The Final Mission and a New Beginning
The once-noisy classroom fell completely silent.
“Alright, attention. We have a new transfer student starting today. Want to introduce yourself?”
When the teacher asked, Yeon-woo nodded.
“Hello, everyone. I’m Ryu Yeon-woo, transferred from Seoul. Looking forward to getting along with you all.”
Whoa!
A transfer student was always interesting material. Even in an all-boys class, the interest ran hot.
“Whoa! Fuck. He’s handsome.”
There was still a bit of baby fat on his face, but at the high-school level his looks landed just fine.
“Hey! Woo Seong-sik. What kind of language is that in front of the homeroom teacher?”
Sitting in the very front row, Seong-sik had blurted the curse without thinking and got his ear twisted first thing in the morning, yelping in protest.
“This kid, putting on an act? I barely even touched it.”
Morning assembly ended soon after, and between every break the barrage of questions from his classmates carried them straight to lunchtime.
For Yeon-woo, who in his past life had worked every kind of field operation including black ops, winning over the hearts of energetic eighteen-year-old students was child’s play.
“Yeon-woo, how have you never played LoL? Did you live on a mountain instead of Seoul?”
“I can start now. After school let’s hit a PC café and you can teach me, Jun-su.”
The only games Yeon-woo had ever played as a child were spinning tops and ddakji; of course he had never touched video games.
Meanwhile, in a conference room swallowed by darkness, a man waited to deliver his report.
Creak—
The unoiled door opened with an ominous scream of metal, and another man stepped inside.
The waiting man rose from his seat and bowed with perfect formality.
A man with fierce eyes and a savage cast to his face looked down at the bowed head and opened his heavy mouth.
“How many times do I have to tell you…”
The metallic, spine-chilling voice that scraped from his throat made the reporting man’s body tremble lightly.
Click—
“Why do you always turn the lights off? Keep it bright, will you? What are we, some dark organization?”
The moment the lights came on, the sinister atmosphere vanished and an ordinary office came into view.
“I’m saying, why are you sitting in the dark playing shadowy mastermind?”
“I’m sorry.”
The fierce-looking man shrugged as if the whole thing were hopeless, walked to his own chair, and dropped into it.
“Speak. Report.”
“We’ve completely incinerated the two previous cases we handled.”
The man nodded at the report.
The subordinate continued without pause.
“Because we handled them in secret, the pushback was severe. We’ll need to keep our heads down for a while.”
Still nodding, the man opened a drawer, took out a pressure ball, and spoke again in that metallic voice.
“Lately my digestion’s been off, so I need to work the pressure points like this. If something’s blocked, you stimulate it until it opens and everything circulates again. Isn’t that why we’re here?”
The man delivering the report silently bowed his head at the words of the man in the seat of honor.
“Still, for that much, Jeon Su-hwan did a lot of hard work. You sent him off comfortably, right?”
“Yes. Sniper round to the head…”
“Hey now, it’s almost mealtime. Let’s not talk about cruel things that ruin the appetite.”
Cutting the report short, he rolled the pressure ball between his fingers.
“All of this is unavoidable for the greater good. That guy just had bad luck.”
In the weeks that followed, Yeon-woo grew quite close to his classmates. With the exceptional memory of his agent days, he approached every student in the same grade—boys and girls alike—calling them by name first and treating them like old friends.
As promised, he also went to a PC café with Jun-su and played games together.
Despite his superb reflexes, Yeon-woo was hopeless at gaming; he died on a continuous loop and spent the entire match staring at nothing but the gray death screen.
Friends started dropping by his house, and seeing how thoroughly Yeon-woo had changed, his parents and little sister finally looked relieved.
“Yeon-woo, let’s hit karaoke.”
On the way home from school, Woo Seong-sik and Kim Jun-su casually draped their arms over Yeon-woo’s shoulders.
“Karaoke? What’s that?”
“What? Did you seriously live on a mountain instead of Seoul?”
Seong-sik and Jun-su both wore identical dumbfounded expressions.
Yeon-woo had never cared about singing, and by the time coin karaoke rooms became common he was already working the overseas division.
After Jun-su’s brief explanation, Yeon-woo’s face lit with understanding.
“Ah, I’ve seen it in dramas.”
“Anyway, let’s go. How about it?”
At Seong-sik’s words Yeon-woo stroked his chin.
In my past life I was tone-deaf, but maybe not in this one.
In his previous life as Jeon Su-hwan he had been competent across nearly every field, yet his singing had been so catastrophic that he had always avoided it.
“Hmm. All right, let’s go.”
“See? That’s why I like Yeon-woo—he never backs out when we suggest something.”
“Yeon-woo, not backing out is great, but from now on, no matter who asks you to sing, just refuse first.”
“Pfft.”
It was the first real taste of frustration he had felt since reincarnating.
Jun-su shook his head with deadly seriousness while Seong-sik clamped a hand over his mouth and desperately slapped his own thigh.
“So singing doesn’t work even after reincarnation.”
“Yeah. This is the one thing reincarnation can’t fix.”
No—that wasn’t right. He had already reincarnated.
Swallowing the rest of the words, Yeon-woo hung his head.
