"Things will never be the same again."
Gneiss Underwood never thought that he could have a shot of a normal life.
Growing up in an environment where everything defied sanity, guns and loneliness were his normal companions, if not danger and Death h...
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"I hated deceiving her—yet was happy to do it at the same time."
Number Seven
Even with his eyes trained on the dummy, he could feel their stares boring on his back. Behind the dark specs, he glanced at the sidelines. Each and every soldier in the firing range had taken notice of his absurd performance. Some completely forgot that they were supposed to look where to aim.
Exactly like he planned.
Arashi removed the empty magazine and inserted a new round of bullets. He fired continuously, hitting nothing with perfect accuracy.
"Easy there, Private," his commander, Captain Kim Joo San, shouted after he used up the entire load without landing a single hit. His ear muffler was torn out of his head. "Your posture is wrong. Shoulders too rounded. Arms too stiff. Stop trembling like a pussy. Do you hear me, Private?"
"Yes, sir."
The middle-aged man growled for him to continue. Arashi coolly reloaded his gun, unruffled by the fact that he could hear all the soldiers' rude comments, even the faintest murmurs about him.
He put the muffler back, muting the outside world. What the others didn't know was that under his mufflers, there's another set of earpieces that helped him completely tune out their voices. With his sensitive-hearing, a normal gunshot would be twenty times louder. He had his mufflers customized, but he still mentally winced whenever he pulled the trigger.
If only he could attach a silencer...
After adjusting his position, he made another pointless shot, one round after another. Captain Kim finally gave up and walked out from the training grounds, his scarred face wrinkled with frustration. He had no idea how a young Korean recruit could be that bad. Captain Kim was the assigned trainer for the new recruits for the mandatory military service of South Korea this year. In all his years in the army, he had never seen someone as pathetic as that Private... what's his name again?
He scanned the paper in front of him. He frowned as he encountered the name.
Park Lee Hyun.
Arashi made a mental calculation in his head as he did his 23rd push-up. They just finished running 50 laps in the track oval, and his Korean comrades were sweating like crazy. He wasn't bothered even a bit. When he was a lower Base in Creed a few years ago, 50 laps a day was unheard of. More like a hundred during the rare times their trainer felt compassionate.
As he pushed himself up and down, he kept his eyes glued to the small squat building sitting on the other side of the barbed fence. His real mission was infiltrating this savagely secured camp to duplicate some top secret files from the South Korean army. A number of overly ambitious officers had made plans against their neighboring countries in the North, so in order to keep the world from experiencing another meaningless war, Creed had to step forward. Again.
