- After dying to the unranked monster, Lee Soo Hyuk and Choi Jung Soo find themselves in a forest in the middle of nowhere. They soon realize that, not only are they not in Korea anymore, but their bodies have apparently changed from what they remember. They appear to be a few years younger than when they died. Luckily, they still have their skills and weapons with them in this new world.
- Unluckily, this new world is also apparently overrun with monsters. Great.
- They can only hope that their dongsaeng is doing okay without them.
- Their dongsaeng is not okay without them.
- For the next decade or so, he leads the new Team One with a death count of zero, solidifying his reputation as the number one team leader in the company.
- Until one lazy afternoon on his day off changes everything.
- He had just finished volume five of The Birth of a Hero, when the alarm sounds and swarms of monsters start attacking civilians.
- He can’t leave his team to fight alone, so he cuts his only day off short to assist.
- But he hadn’t expected it to end this way. Sure, it’s all part of the job, he does fight monsters for a living, he just didn’t expect that he’d go out like this; pierced through the heart by a monster with unmatched speed. Well, almost unmatched. He was luckily able to use instant in time to save his teammate. That teammate has a family waiting for him, it’s Kim Rok Soo’s responsibility as his leader to make sure he returns home. Besides, it’s not like there are many to miss him. Sure, his colleagues would mourn him for a bit, but Kim Min Ah will make a fine Team Leader. They’ll be ok.
- Closing his eyes amidst the sound of his teammates crying, he finally allows himself to rest. Maybe in the next life he’ll finally be able to be a slacker.
The rest of this will be Kim Rok Soo’s journey. I’ll do Choi Jung Soo and Lee Soo Hyuk in a different post.
- The boy wakes up in a forest. It’s cold and dark and he doesn’t know where he is. Or who he is, for that matter. It’s as if there’s a fog covering his mind, and when he tries to remember anything, all he gets is a sharp pain in his head and some wooziness. No thank you, he’ll do without.
- After some walking, he decides to take a small rest before BOOM, a wild Radish appears!
- Radish takes one look at the child and instantly sees a new accomplice/underling/successor. Also, this kid looks almost exactly like him, he would be an idiot to let him escape.
- So the boy, in the absence of any other options, trails along after the mask wearing redhead until they reach a secret Arm base, where the boy is given a room and questioned on his sudden appearance.
- After a brief convo in which he learns that the redhead’s name is Barrow, he reveals that he doesn’t have any memories. WS offers to name him, to which the boy answers that he’ll think about it.
- (Here’s the thing. I’m debating over whether to let him get a new name from Barrow before learning of his own name, or to remain nameless before he eventually remembers. So for now, we’ll say that Rok Soo is also debating whether or not to let this random stranger give him a name or think of one himself.)
- As time goes on and Barrow comes and goes, the boy starts picking up random bits of info about this world. Sometimes words of places just come to him, while other bits of knowledge are revealed in a dream or vision. All of this accumulates up until Barrow decides to take him to the Henituse territory.
- Barrow gives the boy some money, along with instructions to buy himself some new clothes and books (if the kid’s gonna work with him, he might as well have some sort of knowledge about the world. And besides, the boy is obviously suspicious of him, so there’s no need for him to know about Arm or the Ws’s goal just yet).
- Krs does buy himself some clothes and books, but he also finds that he has tons more money from Barrow, so why not spend some on a way to protect himself? That’s right, he picks up the shield. While he’s not entirely sure how he knows about this weird power, (or if it’s even real) he has nothing better to do while waiting for Barrow to return from his “errand.”
- After picking up a shield, he also picks up some kittens. Since he doesn’t know about the cat tribe, he also doesn’t know that On and Hong are not ordinary kittens. They follow him around the rest of the day after he gets the shield and he finds them cute, so he decides to take them with him.
- Of course, Barrow immediately recognizes them as Cat Tribe children, but they don’t recognize him. As he is in disguise and they had never actually seen a member of Arm in person before then, they don’t know about the WS or what he looks like. Of course, they are still very scared of this guy who is apparently taking care of their new companion, but they can tell that the boy is completely innocent at least, so they go with him anyway. They are still very cautious around this red haired human-but-not-human, but figure that their boy will not let them get hurt, so they’ll just observe for now.
- Barrow decides not to say anything about them being from the Cat Tribe, letting them get more familiar with the kid first. Which krs does. He figures it out a few days after taking them in. Which works perfectly for him, since he does have a dragon to free in the near future.
