Chapter 2 Part 4

The office, meeting rooms, lecture halls, sparring grounds, laboratories, dormitories, cafeteria, etc., were all supposed to be underground, yet as Jeong Chang-in entered the building, he showed no intention of going down, heading instead for a dilapidated door at the end of a wooden hallway with missing floorboards—what was inside, Jeong Tae-ui couldn’t tell.

However, sensing Jeong Tae-ui’s footsteps following him, he paused and turned around. As Jeong Tae-ui tilted his head, the door right beside him quietly opened. And from within, a young man emerged.

“Tou!”

Emerging through the open door, the young man, who had slowed his steps upon seeing Jeong Tae-ui standing right in front of him, turned his head towards Jeong Chang-in, who called out as if it was a good coincidence. Seeing Jeong Chang-in, he straightened his posture and bent only slightly at the waist.

“Are you busy?”

“No, sir. I was just about to go out for a cigarette.”

Jeong Tae-ui, nodding as he thought he understood one difference from the military, inwardly sighed as the world of the common language within the branch, English, which he could use but didn’t particularly want to, opened up. At that moment, he swallowed his sigh back as Jeong Chang-in’s index finger suddenly pointed at him.

“Take this fellow downstairs. Show him to the room Kiyomi used and help him bond with his new colleagues now that he’s arrived.”

“Ah, yes.”

The young man scratched behind his ear as if annoyed, but without further complaint, he nodded.

As soon as Jeong Chang-in finished speaking, he didn’t even look at Jeong Tae-ui, just lightly waved his hand once, opened that decrepit door, and went inside, leaving only the young man and Jeong Tae-ui in the hallway.

The young man scanned Jeong Tae-ui from head to toe, then re-entered the door he had just come out of. And he crooked his finger. Jeong Tae-ui also scanned the young man from head to toe, then followed him inside. The young man chuckled.

Inside the wooden door the young man had emerged from was an elevator. It looked like a sliding door of a crumbling, abandoned school, but it opened and closed without a sound, which was quite a fresh shock. Stepping inside, the elevator’s functionality was also impeccable.

“Is all the budget here poured into making things look older?”

Jeong Tae-ui, muttering to himself as he surveyed the interior, turned his gaze to the young man who was still looking at him.

He had the appearance of a Central Asian soldier, but judging by his tanned skin and subtly narrow bone structure, he didn’t seem to be purely Han Chinese, likely mixed with the blood of some ethnic minority.

The young man, looking at Jeong Tae-ui with curious, yet not overly expressive, eyes, tapped his chest a couple of times with his index finger and said,

“Tou. Tou Qing In.”

“…Jeong Tae-ui. You can just call me Tae-ui.”

The pronunciation was subtly different, but it seemed pointless to correct it, so Jeong Tae-ui remained silent.

“Were you transferred from another branch? Or are you a complete newcomer?”

“I’m new. It seems like members often transfer between branches.”

“It’s not that common, but not that rare either. You’re pretty disciplined for a newbie; what did you do before? You weren’t working for a corporation or anything, were you?”

“I was unemployed.”

Jeong Tae-ui answered seriously without smiling, but the young man, Tou, took it as a joke and burst out laughing.

“Well, you’re not from the Europe Branch, so it’s fine. Welcome.”

Jeong Tae-ui, shaking Tou’s outstretched hand, tilted his head slightly.

“It seems like the relationship with the Europe Branch is quite bad.”

I heard it from my uncle, but for the first thing he said to be ‘you’re not from the Europe Branch,’ well, that’s a bit much. I wonder if they’re on as bad terms as my old squad and that damned Kim So-wi’s squad.

“Quite bad? Ha, you’ll find out early next month. There’s Joint Training with the Europe Branch starting next month, so those bastards are coming here. Just so you know, if there’s one or two particularly unlucky ones, you can secretly bury them. Everyone in our branch will help you out.”

His tone was too serious to be a joke. It seems their relationship is even worse than my squad and Kim So-wi’s squad.

“I really appreciate that camaraderie.”

“Oh, we have to help each other out, right?”

Tou, laughing cheerfully, stepped out of the elevator which had stopped just then. Jeong Tae-ui followed him out. And he was a little surprised.

B5. Before his eyes, a long white hallway stretched out. The carpeted hallway, where footsteps were barely audible, was starkly different from the ground floor he had just been on. He never imagined such a clean and proper space could exist beneath that decrepit, crumbling abandoned building.

“Why, surprised?”

Tou smiled broadly, as if this wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a reaction.

“You thought it would be a damp basement infested with rats, cockroaches, and cobwebs everywhere, didn’t you?”

He hadn’t imagined anything quite that dire, but he couldn’t say it was entirely wrong either.

“Are the BOQs on this floor?”

As Jeong Tae-ui spoke, following closely behind Tou, who was striding briskly down the rather long hallway, Tou turned to him and chuckled with understanding, “Ah-ha.”

“So you were a military officer. Which branch were you in?”

“…”

“No comment? Alright. Everyone has things they don’t want to talk about. Here, it’s not called BOQ, but Male Dormitory Room. Three people to a room. But the Male Dormitory Rooms are one floor further down. Here, we have the Free Sparring Room, Library, and Multimedia Room. You can consider this floor to have most of the recreational facilities for your free time, whether you want to play, read, or watch movies.”

“I want to drop off my luggage first.”

Tou, finding Jeong Tae-ui amusing as he said that, holding only a relatively small Boston Bag, smiled broadly and practically snatched the bag from his hand.

“Really? Then I’ll carry it for you. For now, let’s build some camaraderie with the others. Hm? We’ll be going through thick and thin together in the future, shouldn’t we at least get to know each other?”

“…”

“Free time starts at 5 PM, so everyone’s probably doing their own thing right now, but most of them will be in the Free Sparring Room.”