Regardless, the next song started and his friends began to sing.
Time passed; the final track ended.
Throughout it all Yeon-woo had been nothing more than a clapping robot.
“But why are you staring so hard at the emergency map?”
Seong-sik asked on the way out.
Yeon-woo was studying the fire-evacuation diagram posted inside the karaoke room with laser focus; Seong-sik had never seen anyone examine one so carefully.
I’ve never seen anyone look at that so intently.
“Occupational hazard.”
“Your job is being a student, though?”
“Um… right.”
Time flowed on and midterms arrived in a rush.
Solving them with pure common sense is pretty tough, but I’m glad I studied in the gaps.
Ryu Yeon-woo was a former agent armed with a razor-sharp mind and broad social knowledge, yet the curriculum was different and he could not simply walk through every subject without preparation.
He studied quite diligently and still missed three questions.
In his past life he had been strong enough academically to enter Hankuk University, so the result was more or less what he had expected; the school, however, lost its mind.
“This is a real balance break.”
“That face, that physique, and grades on top of it? Whoa, the transfer student is insane.”
Friends stared at him with exhausted expressions.
“Hey, is there anything you can’t do?”
During lunch or PE, Yeon-woo flew around both the soccer pitch and the basketball court.
When the question came from behind him, Kim Jun-su answered in his place.
“This bastard is perfect at everything—except singing…”
Pfft—
As if the traumatic memory had just resurfaced, Woo Seong-sik sprayed the water he was drinking.
Naturally Yeon-woo’s grades left his parents’ mouths permanently stuck to their ears.
His cute little sister So-hyun, however, grumbled that if he suddenly raised their parents’ standards like this, what was she supposed to do.
“Hoo. I need to finish this properly before it’s too late.”
A little over four months had already passed since Yeon-woo reincarnated, yet he decided that today was the day he would carry out the one task he felt he absolutely had to complete.
In this life he intended to chase the dream of becoming an actor that he had never been able to pursue before.
To do that, he needed to sever every remaining link to the past—starting from inside his own heart.
In his previous life, Jeon Su-hwan had been dispatched to the Middle East after intelligence suggested illegal arms trafficking that might involve the North; his mission was to seize the information.
Together with an agent sent later as reinforcement, he had finally grasped a thread of the truth, yet he died before he could report it to headquarters, leaving a stubborn unease lodged in one corner of his mind.
Today was the day he would dissolve that unease and thoroughly settle the past.
For reasons he could not name, the feeling that he simply had to do this kept rising.
As a field operative he had learned never to ignore that instinct; every time he had, something worth regretting followed.
Yeon-woo had prepared with meticulous care so that this newly granted life would not be damaged by the previous one.
If one refused to accept the impossible fact of reincarnation, no connection to the past life could even exist—yet certainty was still better.
Through prior reconnaissance he had mapped the geography; using the CCTV patterns he had catalogued while roaming with school friends—futsal, coin karaoke, every hangout spot—he plotted his route.
The destination was an old public phone booth in a neighborhood far from his home.
First Yeon-woo rummaged through his father’s drawers and gathered clothes of completely different styles.
Mixing them with his own, he assembled several complete outfits and collected every bag in the house into one place.
He started with his father’s largest hiking pack; inside it he placed a smaller bag that already held a change of clothes.
Then he nested yet another, still smaller bag containing another outfit inside that one—like a Russian matryoshka doll of bags and clothes—and left the house.
The fully loaded hiking pack felt as heavy as full combat gear.
From there he crossed the mountain behind his house—the same trail he always used for exercise—choosing paths with the fewest cameras, and entered a different neighborhood.
Inside a shabby public apartment complex he had scouted earlier, he pulled out the next bag.
“Hmm… this one…”
In the empty hallway he changed clothes in seconds, stuffed the discarded outfit into the hiking pack, and hid the pack carefully in a corner of the stairwell that led to the rooftop.
Then, carrying the second bag and wearing an entirely different set of clothes and a hat, he emerged looking nothing like the person who had entered.
In this second guise he moved to the neighboring district along a route that avoided cameras as much as possible.
Arriving at the dilapidated commercial building he had previously selected, Yeon-woo climbed to the third floor.
Standing in front of a long-closed, failed tailor shop, he changed again exactly as before.
This time he wrapped a hiking mask around his face and pulled on a sun cap, making even his age impossible to guess.
He repeated the process several more times, altering his gait as well, weaving an ever more complicated trail until, hours later, he finally stood before the public phone that was his true target.
A fifteen-minute bus ride would have brought him here; instead the journey had taken several hours.
Right now he was performing the role of a stooped old man in shabby clothes, mask and hat pulled low.
Yeon-woo slipped on disposable sanitary gloves and fed a fingerprint-free coin into the public phone.
Then he dialed a complex sequence that included the pound and star keys.
The call connected almost at once, and an ordinary customer-service voice came through the receiver.
— This is the service company. How may I help you?
“Product number 478-54221. Category is Yun Dong-ju’s New Path.”
Yeon-woo delivered the operation code and passphrase in a thickly modulated, completely flat voice.
A few seconds of silence followed, and then the mechanical tone of an automated response began to speak.