What Do You Want Me to Do?
What did he want him to do?
The moment the director's sign rang out, Yoon Jay became Captain Jin Young-do. The set awash in green no longer interfered with his immersion.
Jin Young-do, rigid with military discipline, led his men on a sweep near the ruined Antarctic base. Their mission was to extract the researchers still inside the science station and carry them back to the helicopter.
"...Captain."
"Hold."
Jin Young-do and his squad had been left behind in Antarctica to assess the situation in detail and report back. There was no way this was the work of human hands. When an uneasy soldier called out to him, Jin Young-do raised his clenched fist to the side of his face.
At his hand signal, the men swallowed hard and lowered their rifles to a ready position. Jin Young-do had no notable lines, but there was a gravitas in the way he moved that grounded the scene. Even the bit players cast as his squad members found themselves falling into it.
"Th-that thing..."
A staff member with a green puppet perched on his head appeared before the men, who had been surveying the situation under mounting tension.
The extras had all been chosen for their acting experience, but few of them were used to a set like this one, rigged for CG compositing.
"Hold formation."
They kept their stances, but immersion had flown out the window. At Yoon Jay's single low word, however, the extras snapped back to attention and trained their eyes forward.
Incredible...
The truth was, the director had been planning to cut and reshoot midway through. Instead, he watched in fascination as a single cold sentence from Yoon Jay restored order to the ranks. The extras whose focus had slipped now looked as though they were freezing up at their first real encounter with the monster.
He really is Jin Young-do.
It made sense. This situation was no longer unfamiliar to Yoon Jay. Years of rotating through deployments had seeped into the atmosphere around him, making him feel like a genuine soldier. The extras — most of them veterans of mandatory service — felt their bodies tighten on instinct.
Where Yoon Jay and his squad saw the strange creature, they saw something else entirely: the terrorists who had tried to abduct them.
As Jin Young-do, he gritted his teeth. What now? And at that moment, the enemy moved first.
"Aaagh!"
"No!"
It lasted only an instant, but at the agonized expression Yoon Jay wore as he watched a squad member dragged away by the creature, the director swallowed a laugh that threatened to escape.
That's it. Exactly that.
Jin Young-do was a blunt, standoffish superior, but a man of deep affection who thought of his squad as family. That involuntary flash of emotion was what made it feel real.
During rehearsal it had felt all wrong, and the director had worried — but once the cameras rolled, it was different. A former soldier through and through, he wasted nothing, not even the smallest motion.
Now I see why that CEO kept recommending him.
Set in the near future, the prop rifle in his hands belonged more to the world of video games than to reality — yet he calibrated his body's recoil to match, firing the thing as though it were a genuine weapon of tomorrow.
The staff pulled the wires already rigged to his upper body. Some actors, hoisted suddenly into the air, flailed like landed fish; watching him hold his posture steady, one could only conclude his core strength was considerable. And that was without ever having attended an action school.
"Hah... hah..."
Jin Young-do, having fought and killed the monster alone, collapsed to his knees on the spot.
The battle had ended mere moments ago, and his breathing came ragged — but his expression was hollow and desolate, the look of a man who could not believe everyone else was dead.
"..."
He turned his head slowly, surveying the four directions. He had killed the monster, but everyone else was gone.
He let out a heavy, suffocating breath. There were no lines. The vacant look on his face and the sound of that breath alone were enough to show the grief flooding in as reality registered, far too late.
"Cut! Beautiful!"
"Well, that's a clean start to the day."
The director wore a satisfied expression as he called the cut, then folded his arms and waited for the man who always took the seat beside him. But no matter how long he waited, Yoon Jay didn't come.
"Hah... haah..."
The extras who had played the squad members drifted over, sensing something strange, and gathered around Yoon Jay as he panted for breath. The disciplined atmosphere that had held them in line while the cameras turned had dissolved entirely.
"Um, are you all right?"
"Hah..."
"Jay? Are you okay?"
Yoon Jay had one hand pressed over his face, head bowed. An assistant director sensing that something was off shot to his feet.
"Jay!"
"...I'm fine."
At last Yoon Jay rose heavily from his seat and wiped his face with a dry hand. His expression was as calm as if nothing had happened, but the cold sweat that had already soaked through could not be hidden.
