Chapter 2. The Last Mission and a New Beginning
The noisy classroom suddenly fell silent.
"Alright, everyone, attention. We have a transfer student starting today. Introductions… hmm, do you want to do it yourself?" the teacher asked, looking at Yeon-woo.
"Hi everyone, I'm Ryu Yeon-woo, transferring from Seoul. Please take care of me."
Whoa!!
A transfer student was always an interesting topic. Even in an all-boys class, the interest was palpable.
"Whoa! Damn, he's handsome."
He still had some baby fat on his face, but even for a high schooler, his looks were striking enough to impress even other boys.
"Hey! Woo Sung-sik! What kind of language is that in front of the teacher?"
Woo Sung-sik, who had blurted out the curse without thinking from his front-row seat, found his ear pinched, yelping in mock pain.
"You're exaggerating! I barely touched you."
Homeroom ended soon after, and the barrage of questions from his classmates during break time flew by, bringing lunchtime quickly.
For Yeon-woo, who had worked in all sorts of field operations in his past life, not to mention espionage, winning over the hearts of spirited eighteen-year-olds was a piece of cake.
"Yeon-woo, how have you never played League of Legends? Did you live in the mountains instead of Seoul?"
"I can learn now. When should we go to the PC room after school, Joon-soo? You can teach me."
The only games Yeon-woo had played in his childhood were spinning tops and flipping cards. There was no way he'd have played League of Legends.
Meanwhile, in a darkened conference room, a man waited to give his report.
Creak!
The door opened with a ghastly sound like a scream, as if it hadn't been oiled, and another man entered. The waiting man stood up and bowed respectfully.
The man who entered, with a fierce impression and intense eyes, opened his mouth, his voice heavy.
"No… how many times do I have to tell you?"
The chilling voice, laced with a metallic rasp, made the waiting man's body tremble slightly.
Click!
"Why do you always turn off the lights? I told you to keep them on. What is this, some kind of secret society?"
As the lights came on, the eerie atmosphere vanished, revealing an ordinary office scene.
"Why are you playing villain in the dark?"
"I apologize."
The fierce-looking man shrugged, as if exasperated, and walked to his seat, plopping down heavily.
"Speak, Your report."
"The two previous cases have been completely incinerated."
The seated man nodded as he listened to the report.
The other man continued, "There was significant interference due to the clandestine nature of the operation. We'll need to be careful for a while."
The seated man, still nodding, opened a drawer and took out acupressure balls. He spoke again in his raspy voice.
"My digestion hasn't been good lately, so I need to do some acupressure. If there's a blockage, you have to stimulate it to open it up, so everything can circulate. Isn't that why we're here?"
At the seated man's words, the reporting man silently lowered his head.
"Still, Jeon Su-hwan worked hard. He had a peaceful departure, right?"
"Yes. A headshot…"
"Hey, it's almost dinner time. Let's not talk about gruesome things that'll ruin our appetites."
The seated man cut off the reporting man, fiddling with the acupressure balls in his hand.
"All of this is unavoidable, for the greater good. That friend was just unlucky."
Yeon-woo had become quite friendly with his classmates. With the excellent memory from his agent days, he approached his classmates, both boys and girls, calling them by their names first.
As promised, he went to the PC room with Joon-soo and played games.
Despite his excellent reflexes, Yeon-woo was terrible at gaming. He died repeatedly, staring at a gray screen for most of the game.
His friends came over to his house, and his parents and younger sister were relieved by his truly changed demeanor.
"Yeon-woo, let's go to the coin karaoke."
Woo Sung-sik and Kim Joon-soo slung their arms around Yeon-woo's shoulders on their way home from school.
"Coin karaoke? What's that?"
"Whoa. Did you seriously live in the mountains, not Seoul?"
Sung-sik and Joon-soo looked dumbfounded at Yeon-woo's question.
He hadn't been interested in singing, and by the time coin karaoke became popular, he was already working overseas.
After Joon-soo's brief explanation, Yeon-woo put on a look of understanding.
"Oh, I've seen that in dramas."
"Anyway, let's go. What do you say?"
Yeon-woo stroked his chin at Sung-sik's suggestion.
'I was tone-deaf in my past life, but maybe not this time.'
Jeon Su-hwan had been generally competent in all areas, but his singing was atrocious, so he had always avoided it.
"Hmm, alright, let's go."
"See? I told you, Yeon-woo is great because he never refuses."
"Yeon-woo, not refusing is good and all, but it would be best if you refused to sing from now on, no matter who asks."
"Pfft."
This was the first sense of defeat he'd felt since his rebirth.
Joon-soo shook his head gravely, while Sung-sik covered his mouth, desperately slapping his thigh.
"So even reincarnation can't fix my singing."
"Yeah. I don't think this can be fixed, even with reincarnation."
No, that's not it, the reincarnation part was already done.
