Passion Novel - Volume 2 - Chapter 29

They called that Saturday morning the crocodile’s tears.

Having been relentlessly tormented by work day and night all week long—forced to stay sharp and tense even outside of regular hours—they couldn’t rest even on the weekend.

Usually, they had free time to go out from Friday evening until Sunday evening, but that Saturday, they couldn’t even step outside the designated area without permission, let alone go out. It was because training was scheduled again from Saturday afternoon.

They were at least allowed to rest that Saturday morning to conserve some energy, but those who had been relentlessly overworked until Friday night gritted their teeth at the instructor’s seemingly benevolent words, “Rest in the morning and gather in the afternoon.”

“If training starts in the afternoon, shouldn’t we pretend to make a mistake during training and then just grab the instructors by the neck and tear them apart?”

“To tear apart an instructor’s neck, you’d have to deal with the adjutant following behind them too… Just one of them would be overwhelming enough, are you confident you can handle both at once?”

“That’s true. Then shall we form a team? I’ll take the instructor, you take the adjutant.”

“Shall we? Which instructor shall we target?”

“Why, the European bastards’ instructor, of course!”

The men, who were sprawled out on mattresses in the free sparring room instead of exercising, were passing the time with such trivial chatter.

Three hours were left until the assembly time. In two hours, they’d have to assemble; only one more hour of comfort remained. Amidst those who groaned with each glance at the clock, Jeong Taeui sat huddled with his knees drawn to his chest.

He would have rather sprawled comfortably in his room, reading a book or solving puzzles—a habit he’d picked up while living with Moro—even if just for a few hours, but he was stuck here because Tou had dragged him along.

Thinking that similar conversations were probably going on among the European branch members sitting a good distance away, Jeong Taeui looked at them one by one with deeply dubious eyes.

As Jeong Taeui quietly sighed, Wienho, who was lying down next to him and tossing and turning, asked what was wrong. Jeong Taeui said, “Hmm,” seriously.

“It just occurred to me. People outside think of UNHRDO as an organization filled with incredibly talented individuals, but these guys are UNHRDO branch members… Carlo over there, scratching his crotch with his hand in his trunks, or Tou, who’s been fidgeting since morning because he ran out of cigarettes and looks like an opium addict, or Ching, that hardcore fan—they call guys like that ‘ppadori’ in our country—who still clutches Maeyamfang’s picture every night, sobbing about why she left him behind to die… If outsiders knew, they’d be appalled.”

“Yeah… Listening to you, it does seem a bit serious, our branch.”

“But seeing that the other side isn’t any better makes me feel a little relieved.”

Jeong Taeui nodded his head toward a group of European branch members clustered on the opposite wall. They were making just as unsightly a scene. Some were playing the flasher game, others were startled awake by someone stepping on them in the flasher getup and ended up punching the wrong person, and in one corner, there were even guys fiddling with Hwatu cards—not even playing cards—that they’d somehow obtained.

He recalled what his uncle had said before, that once he got out of here, he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a job. Rather, he’d be 고민ing which place to choose.

To deceive so many companies and pass off such humans as talented individuals for money, this was truly a fraudulent group… Jeong Taeui stared at them with cold eyes before turning his head away.

But thinking about it, these guys were still better. Even if they were a bit shocking, from the employer’s perspective, they were successful as long as they didn’t cause any major problems and did their assigned work well. The problem was producing guys whom the employer couldn’t control and who had serious personality issues.

For example…

Jeong Taeui tried to recall something for a moment but quickly shook his head. He almost thought about a human being who was never good to think about. If he kept thinking about such a guy, he would become gloomy.

“Ah—resting time is almost over. I should probably head out soon. The time to get my ass kicked again is approaching. Ugh, damn it, if I could just have a smoke before going out, things would go so much smoother.”

The future opium addict plopped down next to Jeong Taeui, pacing anxiously. Jeong Taeui looked at Tou pitifully, who, lacking a cigarette, was chewing on a matchstick instead.

“Does chewing on that give you a bit of a cigarette taste?”

“Do you think it would? Ugh… just one cigarette, no, I wouldn’t even ask for that much, just a butt someone left behind would be fine. Just one puff.”

If he mentioned now that he had thrown away the cigarette he’d snatched from Tou earlier without properly smoking it, leaving it as a long butt, he would surely be beaten to death. A feeling of guilt surged within him.

“Are there any European branch guys who have cigarettes? Hey, if you happen to notice any European branch guy smelling like cigarettes during training, let me know later. I’ll just grab him and shake him down for cigarettes.”

He could almost see the structure of how extortion and threats occurred within the branch. Jeong Taeui stared at Tou with cold eyes before turning his head away. He should probably buy him some nicotine-free cigarettes later.

