Black Badger

Lee Seunghyun’s life had been riddled with violence.

From as far back as he could remember, he was fighting. Older kids than him at the orphanage. Or the orphanage staff.

Sometimes it was a fight for food, sometimes a fight for sleep.

Sometimes it was just a fight for the sake of winning a fight.

Either way, from the moment he could remember, he’d been fighting someone.

That was the only way of life Lee Seunghyun knew.

Fortunately, it was also something he was better at than everyone else.

“That vicious little bastard.”

Even after getting beaten to hell, he’d bare his teeth and come back for more—so the people at the institution were sick of him.

“How the hell did a kid like that end up mixed in here?”

He didn’t remember much about his life before meeting Sasha.

Only that he’d thrashed around like an animal for food and warmth. It wasn’t like digging up those memories would make him happy, so he didn’t miss the way they’d blurred into a hazy fog.

The only thing he remembered clearly was the warmth he’d felt sometimes, tearing off a bit of food to give to kids smaller than him.

A faint warmth, but still....

“Huh?”

Even so, Lee Seunghyun later came to be glad that, from time to time, he’d helped those airheaded kids on a whim.

He’d been just about to decide he needed to stop getting attached to the weak ones—kids who’d fall sick, get beaten, or die for reasons even he couldn’t understand.

It was right around the time he’d decided he should shut off all interest in everything except his own safety—

That Lee Seunghyun met Sasha.

A little girl with snow-white skin and messy light-brown hair that hadn’t been properly combed.

Newly arrived at the orphanage, she had the exact kind of personality that would get her killed within a year.

“Where did my lunch go....”

The way she mumbled to herself blankly was absurd.

In this place, the luxury of eating lunch slowly wasn’t allowed.

“My bread.”

But the kid who’d come in yesterday—or maybe the day before—didn’t seem like she even recognized the atmosphere here, much less knew how to respond to it even if she did.

“My bread?”

The girl wandered around the run-down cafeteria like her life depended on it.

Unable to watch anymore, Lee Seunghyun sighed and walked over.

“Hey.”

“Huh?”

The girl turned to him, eyes widening comically.

“Your bread isn’t here.”

“Why...?”

“Someone stole it. The moment you get something, shove it in your mouth. Don’t save it for later, don’t hide it for when you think you won’t get any.”

“Stole it?”

She spoke with those bright blue eyes blown wide open.

“Who? Why?”

He gave her a look that said, Are you seriously asking something that stupid? but she just kept her mouth hanging open and then added, like the thought had only just occurred to her—

“Sometimes you don’t get any at all?”

Shock rose in her vacant-looking eyes.

“Why?”

Then she studied Seunghyun closely and asked,

“Then aren’t you hungry?”

After looking at his empty hands, she pulled her eyebrows down.

“You didn’t get any either? Should we go tell the adults you didn’t get yours?”

...This kid’s hopeless.

That was the first thing Lee Seunghyun thought when he saw Sasha.

***

A little girl who’d lived a life loved by her parents, then rolled into this rotten place.

She was too naïve, too pretty, and too quick to grow attached to people.

Lee Seunghyun realized that by the second day.

Was it because on the first day, he’d handed her bread he’d stolen from a staff member?

The next morning when he opened his eyes, the girl was looking for him.

“Oh!”

As he headed toward the entrance, she popped out from somewhere with a thud of motion.

Lee Seunghyun glanced at her briefly, then kept putting on his shoes.

But as he opened the front door to go out, she ran over without even putting on shoes herself.

“Hey!”

“There’s no breakfast here.”

“Really?”

Those eyes went wide again.

He snorted and turned away, and she flinched in surprise, reaching out.

“That’s not it.”

She grabbed the hem of his clothes.

“Thank you for yesterday!”

Lee Seunghyun stared at her.

But the girl didn’t let go of his clothes.

“What’s your name?”

Instead, she smiled gently, then pointed at herself with the hand that wasn’t clutching him.

“I’m Sasha.”

Lee Seunghyun let out a deep sigh.

There were plenty of kids like this. Kids who figured if they stuck close to him, they might get some scraps. Or kids so starved for affection they’d latch onto anyone who would give them attention.

The first kind would turn their backs the second trouble showed up—or the second they saw a better opportunity.

The second kind died easily.

The causes of death varied. For little kids with no protector, all sorts of people came sniffing around.

And since this orphanage was a breeding ground for corruption and violence, nothing that happened here was surprising.

At first, he thought he’d been shocked.

Now, he’d reached the point where he didn’t just stop being surprised by sudden deaths—he even came to despise the weak who died.

