"After the mission on the train, it took us a while to decode the USB."
Hyuk had finally stopped sweating so profusely now that the guest had left. Every few seconds he pushed his glasses back up the flat bridge of his nose, then straightened the stack of reports in his hands as if that could calm his nerves.
"Horus will brief you on the technical details of how the data was extracted and what we found," he said. "What matters right now is the name we found in it: Valentin König. He goes by Valentin Ryokakku these days."
He cleared his throat before continuing.
"He was a rather special member of the Russian Communist Party's inner circle. We're not entirely sure what his exact role was, but he had far too much influence for an outsider. You know how the Russians are about their heritage, for a German to hold that much power among them? Unusual, to say the least."
He paused, wiping each palm on his trousers in slow, anxious strokes.
"However, sometime around 2001, the man vanished completely off the grid, no trace at all. Only recently, thanks to information hidden inside the USB, we discovered his marriage to a Japanese woman, apparently an heiress of a powerful yakuza bloodline: Ryokakku Rei."
"A match made in hell," I muttered.
Hyuk ignored me, adjusting his glasses again.
"The yakuza have been dormant for quite some time. Their minor activities don't usually spill beyond Japan's borders. But this marriage could change that, and the involvement of a figure once considered central to the communist movement makes it all the more dangerous."
He stopped speaking for a moment and looked at me over the rim of his glasses.
"Cronos, the man you met earlier, is after something called The Eye of the Tiger. We don't have much information yet, but it appears to be a gem of König's own creation."
"So we're killing two birds with one stone," I said dryly. "We keep König from upsetting the current balance of power, and we promise this 'Cronos' bastard his jewel in exchange for temporary peace with the communists. This damn agency never fails to amaze me."
A bitter laugh slipped out before I could stop it.
Hyuk didn't reply. He closed his short briefing with a loud cough, muffled behind the same handkerchief he carried everywhere. Then he gestured silently toward the door. I didn't need directions; I already knew the routine.
Whenever a new assignment came in, there were three stops before deployment.
First, Cybersecurity, where they buried me in endless stacks of documents about the target. Then Strategy, where they outlined a base infiltration plan. And finally, Arsenal, my personal favorite and Horus's domain.
Each division was on a separate floor, one beneath the other, and the real headache wasn't the paperwork, it was tracking down the handler assigned to guide me. They changed with every mission. The only constant was Horus. It was easier that way since we always ended up together, no matter what.
By the time I'd finished running circles all afternoon, I finally had the full mission dossier.
And that's when I saw it, the target environment.
A school.
Never in my life had I imagined my next "assignment" would involve attending one.
Training young operatives was an expensive burden so the company handled both education and conditioning at once. The system was far more advanced than anything you'd find in a normal school: rigorous schedules that left barely enough time to sleep, instructors who seemed to take pride in their cruelty, endless drills.
I'd been one of those students once.
So seeing a real school on my mission brief felt… distant. Like an old dream I used to have when I was too tired to keep living the company's cycle of exhaustion.
The objective this time was simple, at least on paper.
My age matched that of an ordinary student, making infiltration easier. The plan was to approach König's children, who were in their second year of high school, and get close enough to their family to uncover his current connections. Whether the kids had any link to König's past was unclear. I'd be going in blind.
My new identity read almost like a half-truth:l
[ Name: Baek Junseo
Age: 17
Origin: Gimpo, South Korea — born November 11th, 2001
Background: Only child, parents divorced and living separately in Seoul.
Profile: Former basketball team captain and student council vice president during middle school.
Cover: Exchange student living with a Japanese relative (an undercover agent from our Tokyo branch who would handle school-related calls and play guardian if necessary).
Languages: English, Japanese, Korean, French.
Academic standing: Advanced. ]
After reading the file, I couldn't help rubbing my temple in resignation.
I could already picture Horus's grin when he found out, he'd be teasing me about this until the day I died.