Chapter 126 - Be on Time! (1)

“First things first,” Yun said the next day, when I came out for my usual physical training. “Don't be late for the exam.”

“Doesn't that go without saying?”

I wasn't so scatterbrained that I'd turn up late for an exam. Had I really come across as that clueless? But Yun wasn't saying this for no reason. He was an extremely efficient man who never wasted words.

Which meant there was more to it.

“You have to get to the exam site on your own. It won't be an easy place to reach. And once the exam is underway, training officers aren't allowed to intervene in any way.”

“Yes. I expected as much.”

“It won't be at headquarters. They announce the location a week in advance, but people still turn up late sometimes.”

Seriously...?

Yun looked at my stunned face and said coldly, “If you're late, you're out. No matter the reason.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don't be late even if your parents die.”

“My parents are already dead.”

“You can swim, right?”

I nodded. Though I was a little worried I might be rusty, since I hadn't swum in nearly a year.

My training officer must have had the same thought. Instead of picking up a gun, he dragged me to the pool at headquarters and threw me in. Suddenly finding myself swimming, I splashed around in the chlorinated water.

“Warmed up yet?”

After I'd had the pool all to myself for about an hour, Yun came over, still wearing his windbreaker.

I lifted my head out of the water and blinked. I'd warmed up an hour ago, before getting in.

I gave him a puzzled look and nodded. He jerked his head for me to get out.

“Then let's go.”

“Sorry? Where?”

“The sea.”

What?

“The swimming test is in the sea.”

Ah.

That wasn't surprising. What surprised me was his suggestion that we go right now. Was it somewhere we could just head off to without any planning? For that matter, this was the first I'd heard of there being any sea within Center Core. I'd thought it was situated on a vast continent.

“If you can swim this well in the sea, you won't need any separate swimming training.”

“We're leaving right now?”

“It won't take long by plane.”

Oh, so we were taking a domestic flight.

Would the tickets come out of the organizational budget? Did that mean lunch would be an in-flight meal?

With all those questions in mind, I silently followed Yun's instructions. I'd learned long ago that if I simply went along with him, things would take care of themselves.

I trotted along after him.

And it wasn't long before I was reminded that my training officer had been adopted into a family of business magnates.

Yun... chartered a plane.

“A chartered plane just to see if I can swim in the sea...”

“If your swimming isn't up to scratch, we'll get a room nearby.”

His voice made it clear that he meant to get this over with in one go.

“You've swum in the sea before, haven't you?”

My swimming proved satisfactory.

Satisfied with my skills, my training officer hauled me back to headquarters. We arrived around sunset, and after making me complete my quota of shooting practice, he promptly let me go.

He seemed pleased that his workload had shrunk considerably.

“Swimming's out of the way. Shall we get climbing out of the way tomorrow? You can climb too, right?”

“You mean rock climbing? I'm reasonably good at that. There were cliffs everywhere where I used to live.”

“Good. What about climbing buildings?”

“Buildings?”

Was building climbing a thing?

I blinked in puzzlement, and the next day, Yun gave me a detailed explanation. It was illegal for civilians to climb buildings, but Badgers needed to know how. Apparently, they often had to scale old buildings outside the core.

After that perfectly reasonable explanation, he abruptly held out some safety gear.

Then he calmly ordered, “Climb headquarters.”

“... Surely you don't mean the building we're in right now?”

“Getting approval to use another building is too much trouble.”

He was utterly shameless.

“I've got permission. Start after lunch.”

Was this normal...?

But since he had permission, there was nothing I could say. Another day or two of practice wouldn't change anything anyway. So I had lunch with Tom, who happened to be back at headquarters. (“Are you climbing headquarters too, by any chance?” “No. What are you talking about, Hilde?”) Then I put on the safety gear and began scaling the building on a side where the sun wasn't too harsh.

I felt bad for the people working inside.

I began climbing with some misgivings.

Once I actually got going, though, there wasn't much room for other thoughts. I scaled the building's smooth glass facade in something close to a trance.

Until someone flung a window open.

“Living life to the fullest, aren't you?”

It was Riccardo.

“To think it was you hanging off the windows... For a second, I thought the creature alarm was broken.”

“Hey, you little shit. You scared the hell out of me.”

Ro was there too.

With my arm hooked over the windowsill, I looked at Riccardo, who watched me in amusement, and Ro, who was laughing and stretching a hand out to snap pictures of me.

Their hair fluttered in the wind.

“Feeling better about life again?”

Riccardo smiled, his long eyes curving into narrow crescents.

I gave a crisp salute.

“Yes, sir. All thanks to you. Salute, salute.”

“Still as cheeky as ever...”

“What are you doing, anyway?”

True to form, Ro was late getting around to that question.

I flashed a V sign at the barrage of camera flashes and answered, “Practicing for the climbing test.”

“Huh? Test? What test? Why are you taking a test?”

“My promotion exam.”

“Oh, that thing the rookies take?”

Honestly, I was surprised he even knew the promotion exam existed. Riccardo must have felt the same way, because he chimed in with an impressed “Ohhh.”

Ro ignored both our reactions.

“But why are you climbing this?”

“Because my training officer told me to.”

“Yeah?”

Apparently, he'd lost interest now.

“Well, keep at it.”

I did as he said and got back to climbing. With Riccardo's amused gaze on me, I went up and up. Along the way, people opened windows here and there to watch. Most were strangers. Office workers poked their heads out and waved at me.

I stopped now and then to return their greetings.

Why was this thing so tall, though?

There was a reason Yun had told me to use the bathroom before I started climbing. The building was annoyingly tall.

The wind swirling around the building was starting to pick up, too.

Good thing I'd dressed warmly.

