Second Day
For any person, a change in their surroundings meant stress.
A shift in environment was synonymous with the demand to adapt, and the more abrupt that process, the greater the stress it inflicted in equal measure.
There were people who thrived on rapid change, but most simply wanted a life not so different from the one they'd known before. Because it was predictable. Controllable. Something you could prepare for.
Which meant, put the other way around, that a change arriving without warning — unpredictable, uncontrollable, and utterly unprepared for — was never a welcome thing.
"…."
And so on the day I came back, I simply lay buried in my room, incapable of thinking anything at all.
All I could do was strip off my gear, shove it into a corner, and spend the entire night half-awake, drowning in thought. Had I returned home, or had I simply been thrown here? I affirmed and denied that idea a thousand times over, along with countless other thoughts that crowded in beside it.
It was only when a bodily need I could no longer hold back finally forced my hand that I lifted my face from between my knees and staggered, step by unsteady step, toward the bathroom.
That was the first time I used the toilet and the shower since coming back.
And so the second day began.
There wasn't much to it. Specifically, the shower led straight into twelve straight hours of deep sleep. I woke around five in the afternoon.
I was starving enough to die, so I dragged myself upright, forcibly shoved aside the negative thoughts seeping up through the haze of sleep, and ransacked the house until I found a few packs of ramyeon.
That was the first meal I ate after returning.
Once I'd finished eating, the things I needed to do rose naturally into my mind. I'd been buried under negative emotion, but as a few basic needs were met, those obligations surfaced like bubbles rising through water.
There was a lot that had to be done. And so I started tearing through the house.
To find out what had happened here while I was gone.
For reasons I couldn't name, a faint residue of memory in the back of my mind seemed to insist that I had to.
Living in modern society required money.
And after my body had been twisted into this shape, that need had only grown sharper — compounded further by a completely wrecked physical fuel efficiency that started screaming for food after barely a day without eating.
Until human beings fully shed their human nature, there was no escaping the shadow of hunger and sleep. So the moment things settled enough to allow it, the first thing I did was run every identity check I could manage.
From the small matter of what my current legal identity looked like, all the way to how much money I actually had.
There were plenty of banks on the market. But since my old memories hadn't been completely wiped clean, it was only natural that my hands went first to the bank my former self had used.
The name had changed. The photo had changed. But fortunately, the Icarus Gear still allowed identity verification, so I was even able to secure my altered resident registration number.
Still, more than the proof that a version of me existed in this world, what actually made me happy was the fact that there was money in my account.
"…A million won."
It wasn't a bad amount for securing a little short-term breathing room, but it wasn't nearly enough to sit at home and live off for any real stretch of time, either.
A brief flicker of curiosity remained — what exactly had I done to scrape this much together? — but I had a feeling I might never find out, so I shut that thought down almost immediately.
How I was going to earn money going forward was a mild concern, but given that the Icarus Gear had come across with me, a solution wouldn't be long in coming.
───riiip!
At any rate, the first thing I did with that money was buy groceries.
Meal kits that didn't take much effort — soup dishes, mostly, the kind you could eat easily and for a long time. I ordered them by the box. Since they were coming from a nearby store, they arrived within an hour or two.
I tore the tape off the boxes, set aside a few packs to cook right away, and shoved the rest into the refrigerator.
A sensation at once utterly familiar and completely alien. Not long ago I'd been cutting across a power plant. Now I was relearning the act of consumption from scratch.
It felt so strange it almost hurt.
I missed my teammates.
It might be a little late to mention this, but this house was honestly a bit much for one person living alone. That said, the clothing, the furniture, and everything else had a distinctly unified look to them, so it didn't seem like two or more people had been living here either.
Just what had the old me — the me of this place, I mean — been doing with his life?
I took the time to search the house thoroughly, but there wasn't so much as a photo album.
Not knowing my own past. It was almost funny.
While I ate, I sorted through the things I needed to do.
First priority: hide every single thing I'd brought with me when I crossed over. Stashing them in the house was out of the question. This wasn't America — who the hell kept guns hidden in their apartment?
But I couldn't bring myself to go out today. It was a little embarrassing to admit, but I was mentally exhausted.
