𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗥𝗢𝗔𝗗 𝗛𝗢𝗠𝗘 (a TAELICE adaptation)

CHAPTER 27

It was around may or so 2011.

The year of the Olympics. The whole nation had been in the midst of huge celebration. People like them, though, had been going day and night without a break.

Every person who is involved day in abd day out in counter-terrorism knows that in such significant years like that one, people both inside and outside the country are playing both inside and outside the country are paying great attention and watching everything that takes place on the soil of this land.

For a large majority of that year, Taehyung and the entire explosive ordnance disposal squad frequently had to leave the province. There were prominent conferences and events, large and small, so their schedules were packed completely with assignments of providing security support. There was a very large, important conference in Seoul during those few days. He and several other key members of the EOD squad had arrived in advance. After resting for a couple of days and submitting their request to temporarily be away from their place of assignment, they went to Hampyeong County in South Jeolla Province.

This place name was frequently mentioned during the EOD squad's internal training times. Looking like ordinary travellers, they went during the night to a spot near the minefields there.

" Commander Kim, you wouldn't be bringing our team here to do an on-the-spot training session, right? " Squatting down outside of the minefield, not crossing beyond the stone stele that served as a warning sign, the EOD squad leader joked with Taehyung. " How about we submit a request to do this and have a go at it? "

" Even if you did want a go at it, the turn wouldn't fall on you. " Taehyung took a seat on the dirt slope and said. " Just bringing you all here to check out the scenery. "

Millions of land mines were buried in this place that had once been a battlefront, and to date only half had been cleared.

The armed period of this batch of land mines was 120 years. Waiting for them to become inactive was not an option. They required people to again and again go in to demine until they were all cleared out. He remembered when he was away teaching one time and someone had asked him. " Aren't there robots nowadays? " In reality, although demining with the use of robots has a high degree of safety, when emergency situations are encountered, the landscape is complex, or there are multiple types of mines and other explosives intermixed and buried together, the nature of the operation is more dangerous and will still require people to manually clear the mines.

Sitting in such a place could quiet a person's heart. As far as the eye could see were simply too many assignments that still needed to be completed. In the future, when he was no longer on the front lines, there would naturally be a place for him to go to whittle away the latter half of his life.

During the following day's conference, Taehyung, as a member of the specialist team, was providing backup to onsite security and was on guard on the lawn outside the venue.

He wore civilian wear, a black top, black pants, and a black hat, and on his neck hung a name tag. In an inconspicuous corner on the venue's lawn, he sat with a group of people, drinking water and resting.

His brigade commander came over to ask how they were doing. Before he had even spoken a couple of sentences, however, he noticed Taehyung had slowly twisted the bottle cap of his mineral water shut, so forcefully that a crack appeared in that light-blue, translucent cap. Taehyung, though, was completely unaware of this. As his immediate supervisor of many years, Commander Jang felt that this was too out of the ordinary, and consequently his first instinct was that there was trouble, that some suspicious persons found in their military files had appeared.

Letting his gaze follow Taehyung's, he saw that there were merely two girls, both wearing short skirts, together with a few young men.

The two girls were very young and quite pretty. However, they were absolutely unknown to him.