Yeon-woo swallowed the rest of his sentence and hung his head.
Regardless, the next song started, and his friends began to sing.
Time passed, and the last song ended. During that time, Yeon-woo had been nothing more than a clapping robot.
"Why are you looking at the evacuation plan so intently?" Sung-sik asked Yeon-woo on their way out. He was curious about Yeon-woo staring so fixedly at the fire escape route map posted inside the karaoke room.
'It's the first time I've seen anyone look at that so closely.'
"Occupational hazard."
"Your occupation is being a student."
"Um… right."
Time flew by, and midterms were fast approaching.
'It's quite challenging to solve these with common sense alone, but I'm glad I studied in my spare time.'
Ryu Yeon-woo, a former agent armed with a sharp mind and broad knowledge, found the curriculum different, and it was difficult to solve everything without studying each subject.
So he studied quite a bit, but ended up missing three questions.
Even in his past life, Yeon-woo had been a good student, good enough to get into Korea University, so he had anticipated this result to some extent. But, of course, the school was in an uproar.
"This is totally unbalanced."
"That face, that physique, and now those grades? Wow, the transfer student is insane."
His friends were in awe.
"Dude, is there anything you're not good at?"
Whether it was lunchtime or PE class, Yeon-woo excelled on both the soccer field and the basketball court.
Kim Joon-soo answered Kim Jae-yong's question, who sat behind Yeon-woo, "He's perfect in every way, but his singing…"
Pfft!
As if recalling that traumatic day, Woo Sung-sik, who was drinking water next to him, spat it out.
Yeon-woo's parents were, of course, overjoyed with his grades.
However, his cute younger sister, So-hyun, grumbled, asking what she was supposed to do now that he had raised their parents' expectations so high.
"Sigh, I need to take care of this before it's too late."
A little over four months had passed since Yeon-woo's rebirth, but he decided to carry out what he considered a necessary task today.
In this life, he planned to pursue his dream of becoming an actor, a dream he couldn't achieve in his past life.
To do so, he felt the need to sever ties with his past, starting from within his heart.
In his past life, Jeon Su-hwan had been dispatched after reports of illegal arms trading in the Middle East, with intel suggesting possible North Korean involvement. He was tasked with gathering information.
He and another agent, dispatched later, had barely managed to uncover a clue, but he died before reporting back to headquarters, leaving a lingering unease in his heart.
Today was the day he would resolve that unease and definitively settle the past.
Yeon-woo had meticulously prepared to ensure that this new life wouldn't be affected by his past.
He had studied the area in advance and planned his route based on the CCTV information he had gathered while hanging out with his school friends at futsal courts, coin karaoke, and other places.
His destination was an old public phone booth in a neighborhood quite far from his home.
First, Yeon-woo rummaged through his father's drawer and prepared clothes in different styles. He combined them with his own clothes to create several outfits and gathered all the bags in the house.
He started with his father's largest hiking backpack and placed another bag containing a set of clothes inside. He continued placing smaller bags inside, one after another.
Like a Russian Matryoshka doll, he nested bags containing clothes within other bags, and then left the house.
The full hiking backpack was quite heavy, as if he were carrying a full combat load.
Yeon-woo headed towards the other neighborhood, taking a route with minimal CCTV coverage and crossing the mountain behind his house, where he often exercised.
He entered a run-down apartment building he had scouted earlier and took out another bag from his backpack.
"Hmm, this one…"
In the deserted hallway, he quickly changed his clothes, put the ones he had been wearing into the hiking backpack, and hid it well in a corner of the stairwell leading to the apartment rooftop.
Then, with the second bag and a completely different outfit, including a hat, he emerged looking different from when he entered.
In this second disguise, he moved to the next neighborhood, sticking to routes with minimal CCTV coverage.
Arriving at a dilapidated shopping center he had previously identified, Yeon-woo went up to the third floor. Standing in front of a closed-down, bankrupt tailor shop, just as he had done before, he changed into another outfit.
This time, he wore a hiking mask and a sun visor, making it difficult to guess his age.
Repeating this process several times, changing his disguise and even his gait to make his movements more complex, he finally arrived at his destination, the public phone booth, after several hours.
It was a fifteen-minute bus ride, but it took Yeon-woo hours to get there. He was currently playing the role of an elderly man with a hunched back, wearing shabby clothes, a mask, and a hat.
Wearing disposable gloves, Yeon-woo inserted coins, free of his fingerprints, into the public phone. Then he dialed a complex number including pound signs and asterisks.
The call connected, and a normal operator's voice answered.
–"Service company. How may I help you?"
"Product number 478-54221. Category: Yoon Dong-ju's New Path."
Yeon-woo spoke in a deep, modulated voice with a flat tone, reciting the operation code and password.
A few seconds of silence followed, and then an automated voice responded.