Jeong Taeui scratched his head and looked at the time. It wasn’t long until 1 PM, the assembly time. He tilted his head from side to side to loosen his neck, asking no one in particular,

“By the way, is it really okay to pretend to make a mistake during training and then take down an instructor?”

“Well, it’s basically an indiscriminate sparring. Come to think of it, it’s your first time, isn’t it? The rules are simple. If you grab them, you just beat them up. Of course, if you get caught, you just get beaten up. If you don’t want to get hit, you figure out how to shake them off and run away. The time is divided into two halves, with the chaser and the chased switching. The chased must only defend. An attack is only allowed to shake off the attacking team and escape. That’s it. However, because the rules are so simple, accidents happen a lot. Actually, the clause that counterattacking is possible to shake off an attack and escape, if you think about it, means it’s okay to counterattack the guy attacking me. So, it’s only a matter of time before it turns into a chaotic free-for-all.”

“What is that? Then can’t I just hide in a corner until time runs out?”

“If you hide and get caught, you’ll most likely get ganged up on. It’s better to just run. Well, if you’re confident you can hide properly, you can hide, but the space is limited.”

Jeong Taeui stared at Tou, who was answering him, in disbelief. He didn’t know if that incredibly ignorant thing was really training, but the expressions of Tou and the others were quite serious.

“No joke, you better be careful. If you take it lightly, something really big could happen.”

Carlo, who was lying down a little ways away, muttered. Jeong Taeui glanced back at him.

He seemed to understand what they meant. Surely, as they said, if the rules were simple, the game was bound to become dangerous. Moreover, the rules themselves sounded incredibly perilous. Either run away unconditionally, or catch the one running away and beat them up unconditionally.

“Then if you can’t shake them off and fail to escape, you could get beaten to death.”

Jeong Taeui clicked his tongue and muttered. It was half a joke, but Ching nodded with a solemn face.

“If you’re unlucky, yeah. And if you get hit in a bad spot, you could just go. Hmm… and in your case, you have to be even more careful. You unfortunately incurred the grudge of the worst kind of guy.”

“…….”

He seemed to know who that bad guy was without asking. It was the man who had said just yesterday that he wasn’t in the mood to fight with him, but you never knew. His mood might have changed today. That man seemed to live quite according to his whims.

“There are often guys who take this opportunity to do nasty things to those they usually don’t like, so you have to be careful. And even though I doubt it would happen among us, sometimes even teammates take this chance to settle old scores. It’s quite brutal.”

As Ching clicked his tongue and spoke, Alta next to him replied with sparkling eyes, “On the other hand, if there’s someone you usually hate, this is your chance to get them back.” Jeong Taeui briefly offered a silent prayer for that unknown person Alta held a grudge against.

It had been almost a week since training started, but he still couldn’t quite grasp this brutal and heinous atmosphere. People were being carried out injured every day due to large and small accidents. Some had already died. On this small island, things that defied common sense were happening nonchalantly.

“I have to get out of here somehow in six months, or I’ll really become strange.”

Jeong Taeui sighed and muttered to himself. That was what he had to fear most in this situation. No matter how unfamiliar the situation, people would naturally become accustomed to it over time. It would happen before they even realized they were gradually being assimilated into that situation.

Everything had its pros and cons, and this place surely had its merits, but the cons were of a very bad quality.

“You don’t seem to get it, but let me tell you, that video we saw during the combat practical analysis before the joint training started? That was an edited version of the weekend training.”

Tou said from beside him. Jeong Taeui murmured, “What video…?” before his face hardened.

That was it. The scattered red marks left in that video. He couldn’t forget that vivid and intense color.

“Killing people so casually, is that the training we’re going to do now? It feels a bit ridiculous to even call it training.”

As Jeong Taeui clicked his tongue and muttered, Tou shrugged.

“It’s not like that. That was because that guy was crazy, and even if I hated someone who wasn’t actually the enemy who killed my parents, I wouldn’t beat them to death. Sometimes people die in accidents, but there’s hardly ever a case of deliberately killing someone. The point is to avoid meeting a crazy guy.”

Hearing Tou’s words, Jeong Taeui was half convinced. Indeed, usually, no matter how much you dislike someone, you wouldn’t think of killing them unless it was a very extreme situation. Even without having experienced it, it was because they instinctively knew the weight of murder.

…Thinking about it that way, just how terrifying a grudge did that guy accumulate for people to be rushing at him in droves, willing to risk their own lives to kill him?

Jeong Taeui’s mouth felt bitter. Well, as you live, there might appear someone you want to kill even if it means throwing away everything you have. A life without that would be a happy life, though.

“Hey, it’s time. Shall we go?”

“Ah, yeah. Let’s meet again alive.”

As Carlo got up and spoke first, the other men also rose from their spots and replied.