I slipped back into a trance as I climbed, until a window on one of the upper floors flew open.

“Oh.”

I found myself face-to-face with the wide-eyed commander-in-chief.

“Commander.”

Yehyeon seemed genuinely startled. His already large eyes widened as he stared at me, frozen in the act of opening the window.

He seemed too surprised to speak. Behind him, his brown-haired aide's face popped into view.

“Um, I'm preparing for my promotion exam.”

I offered an awkward explanation to Yehyeon, who seemed to have forgotten even to blink.

“I was told we had permission...”

Yehyeon didn't take his eyes off me for a while. Then his aide said, “Commander, the report's arrived,” and he turned his head as though coming to his senses.

After a brief glance into the office, he turned back to me.

“The climbing test?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Isn't this a little too high?”

I tipped my head back and looked up. Blue sky and a building stretching into it. There wasn't as much building left as I'd expected. I'd come a long way. A little farther and I'd be on the roof.

The place with the helipad marking. Where I'd gone after drinking and gotten a thorough dressing-down from my seniors.

I brushed away the white hair blowing across my eyes and nodded.

“I'm fine.”

Yehyeon looked me over appraisingly. Apparently deciding I was all right, he began slowly closing the window.

“Be careful.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“And don't worry too much about the exam.”

My superior's husky voice drifted through the closing window.

“As long as you make it to the exam in one piece, you'll pass.”

People greeted me three more times before I reached the roof. Once I got there, Yun gave me a perfunctory round of applause, too.

And that took care of climbing.

* * *

“As for airborne training,” Yun explained after I finished shooting practice, “we send you to a military unit for that.”

Send us out?

Could a Badger with an enhanced body train with a regular military unit? I gave him a questioning look. That seemed to call for further explanation.

But Yun offered none.

“You'll go with your fellow recruits for this.”

He meant Heshy and Tom.

“Go spend three weeks cooped up on a military base.”

Three weeks?

We'd gotten climbing and swimming training out of the way in a day each, but now I had to spend three whole weeks on airborne training? It made no sense. We were already in the military. I didn't understand why we had to go to another unit.

But once again, there was no explanation. Yun briefly told me when the training started and how to get there, then disappeared.

So I peppered my fellow recruits with questions. Heshy, whose father was in the military, explained everything in detail.

“Airborne training normally takes three weeks.”

He'd already completed the course several years ago and earned the badge awarded only to those who passed.

He didn't need the training, then. But since Black Badger rookies routinely went through the course, he would be taking it again.

Assuring us it would be more fun than we expected, Heshy taught Tom and me a military song.

“... A military song...”

“You just need to make four safe jumps.”

His eyes shone as he watched Tom and me mumbling the song we'd never expected to learn.

“Let's just hope we're not one of those unlucky intakes that has to jump from a balloon all four times! You jump from a balloon, a plane, or a helicopter, but if the weather's bad, it's straight to the balloon. No exceptions.”

And so we were dragged off to the military.

Karl and Angela saw us off as we left for the base.

Yun didn't come to see me off. Very much like him. It wasn't until Heshy and Tom consoled me, saying I must feel let down, that I even realized a send-off was something people expected.

I'd have been creeped out if he'd actually come.

At any rate, off to the military I went, powerless to stop it.

“Keep the balls of your feet and your knees together!”

They put us through the wringer at the base.

“Bunny hops! Call out ‘Feet, knees’ as you go!”

“Feet, knees!”

“Feet, knees!”

I started to miss Choi Yun.

“What kind of volume do you call that?”

“Feet! Knees!”

“Feet! Knees!”

I'd graduated from this sort of thing when I was young...

But there was no way out. No way to contact the outside world, either. (The bastards had confiscated our phones.) Thank goodness I was training with my fellow recruits. At least after training, the three of us could relax together in our shipping-container barracks.

Ah. The time I spent with Tom and Heshy was simply enjoyable.

Enough to make me forget my situation for a while.

“No walking!”

Probably because we were in a strange place where we had to run in formation every time we went to the outdoor toilets.

There was even a chant we had to shout.

“Airborne, infiltration! Airborne, infiltration!”

“Not loud enough!”

At least let us go to the bathroom in peace...

But even those seemingly endless three weeks of training were soon over. In the final week, we got up before dawn and lined up on the parade ground. Breathing in the blue-tinged predawn air, we strapped parachutes to our backs and headed for the jump site.

We stared at the sky and waited endlessly for our turns, then jumped.

Over that week, we made four jumps. Three from a balloon. One from a plane.

“Ugh, I missed out on the Chinook again!”

Heshy couldn't stop lamenting the fact that he hadn't gotten to ride a helicopter.

“I wanted to jump from a helicopter!”

I was a little disappointed myself.

Still, the training ended without incident. Three weeks after leaving, we trudged back to headquarters in military uniforms, waving miserably at Karl, Angela, Iho, and Shu, who were waiting for us.

They smirked at the way we'd gotten into the habit of walking in step.

And so, amid teasing about how three weeks had turned us into soldiers, we finished preparing for the airborne test as well.

One training requirement after another, dealt with.

Those days piled up, and before I knew it, exam week had arrived.

* * *

Exam day.

The day Heshy, Tom, and I now awaited with bated breath.

The day before it, I'd finished training and was walking to the grocery store to buy something for dinner, my hands stuffed into my windbreaker pockets.

I breathed in the cool evening air as I walked, mentally running through the coming exam. I went over the shooting mistakes Yun had pointed out to me again and again.

So absorbed was I that I never noticed.

Someone had come up to me.

A handkerchief pressed hard over my mouth and nose.

My last thought was that it smelled bizarre. Then my memory cut out.