That was dangerous.
He patted the shoulder of Han Jin-woo, who had trailed after him in a fuss, and reassured him. Kwon Min-jae and Baek Da-eun, watching from a distance, studied him closely as well.
Im Sang-woo, Kwon Min-jae's manager, hadn't exactly been sitting idle all this time. He'd haunted the police station so often he'd won over the officer in charge, begging on his knees — please, just do something about my actor.
When Im Sang-woo clung to him so desperately, the officer — who had grown genuinely fond of him over the weeks — began to feel sheepish. It wasn't as if they were deliberately ignoring the case; there were simply more urgent ones piling up... Though honestly, wasn't this the sort of thing celebrities were used to?
The manager scrubbing through the CCTV footage let out a shout. The officer, too, caught the outline of a figure reflected in the deeply tinted window of a car and gave a hollow, disbelieving laugh.
Height somewhere around mid-one-seventies, a solid build... So Im Sang-woo had been right — it really was a man?
Im Sang-woo didn't believe a word of it. How many weeks had it been of this runaround now? He chewed his gum slowly, working it between his teeth.
Not one of them is worth trusting.
Im Sang-woo had managed Kwon Min-jae since his teenage years; the actor was practically family to him.
But the agency people just said there was a film to shoot, leave it to the police — and the police had their eyes on other cases and wouldn't even glance at his boy...
Still, thank God for that man, I suppose.
Im Sang-woo looked over at Yoon Jay, who was lying on the bed.
"Ready, action!"
The instant the director's sign fell, the man's eyes snapped open on the bed, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Hah...!"
The man's bare torso was drenched in sweat. Nor was that all — scars showed all over his body.
He wiped his face dry, then looked down at his own palms. His hands were trembling.
He seized a pull-up bar to exercise the thoughts away. A service scene for the audience, of course.
"...What brings you here?"
"Captain Jin. It's been a while — are you really not going to let me in?"
Then someone knocked at his front door. It was Brigadier General Wee, played by Choo Young-mi. Jin Young-do stared at the general's shameless face. A simple exchange of glances, and yet it felt like open combat.
The first to ease off was Jin Young-do. He let out a sigh and stepped aside, clearing the way for the general to enter.
"Still living like a hermit, I see."
"Can I offer you anything?"
Captain Jin Young-do opened a refrigerator containing nothing but water and liquor and showed it to the general. Strangely, the appliance was unplugged, serving no function at all.
"No ice, I take it?"
Jin Young-do looked at the general with an expression that seemed genuinely to be asking. Because of his final mission — because of what had happened at the Antarctic base — he hated the cold now, and hated anything cold.
"When they handed you the truth for the sake of the nation and threw you away, that was fine. And now you come to pick it back up?"
"We're in something of a hurry."
"How convenient for you."
The two men held their breathing in perfect sync the entire time, easing off and tightening again, keeping the tension coiled. Even in this situation, it made you feel something could go wrong at any second.
Brigadier General Wee had read the reports on Jin Young-do cover to cover. The man kept walking straight down the shortest road toward death.
"Captain Jin. What number is this — waking up in the emergency room? Doesn't it ever get tiresome?"
As he said it, the general's eyes drifted to the pistol laid on the table, and to the marks where something had been bound to the exposed steel beams of the ceiling. It was a device that quietly revealed what choices Jin Young-do had already made.
"Wasn't that what you wanted, General?"
"..."
"Ah."
Jin Young-do spoke with a sudden air of realization, almost playfully.
"I should have died in Antarctica back then. That would have been the perfect destruction of evidence."
"Don't say idiotic things."
"You started it, General."
The contest of wills showed no sign of ending. The two men locked eyes again, matching each other's breath — so intensely that the people watching could hardly breathe.
"Captain Jin."
"Sir."
"If you're going to die anyway, why not choose your ground properly? Instead of finishing it all alone and forgotten in some back-alley hole like this..."
In the end, Brigadier General Wee surrendered first and made his proposal — one that couldn't be refused. Don't die like this. Die on a battlefield. It was the one move that could snare a man like Jin Young-do, who had once carried genuine pride in the profession of soldiering.
