Episode 2. The Deserter Enlists Again

Han Gi-jun survived, but after that night he never really lived as Han Gi-jun again.

He worked under the name Kim U-cheol in a refrigerated warehouse outside Incheon and changed rooms every time the season changed. His phones were always prepaid. He avoided any job that asked too many questions about resident registration numbers. Among the laborers he was just the quiet temporary worker who lifted more than he spoke. At night, any burst of static could wake him. Any metallic snap that sounded like a folding platform turned his skin cold.

Time still tried to trick him. What had once felt like active terror slowly became a familiar shadow that only followed him. Gi-jun mistook that for healing.

Then he heard his younger brother's name.

On a wet dawn, an old voicemail from his mother reached his prepaid number. He had cut contact for months, so he distrusted the caller ID before he trusted the sound. But when he played it, the voice was unmistakably hers: tired, hoarse, and still worrying about someone else before herself.

"Gi-jun, wherever you are, call me once. Si-yun's draft notice came. They say it's a strange unit. They keep only the best-scoring boys and send the rest somewhere else, but I don't know why that sounds so frightening."

The message ended there. Maybe the battery died. Maybe she could not keep her voice steady long enough to continue.

Si-yun was six years younger than Gi-jun. He had always been the one who could not walk past the injured. When they were children and Gi-jun carried home a pigeon with a broken leg, it was Si-yun who changed the box, mixed the medicine, and whispered to it at night. The thought of someone like that entering the 31st Conversion Readiness Battalion made Gi-jun drop the iron hook he was carrying at work.

That same night he quit the warehouse, emptied the rented room he had taken under a false name, and dug up the pair of dog tags he had hidden years earlier. One was his own. The other belonged to Park Yong-hyeon, who had dropped it in the Sorting Hall corridor on the night Squad Five vanished. Gi-jun held both tags in his palm for a long time. Surviving was not enough reason to keep pretending nothing had happened, not now that his brother stood so close to the same threshold.

The next morning he walked into a regional military police office and surrendered.

The sergeant at the front desk looked as if he had never seen a deserter arrive by choice. Gi-jun did not lie. He gave his real name, said he had deserted from the 31st Battalion, and said he had come because his younger brother had been drafted there. He expected a cell or cuffs. Instead, a lieutenant colonel emerged from the back room carrying a thin file.

"Return reassignment program."

He pushed the document across the desk.

"What you witnessed is classified. Sending an exposure-risk deserter into open court creates too many questions, so returnees are categorized as internal reassignment assets. The condition is simple. You go back through the evaluation system."

"You're sending me to the same unit?"

"You understand the system already. Higher command sees that as a useful trait. Watching whether a previous failure can be converted is part of the evaluation."

Gi-jun did not bother reading the fine print. If Si-yun had already been assigned there, then the only place Gi-jun could still choose was the same hell.

Three days later he stood before the same front gate again. The iron bars, the cameras, the slope behind the compound, even the direction of the wind felt unchanged. The difference was him. On the first day he had still believed rules were meant to protect people. Now he knew rules could also be built to erase them.

When Si-yun saw him in the barracks, all the color drained from his face.

"Hyung... you're alive?"

There was more anger than relief in the words, and Gi-jun understood why. After he ran, the family had probably received only a disappearance notice and silence. Si-yun needed time before he could accept his brother as something other than a ghost.

"I'll explain later," Gi-jun said quietly. "For now, just listen to me. Last place here is not a punishment."

At first Si-yun scoffed. "Are you still trapped in some army nightmare?"

But Gi-jun did not smile, and that alone made his brother's mouth harden.

On the surface, the test system looked the same as before. Laser rifles. Beacon runs. Flag recovery. But now Gi-jun could see the logic hiding behind the ranking board. The wrist band issued to returnees carried limited maintenance permissions, and every night in the service corridors he caught glimpses of the scoring backend. The visible categories were accuracy and speed. The hidden ones were obedience latency, resource wastage tolerance, casualty abandonment allowance.

It was not a system for training soldiers. It was a system for selecting which soldiers were cheap enough to keep.

One night in the maintenance room, Gi-jun opened a file that made even his fear pause.

[APTITUDE REALLOCATION EFFICIENCY PLAN]
- elite retention target: top 22%
- auxiliary transfer target: 18%
- nonrecoverable attrition allowance: bottom 60%
- hall throughput optimization: Q3 target +14%

At first he could not even translate the bureaucracy into human meaning. The file never used words like execution or disposal. It preferred recoverability, attrition allowance, throughput. But the numbers pointed to only one end. At the bottom sat a signature he knew too well.

Major Jeong Min-seok.

That evening, Si-yun's squad came last in the final drill.

The reason was so perfectly Si-yun that it made the result unbearable. During the destination breakthrough, a recruit from another squad twisted his ankle. Si-yun broke formation to help carry him. The system counted it not as cooperation but as delay. The moment the board marked Squad Seven as last place, Gi-jun felt his heart go cold in the same old way.

At the end of the corridor, a new order appeared on the notice board.

[Squad 7 / 05:10 / Move to Sorting Hall]

Below it, in smaller text:

Submit final religious rite requests in advance.

Si-yun did not look at his brother in front of the others. He refused to give them the spectacle of fear. But just before lights-out, he spoke through clenched teeth.

"If what you said is true, then what are we supposed to do?"

Gi-jun could not answer immediately. Desertion had taught him how to survive alone. It had never taught him how to save anyone else. But this time he could not run. He would not watch his brother stand in the same line.

He took out the two dog tags hidden beneath his bedding and pressed one into Si-yun's hand.

"This time I'm not stopping at escape."

Si-yun looked at him then, fear and anger mixed together but not extinguished.

"Then what are you going to do?"

Gi-jun looked up at the emergency speaker in the barracks ceiling. If that system could be forced to talk to the world beyond the camp even once, the doors of the Sorting Hall would never close quietly again.

"Before dawn," he said, "we turn the score sheet over."