This one was uselessly pretty. He doubted she’d last a month.

Better not to get attached.

He peeled Sasha’s hand off him.

Then he strode away.

The girl followed.

He didn’t turn around even once, but she kept talking behind him so nonstop that there was no way not to know.

“Tell me your name.”

Her running speed was weirdly fast.

“Tell me your name!”

Unlike yesterday, when she’d stood there blankly digging through the kitchen, she ran so fast it was ridiculous.

Lee Seunghyun knew his stamina was exceptional. It was the one thing he liked about himself—and also his survival strategy.

He’d thought he’d never lost at anything that involved endurance.

Until Sasha caught up to him.

“Tell me your name....”

She chased him down at an outrageous speed, grabbed his clothes, and mumbled with a sulky face.

“Don’t you want to tell me?”

She didn’t even look that out of breath.

How is she this fast?

“Do you regret sharing bread with me yesterday?”

Lee Seunghyun scanned her, and for the first time, he thought—

Maybe this one might survive.

“Next time I’ll give you half of my bread....”

If he just taught her the rules, couldn’t she escape all sorts of things?

“So don’t be mad.... Stop being mad and let’s play together. Tell me your name too.”

“Lee Seunghyun.”

So Seunghyun answered.

He looked at the building he’d been heading toward and continued.

“Aren’t you supposed to be going back?”

Sasha made a stupid face.

Lee Seunghyun...regretted his judgment a little—the part where he thought she might survive.

***

Sasha was naïve.

She wasn’t aggressive, and she wasn’t even sensitive. She genuinely believed everyone was basically good. The day he gave her his name, Lee Seunghyun ended up having to go to the library with her—and he nearly lost his mind listening to her laugh brightly while saying things like who looked like a good person and who seemed nice.

He didn’t read a single page. Only after he dumped a whole bundle of annoyed scolding on her—telling her to wake up—did Sasha start to understand reality a little.

That didn’t erase her naïveté, though.

After that, Lee Seunghyun had Sasha stuck to him for a while.

It wasn’t intentional. Sasha trailed after him like a baby bird following the first mother bird it saw. No matter how fast he ran, she caught him in the end. If he woke up early and left first, the next day she’d be at the entrance dozing off, waiting. It was unbelievable.

So at some point, Lee Seunghyun gave up on running away and switched tactics—he started cramming knowledge into Sasha instead.

She wasn’t a good student.

No matter how much he snapped about her messy, wild hair, she never properly fixed it. No matter how much he told her she had to sprint before and after weekend distribution time, she kept dawdling.

The only comfort was that she really was fast.

And she memorized, perfectly, the little escape holes he told her to get straight and memorize.

So she could slip away in time, right before violence came pouring down.

“What do we do?”

Sasha cried an unusually lot.

“It looks like it hurts so much....”

Would someone who grew up in an ordinary household really be this startled and saddened by every act of violence?

Even as he wondered that, Seunghyun found that her overreactions weren’t unpleasant to hear.

He pressed a damp rag against her wrist, swollen blue.

“I told you not to go down that alley.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.... I thought if I ran really fast, I’d be okay.”

“How are you supposed to outrun a grown man?”

“Hey, let’s go ask for medicine. If I go, maybe they’ll give us some?”

“Wake up. Leave it alone and it’ll heal, so stop making a fuss.”

The Russian girl who’d been born and raised in Korea was insensitive in a way he couldn’t ignore.

She already drew attention with her exotic looks.

Thinking about how disastrous it would’ve been if he hadn’t arrived in time again, Seunghyun looked at the woman crying over her wrist.

A life balanced on the edge, every time.

Still, she endured.

And maybe, if he just showed her the direction, she’d keep running after him on those swift legs.

He didn’t want to see the kids he’d once torn bread away for disappear one day without warning.

“Sasha.”

When he called her name, Sasha looked at him, eyes widening.

“Why? Should we call an ambulance? Or should we call the police after all?”

“Sleep with a sharpened pencil in your hand.”

The moment a scream was heard, he’d run straight to the women’s dorm.

“Stab the eyes properly, then run along the route I showed you.”

One day, she did exactly that.

And that day, Seunghyun ran into the women’s dorm and smashed the head of a man seven years older than him halfway in.

That was how they survived.

Until Yekaterina came.

***

“Please take her with you.”

He’d been holding his breath near the car of the outsider who said she was a reporter. The moment the orphanage staff stepped away, he shoved Sasha forward in front of the reporter.

“I’m begging you.”

The pale woman smiled faintly.

The people with her looked a little surprised.

Still, he stood his ground in front of the car.