Jeong Taeui wanted to stay put as he felt utterly hopeless about the hell that awaited him if he got up and went out, but Tou grabbed his wrist and pulled him up, so he had no choice but to get up, practically being dragged along.

***

“Hyung, please be careful. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Jeong Taeui took out the message on his pager and looked at it again. It had arrived this morning at dawn.

After returning to his room last night, he couldn’t fall asleep, so he called Xinlu past midnight. He had worried about waking him if he was sleeping, but thankfully, Xinlu answered the phone with his usual voice.

Actually, he didn’t have anything particular to say. After a brief and unpleasant conversation—though it was more of a one-sided communication—with Ilay, he had simply become anxious. However, that didn’t mean he could pour out all his worries to Xinlu and say, “Don’t go near that guy if he approaches you. You must only look at me.”

Come to think of it, he hadn’t said anything to Xinlu yet. Not “I like you,” nor anything beyond that.

Tou had once chided him, saying his actions were so obvious they made onlookers awkward, and Xinlu was surprisingly perceptive in some ways, so he didn’t think Xinlu wouldn’t know, but on the surface, he hadn’t said anything.

Jeong Taeui hesitated, holding the receiver.

Should he tell him now? That he liked him? But it wasn’t something to say over the phone, and after brushing against Ilay like that, saying it right away felt like he wasn’t conveying his feelings with his own pure intention.

“By the way, that person from earlier, are they a close friend of yours, hyung?”

He was just uttering ambiguous words, not knowing what exactly to say, when suddenly Xinlu asked about Ilay from the other end of the line. Jeong Taeui, who had deliberately avoided mentioning Ilay, flinched for a moment but soon answered honestly.

“No, not really. We happened to become acquainted, but… he’s a dangerous guy to get close to.”

So, if that guy happens to come near you or is seen around, try to stay out of sight as much as possible, Jeong Taeui continued indirectly. But somehow, Xinlu seemed to be listening absentmindedly. It was as if his mind was elsewhere.

A subtly uneasy feeling arose. Jeong Taeui himself knew the source of this anxiety. He didn’t want to admit it, but it was a fear of loss. The fear that Xinlu might leave him.

That faint and vague unease was not dispelled, and the call ended. Jeong Taeui looked at the receiver with complicated feelings before pulling the blanket over himself.

After sleeping for a long time, he woke up to a message at dawn. A warning to be careful.

Seeing that short sentence, Jeong Taeui felt better. Xinlu must have been worried about him, knowing about the training starting this afternoon. The fact that there was someone who worried about him sometimes became a greater support for his heart than he expected.

“Thank you,” he sent back a short reply and put the pager in his pocket. He would then take it out whenever he had a moment, feeling a pleasant sense of reassurance. Of course, it didn’t actually help much in reality.

“This is ridiculous, they’re charging at me like a pack of dogs, it feels like I’m the one being chased.”

Jeong Taeui grumbled, retying his shoelaces, which had come undone again without him noticing. Earlier, the laces kept coming undone, so he had untied them completely and tied them carefully from the beginning, but as he was crouching in the middle of the hallway doing so, a guy from the same branch, running around the corner, mistook Jeong Taeui for a European branch member and yelled, “Aha! Found you!” and took a stance to punch him, so Jeong Taeui kicked his ankle.

Even after the guy, who had fallen down, realized his mistake and apologized before disappearing, similar things happened a couple more times.

“Everyone seems crazy… I must have somehow landed on the wrong planet without realizing it.”

Jeong Taeui quietly lamented. He could frequently hear shouts of “Found you!” or “Stop right there, you bastard!” from a distance.

Even though they were teammates, seeing such behavior made him honestly think they were all crazy. It was like some kind of human hunt, and he couldn’t understand the purpose of the training itself.

“I have a feeling this isn’t physical training, but rather training to ruin your personality…”

Jeong Taeui twirled the baton in his hand—it was made of rubber, but it hurt enough to knock you out if you got hit properly—and walked slowly. Since the roles would change every hour anyway, it seemed better to conserve his energy for the next hour. Even if Jeong Taeui didn’t intend to grab and beat anyone with his baton, that didn’t guarantee that the others would pretend not to see him.

“In an hour, I’ll probably have to run like crazy… I wonder if there’s anywhere to hide.”

Jeong Taeui had been scanning the inside of the branch building from top to bottom for a while now. Even though the Asian branch was currently in the chasing position, that would reverse in an hour, so he wanted to find a place to hide beforehand for that time.

However, there didn’t seem to be any such place. He could go anywhere within the branch building that people usually frequented, but he couldn’t enter any door leading to a dead-end space. He had to just keep running in the hallways. Exceptionally, he could enter places with two or more entrances—like large lecture halls or sparring rooms.

