auto-battler games, with matches lasting around thirty minutes, were perfect for killing time after duty.
So every evening I lay in bed and played nothing but auto-battler.
Of course.
The moment I turned on my phone, the notifications exploded.
847 unread messenger messages.
153 missed calls.
All from my younger sister.
A sudden, bottomless fatigue welled up inside me.
……As expected.
I had anticipated it, but seeing it in person was still absurd. How many times had she called over the past two months?
I did answer one call out of a sense of duty.
“Oppa!!!”
I thought my eardrums would burst.
“I missed you! I wanted to hear your voice so badly! I sent letters every single day, so why didn’t you reply even once? That’s so mean! Hearing your voice makes me want to cry, sob sob. When are you coming on leave, Oppa? I’ll definitely come pick you up on your first leave! And what about your underwear, Oppa? Did you wash them? I told you not to!”
……
I hung up after thirty seconds.
After that, I ignored every single call that came in. At first I felt a little guilty, but the moment I glanced at the message contents, that guilt vanished completely.
『Oppa, why aren’t you answering?』
『Oppa?』
『Oppa, you didn’t get another girl, did you? Wait, you’re in the military, so is it a guy?』
『Oppa is shy, so it’s probably fine though…』
『Oppa, answer the phone right now. Otherwise I’m coming for a visit.』
『Pocheon is only three hours from home.』
『Oppa?』
The moment I read the last message, I replied like lightning.
『Don’t come visit. I’m just busy and can’t answer, so don’t worry.』
A visit?
Just imagining it was horrifying. My sister shouting “Oppa♡” in the visiting room? What would my fellow soldiers think?
After that, we compromised on three calls a week, exactly five minutes each.
The routine became me lying in bed while Jiheon talked nonstop for five minutes, responding only with “Yeah,” “Uh-huh,” and “Okay” before hanging up.
Thinking that this would continue for over a year already gave me a headache.
That winter, my sister’s college entrance exam results came out.
She called me. Her voice was unusually subdued.
“Oppa……”
“Yeah, what’s wrong?”
“Jiheon… got rejected from Seohan University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering……”
“……”
“I didn’t get in.”
Honestly, it was the result I had expected.
Seohan University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering had a fairly high cutoff even among natural science majors. I had barely gotten in after three tries myself.
Jiheon wasn’t bad at studying, but she wasn’t in the absolute top tier either. Objectively speaking, getting in on the first try was a difficult score range.
“Yeah, you worked hard. What about your second choice?”
“……”
“Jiheon?”
“I didn’t put down a second choice.”
“……What?”
“I didn’t put down a third choice either.”
I doubted my ears.
“Hey, what are you talking about? You only applied to one school?”
“Yes.”
Her answer was far too calm.
“Anywhere that doesn’t have Oppa in it has no meaning.”
“……”
“What’s the point of going to a different school or a different major if Oppa isn’t there?”
I was at a loss for words.
Normal applicants usually mix reach, match, and safety schools when filling out their applications. It was common sense to prepare for variables.
But my sister had only applied to one place. Just one.
The school I was at. The department I was in. That was all.
“I’m going to retake the exam at twenty.”
Jiheon said it. Her voice carried determination rather than sadness.
“Next year, I’ll definitely get in. I’m going to attend the same university as Oppa.”
“……Hey, there are plenty of other good universities. You don’t have to go to Seohan……”
“I don’t want to.”
Her refusal was firm.
“If it’s not where Oppa is, it has no meaning. Jiheon is definitely going to Seohan University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.”
“……”
It sounded like a threat.
After hanging up, I sat there blankly for a long time.
Retaking the exam.
She was saying she would study for another year. As if spending that much time just to attend the same school as me was nothing at all.
As if no other path had ever existed in the first place.
What had our parents said? They probably just brushed it off with something like “Our Jiheon really knows what she wants~”
They were the type to never take her brother-complex tendencies seriously anyway.
……It left a bitter taste.
I felt guilty too. If I hadn’t been attending Seohan University, Jiheon wouldn’t have made such a reckless choice.
But at the same time, a chill ran down my spine.
I couldn’t even begin to guess how far this obsession would go.
If she got in next year, we would attend the same university. We might run into each other every day. If we were in the same department, our classes might overlap.
Right now the military was acting as a shield, but once I was discharged and returned to school……?
Just imagining it made me dizzy.
Lying on my bed in the living quarters, I stared up at the ceiling.
The thought that it was actually fortunate she had failed crossed my mind—an unfilial thought for an older brother.