He stayed bent forward, unmoving, until an answer came.

Sasha, gripped tightly by his right hand, twisted her body, her face crumpling as if she might cry at any second.

“I don’t want to go!”

What then—did she want to leave here as a corpse?

“You said we’d go together! You said we’d go together!”

Sasha couldn’t catch Seunghyun by running anymore.

They were adolescents now, and Seunghyun was shooting up in height. It was thanks to the food he bought with money scraped together from odd jobs.

He shared that food with Sasha, so she’d grown taller too.

She just couldn’t keep up with Seunghyun’s growth rate.

She only grew pretty—to a useless degree.

If only she weren’t pretty.

Seunghyun thought that every day as he looked at Sasha.

In an environment like this, beauty only made life harder.

Sasha struggled, insisting she wouldn’t go, and finally burst into loud sobs.

“You said if I just ran well, you’d stay by my side....”

She cried like a kindergartener, heartbroken.

“If you’re going, then go together. If you don’t go with me, I ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) won’t go either....”

“All right.”

Someone who looked like an interpreter stepped forward.

He looked straight at Seunghyun, whose eyes had gone wide.

“If it’s just a female student, I think we can manage to take her.”

The relief he felt at that moment.

And the emptiness that stayed behind in his chest when Sasha finally left.

It was only that day that Lee Seunghyun realized the brown-haired, shoulder-length girl had become the meaning of his life.

For the first time in a life devoted solely to survival, he had a goal.

He still didn’t really know how to feel these things, or how to give them.

But he thought Sasha was like warm sunlight in the dead of winter. Sometimes, her mere existence made him think it was a good thing he’d been sent to this maggot-infested orphanage.

Sasha was a girl who could nap peacefully in the sunlight of the library, even as every piece of evidence before her screamed that her life would never be smooth.

Seunghyun hoped she could keep sleeping those peaceful afternoon naps forever.

Just like she had until now.

And he would make sure she could keep doing so.

He made that vow as he watched the reporters’ cars drive away.

***

A lot happened, but in the end, he got what he wanted.

Seunghyun left the orphanage, joined a special forces unit, and went back to find Sasha.

When they met again the year he turned nineteen, she ran toward him looking exactly the same as before.

Fluffy brown hair and snow-white skin.

A naïve personality—and still astonishingly fast when she ran.

“Hyun!”

The emptiness that calls and messages could never fill vanished in an instant.

“Seunghyun! Lee Seunghyun!”

He remembered everything about that day.

The brown hair scattering finely in the sunlight.

The winter when the white breath he exhaled looked beautiful.

***

Not long after, Lee Seunghyun met Hildebert Taleb.

A man with snow-white hair flowing down to his waist and amber-colored eyes.

No one explained who he was, yet the soldiers instinctively knew he held a high position.

Authority fit him like a tailored suit, clinging naturally to his body.

There was no slack in his relaxed stride.

He walked leisurely toward the selected soldiers.

After slowly sweeping his gaze across the blockheads of various nationalities, he opened his mouth.

“From now on, I’ll be teaching you.”

There was no introduction. No greeting.

“Warm up.”

Seunghyun hadn’t called them blockheads for nothing.

Those selected were the finest elites from their respective militaries, all draped in confidence—perhaps arrogance—and high pride.

It meant they’d gathered people who, despite belonging to a military organization, didn’t fear authority all that much.

Regardless of how extraordinary the man before them looked, they weren’t about to obediently accept orders from someone they didn’t acknowledge.

“And who might you be?”

A man who looked Irish broke the silence first.

“You ordering us around?”

The white-haired man smiled faintly.

From his yellow eyes came a gaze that looked like he was watching a newly arrived junior.

Several of them bristled and spat out curses at that look.

Then the white-haired man burst out laughing.

“So they really did gather nothing but blockheads.”

Seunghyun knew that wasn’t an insult. The other soldiers knew it too.

“Fine. If I beat all of you senseless when you come at me together, that should satisfy you, right?”

“You talk big for someone who doesn’t know his place.”

A man with veins bulging at his brow hissed threateningly.

“Want to spend a month rotting in the hospital?”

Seunghyun didn’t like that remark either.

It wasn’t one-on-one, or two-on-one—he was saying he’d take on everyone here at once.

Arrogance hastened death.

They’d gathered men who’d never lost a fight in their lives.

Seunghyun thought that while the others charged in like idiots, he’d circle around and smash that man’s throat.

That would teach him his place....

Thud—crack!

That thought was completely shattered within five minutes of the sparring starting.

That day, for the first time in his life, Seunghyun felt the limits of his talent.