Large spaces with two or more entrances were as good as open, so he couldn’t hide there, and the same went for the hallways. In the hallways, which were complexly intertwined enough to seem like a maze to a newcomer, there was a high chance of encountering enemies or allies every time he turned a corner, so everyone had to run with constant tension.

“Damn it. I wondered why they needed such an unnecessarily large, seven-story, 2,000-pyeong building for just over a hundred people, but it was for this kind of uselessly extreme training.”

“The budget waste is no joke either,” Jeong Taeui grumbled, surveying potential hiding spots as he went up one floor at a time from the 6th basement level. (The 7th basement level was Eoryeong, so no one could enter it in the first place, except for those who had severely violated the rules and were being punished and confined.)

Even though the building was so large and complex, the restriction of not being able to enter any dead-end rooms made it difficult to find a suitable hiding place.

“Can’t I just tear open the ceiling and hide inside? Ugh, at this rate, time will run out. Tsk. If I don’t run my ass off for an hour, I’ll get beaten to a pulp. Even if I insist I didn’t hit any of you… it won’t work, will it?”

Thinking that if he got beaten up while being chased for an hour, he might be running around swinging a club with fire in his eyes to beat those guys in the next hour, Jeong Taeui went up the stairs.

He passed the 6th basement level where the men’s quarters were, the 5th basement level equipped with facilities to spend most of their free time, the 4th basement level where a sign reading “No Entry Except for a Few Authorized Personnel” was posted on the locked door, preventing anyone from entering, and went through the 3rd and 2nd basement levels used for regular schedules, and the 1st basement level where the guards and adjutants stayed and handled their work. Above that was the ground floor located under the decaying and collapsing roof.

Actually, it might be more accurate to see it not as chasing and being chased, but as free sparring in a large area. It was just a difference in the order of attacking first or later; in the end, you could receive any fight that came your way, so it was close to indiscriminate free sparring.

“Hmm, at this rate, time will just pass without any clever response… Well, I have no choice. For now, I’ll just have to run for the next hour.”

Jeong Taeui sighed and went into the restroom to prepare for the next hour. Sometimes, guys would awkwardly hide in the restroom, turning it into a scene of fierce fighting. The restroom Jeong Taeui entered also showed signs of a recent fight; one side of the wall tiles, which had been fine until this morning, was completely broken off. The building repair costs later on would be considerable.

There were two or three men inside the restroom. They were from the Asian branch, in a different team from Jeong Taeui, so he hadn’t spoken to them, but he recognized their faces. When Jeong Taeui opened the restroom door and entered, they all stared at him with fierce eyes, but upon realizing he was from the same branch, they relaxed again and continued their conversation.

“…Yeah. Today’s the only day.”

“I’ll somehow drive that bastard over there, so we can finish him off inside.”

Everywhere I go, it’s the same damn thing. I’m no white heron, but even for a flock of crows like this, it’s rare. How many human butchers, desperate to hunt humans, did I see today?

What Jeong Taeui disliked was having his judgment clouded by the group atmosphere, regardless of his own reason or experience. He didn’t feel inclined to go along with those who raised their voices in the society surrounding him, without deep consideration or thought.

However, he soon changed his mind. He couldn’t speak carelessly about other people’s affairs. He couldn’t be sure that none of their close friends had been killed or crippled by those guys on the other side. Jeong Taeui didn’t deny grudges with legitimate reasons. Besides, he had no right to act like a saint. When his own pent-up anger over several years finally exploded and he beat up Staff Sergeant Kim, his mind had gone blank, and he had really beaten him without holding back. Looking back now, it was a miracle he hadn’t killed him.

What could that hateful bastard be doing now? But that was also a kind of bond, and having not seen him for a while, he was curious. Maybe he had developed a strange sort of attachment. …Though, if he saw him again, he would be utterly horrified.

Jeong Taeui went into a toilet stall and sat down. He didn’t need to relieve himself, but he just wanted to sit for a while. He could go down to the 6th basement level and sit on one of the sofas placed throughout the hallway, but if he did, he would inevitably encounter those guys busily running around and swinging their batons, and if he was unlucky, he might get caught up in it and find himself floundering among them.

“If I can see that bastard get hurt, I’m willing to risk a certain amount of danger. No, I’m okay with getting hurt that much myself. I really want to see what kind of face he’ll make when he screams, what kind of face he’ll make when he’s in pain.”

“He always has that ice-cold, indifferent face, like nothing ever happens, so I want to see if there’s really blood flowing beneath that mask. That unlucky European bastard.”

Outside the toilet stall where Jeong Taeui was sitting, those guys were still talking without leaving. Involuntarily listening to their conversation—though they were talking knowing Jeong Taeui was there, so he didn’t consider it eavesdropping—Jeong Taeui once again felt the deep chasm between the Asian branch and the European branch.