The ID cards in the house had already given me a decent idea that this world wasn't the one I remembered. Even so, accepting a delivery while a thigh-thick tail swayed behind me carried its own considerable psychological weight.
My old seniors would have laughed themselves sick if they'd seen it… but the fact that the delivery driver didn't so much as glance at me strangely for taking a package with my tail swishing only drove home, all the harder, that this was not the world I knew.
"Ugh…."
In the end, I finished the dishes in short order and collapsed with nothing particular to do.
The old saying called sloth a sin, but looked at another way, maybe that was only because it made people so thoroughly useless. Put differently: body and mind, both at ease.
The computer had been running calculations for hours already — my desperate thrashing attempt to somehow drag over the money I'd earned in the previous world. If it worked, financial problems would stop hounding me for good.
Time moved fast. Look away for even a moment and it was already far ahead of you.
I wanted to say something grander, but the plain truth was that it was pitch black outside. It was already midnight. I'd slept the entire day away and only just gotten up, so of course it was.
Wake up, eat, mess around on the computer, eat again, sleep. Pure, undiluted sloth. Textbook, even. If there were a professor in charge of laziness, I'd have earned an A+.
Watching most of the day vanish did leave me a little regretful.
But looked at another way — or rather, if I allowed myself a little self-justification — I was going to be busy starting tomorrow. So this was, in a sense, rest.
Special forces operators tended to go completely off the rails when they had downtime, precisely because they performed so well in the field — and this, too, was a step toward preparing for tomorrow. I hadn't even been back that long. No need to get impatient.
Still, I couldn't do absolutely nothing. And in moments like these, tearing through the house one more time was about the best option available.
───click!
The wardrobe opened with a bright, cheerful sound. Unlike the other places, I hadn't looked in here yet.
But surprisingly, it held a few of the things I needed most.
"…."
Two travel carriers.
I had no idea why they'd been stashed in here… but one thing was certain: I'd just saved some money.
I might not be able to take every last piece of auxiliary gear, but I needed to pack as much as would fit. I started disassembling the firearms I'd shoved into the corner of the room.
They were caked in stone-dust fragments, grime, and powder residue, so cleaning them meant going through several towels out of necessity — and even then, the job wasn't complete.
…I would have liked to leave them in the house. But this wasn't America. It was an apartment in Korea.
And if I left them sitting around too long… just looking at them would bring the longing for the past, for my seniors, flooding back. So I swallowed my tears and closed the bags.
Before I knew it, the clock had pushed past two in the morning.
I still didn't have a clear schedule. Frankly, I hadn't managed anything resembling a proper routine since coming back. Which was another way of saying it was about time I fixed that.
I packed the disassembled parts and equipment into the carriers as tightly as they would go, zipped them shut, and gave them a careful test-roll. They didn't seem to impede movement much.
I washed the filth from my hands in the bathroom sink.
Black powder residue and concrete dust rinsed away under the soap. Dark water vanished down the gap in the basin. Flowing off as if it were nothing at all.
I might never get another chance to wash my hands for a reason like this. Maybe, in some quiet way… I was already beginning to part with the past, little by little.
I'd only been back two days, and yet the thought struck me all the same.
And that was… no. It was far too painful to bear.
───click.
I turned off the lights, and darkness settled over the house.
Maybe the ceiling lights had been too bright, because I'd almost forgotten that this hour belonged to the dark. Even after sleeping twelve straight hours and waking up, the moment I lay down and pulled the blanket over myself, drowsiness began to creep in.
It was quiet.
Across the way, the neon signs and panels of the shopping strip — lights that would never go out — pushed their glow through the veranda window, locked in a quiet contest with the dark.
Before sleep took me, I looked up at the ceiling.
Pitch-black darkness. It occurred to me that it looked a lot like my future — a future where I had no idea what was coming. But then again, when had I ever known?
Just another meaningless negative feeling. In the end, as always, tomorrow's business could only be known tomorrow.
"…I don't know."
I wondered if it was all right for me — someone who'd been torn so suddenly from the past — to simply lie here like this. But holding back the tide of sleep was hard.
I pushed the concrete worries aside. It was time to meet tomorrow.
And so my second day came to its end.
Together with the longing for the seniors who had been my second family.