"You owe it to your men to protect their honor."
If he was going to die anyway, let him die like a soldier.
Their gazes crossed once more. But this time, it didn't steal the breath from the room.
"Cut!"
Choo Young-mi broke into a wide grin. She liked this blue-chip junior who didn't yield an inch in a contest of presence.
"Oof, kid, I thought I was going to suffocate to death."
"That's my line, senior."
"Anyway, your body really is something else."
And it wasn't just that his physique was impressive — the truth was, everyone's eyes kept drifting to the scar-covered body that needed no special-effects makeup at all. Yoon Jay had worn a thin shirt precisely to cut down on the stares that still clung to him.
"Ah — was that harassment? I'm sorry if it made you uncomfortable. I just meant..."
"Thank you for the compliment."
"I am a bit shameless, aren't I? Sorry."
He flashed her a bright smile as she scrambled to smooth things over, and put her at ease.
"Our Jae-hee is going to grow up so handsome!"
"And even when I'm grown, I won't forget you, Mom — okay?"
Choo Young-mi had been one of the people who treated him with warmth and tenderness back in the days of The Child. She was simply talkative by nature — there was no ill intent behind her words.
"You holding up?"
The seat Choo Young-mi had vacated on break was taken by Kwon Min-jae.
He looked like he was struggling.
Kwon Min-jae had asked because the image of Yoon Jay gasping for breath after the first shoot was still on his mind. It had felt similar to what he'd just witnessed — Jin Young-do wrestling with his after-effects.
But Yoon Jay assumed he was asking about the scars on his body.
"I think that's my line. Did you check the CCTV?"
"Ah."
Who was worrying about whom here? Yoon Jay gave a small shake of his head.
"Your hunch was right."
"Hmm..."
Yoon Jay pulled out a handkerchief and, taking care not to leave fingerprints, carefully unfolded the letter Kwon Min-jae had produced. A faint, unpleasant chemical stench rose from it, and Yoon Jay's brow furrowed.
"Don't tell me this is actually blood?"
Im Sang-woo, Kwon Min-jae's manager, blurted the question in horror at the page of unbroken red script. Yoon Jay didn't answer — but his grave expression was confirmation enough.
"It's escalated, hasn't it."
"Is something actually going to happen at this rate? Min-jae, should we hire a bodyguard?"
The agency should have been dealing with this aggressively from the start.
Kwon Min-jae had heard from Lee Seo-won that once the few months remaining on his contract ran out, he would be moving to Astra. That was probably part of why his current agency wasn't exactly bending over backward to resolve this.
"There's a bodyguard right here."
"A former bodyguard. Don't lean on me too hard."
"Because you're an amateur?"
"Yeah."
Kwon Min-jae sulked, but Yoon Jay was right. They were merely actors in the same production; leaning on him like this was a burden on everyone.
Meanwhile, Yoon Jay focused on the letter's contents. Your acting has improved so much. Whose influence is it? That woman doesn't belong with you. Stay away from that woman.
"A lot of mentions of a woman."
"Probably Da-eun he's talking about."
"Baek Da-eun?"
"They've been entangled for a long time. There were dating rumors a few times, too."
After Yoon Jae-hee vanished without a word, it was said that the child versions of the leads who would eventually become a couple were played almost canonically by Kwon Min-jae and Baek Da-eun.
And since the adult actors themselves seemed genuinely close, suspicion that there was something real between them had only fattened the rumors — enough for dating gossip to surface more than once.
So there was a reason she overreacted like that.
Yoon Jay recalled how hastily Baek Da-eun had backpedaled.
"What are you going to do?"
"About what?"
"You can't just keep leaning on me like this. Otherwise... it would stir things up a bit, but you could move first."
Judging by the letter's contents, whoever wrote it had been watching when Kwon Min-jae and Baek Da-eun were close together at the first shoot.
Could he have been one of the extras playing my squad members? Then pinpointing him would be hard for me too — the extras rotate constantly.
Or he might resent me, too.
Alternatively, he could have applied as a member of the staff and worked his way into this very set. Yoon Jay surveyed his surroundings, betraying nothing, letting only his eyes and a slight tilt of his head drift.
"What do you want me to do?"
"You be the bait."