- The only problem is how to smuggle a dragon out of the cave without Barrow noticing. While he could ask the man for help, his gut tells him that would be a bad idea, and he’s inclined to trust it. Besides, for whatever reason, this Barrow guy just gives him a bad feeling.
- His chance comes a few days later. Barrow has some business in another region(read: Endable), so he won’t be back for a month or so. That leaves him some time to procure all the needed supplies and equipment to save the dragon and be back, having erased any evidence, before the man returns.
- Luckily, Barrow leaves him in a nearby city, which just so happens to be Puzzle City, another place he’d seen in his dreams housing one of these “ancient powers” that Barrow had told him about.
- Speaking of, when Barrow had returned from Harris Village to Rain City, he was able to immediately tell that Krs had acquired an ancient power. How he could tell, the boy didn’t know, but he is determined to be extra cautious when collecting them from now on.
- WS actually thinks it’s a good thing for krs to be collecting ancient powers. Actually, him finding one on his own just proves even more that he should carry on Barrow’s legacy. In fact, he’s even keeping an eye out for some more for the boy. It’ll take some time, and he will have to be careful so the kid won’t explode, but he’s working on it. That’s one of the reasons WS frequently leaves him for a while.
- Meanwhile, Krs somehow manages to procure the mana disturbance tool and the cutters for the mission (whether through Billos like in the novel or through some other means), and finally sets out for the Tolz territory with several scrolls, potions, and means of quick escapes (one can never be too careful).
- He figures that once he saves the dragon, it’ll go off and do its own thing, so their should be no problem trying to hide it from Barrow after getting rid of the rest of the evidence.
- The dragon follows them. And now he has to figure out how to hide it from the man. He’s got roughly a week. Great…..
- Something tells him that even with invisibility, Barrow would still somehow be able to detect the dragon’s presence. Call it his intuition, which keeps being more and more reliable when it comes to the man.
- He manages to convince the dragon to stay in the cave where he got the Vitality of the Heart. It’s a bit of a hassle, but he promises to come visit when Barrow leaves again or if they have to move.
- He mostly stays away from the main plot, giving Cage and Taylor their new hope while in Puzzle City and saving the dragon will pretty much be the only way he interacts with it for a while. Though with the other Soo’s traveling with Choi Han, they manage to bring some much needed wisdom and stability that the heroes were lacking in the original timeline, “filling in” a lot of plot holes that krs’s absence leaves.
- As krs is absent during the plaza terror incident, Raon is also not there to help diffuse the mana bombs and there is no mana disturbance to interrupt them. He also hasn’t remembered a whole lot of the plot by that time, so he has no knowledge of it.
- So while the heroes travel around solving problems and saving people, Krs is busy collecting the Sound of the Wind, saving and ditching a whale, meeting a barbarian, and somehow getting acquainted with another redhead.
- Throughout the next few months or so, he gets brought to other Arm bases and meets Hannah and the Magic Spearman, training with them some time before they leave to fight the Whales. During all this, he doesn’t actually make a connection between them and the “secret organization.” He’d never actually seen them in uniform before, and even if he had, he’d never remembered.
- Until an offhanded comment by Raon sparks an impromptu vision. It was a vision of a single paragraph in some sort of book. He doesn’t know what it means, but what he does know is that he needs to stay away from whatever this “secret organization” is.
- Easier said than done. Apparently Barrow is apart of this very secret organization. How does he know this? When he saw the Magic Spearman after the fight with the Whales, the man was wearing the very same outfit. Luckily, Raon wasn’t there. That’s a can of worms that he can’t afford to open right now. Not while he’s in the middle of a terrorist organization. Why is this his life? Just what did he do in his past life to deserve this sort of situation?!
- Now he’s gotta tiptoe around Barrow and the rest of the base’s inhabitants. There mostly seems to be low level grunts in their newest “temporary home,” but who’s to say that he won’t eventually meet someone at the level of the Spearman again? Or even more powerful? He already has suspicions about this “Barrow” being some sort of authority figure, given how everyone refers to him as “liege.” Don’t tell him this guy is the leader….
- Really, what did he get himself into?
///////////
And that’s about how I imagine events going from the beginning through the sea battle. I’ve definitely got more things planned, but I’ll have to go through the novel again to see which events happen when, and which events from tboah happen or don’t, based on krs’s presence.
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