‘National Intelligence Service?’
For Mio, who had lived his entire life locked inside a house, it was the name of an organization that couldn’t register in his mind at once.
‘Something like the police……’
I think I’ve seen it in a book. The NIS…… Like spies……
Just as Mio suspected, the place they had arrived at was, with some irony given its purpose, the National Intelligence Service — located on prime real estate even within Seoul. Specifically, the second basement floor of the annex. It was the deepest, most classified part of the NIS — where covert operations were ultimately carried out and practical responses to national security were executed — the workplace of secret field agents.
All he had wanted was to see one neon sign, and now things had gotten out of hand. To begin with, the kind of person who would be calmly sleeping covered in blood in that alley was never going to be an ordinary person — and yet he had walked right up to him without a second thought, so it was partly Chae Mio’s own fault. He hadn’t done a single thing wrong, but his heart was thudding and his paws were going numb from the fear that someone might appear and seize him at any moment.
What do I do. I won’t suddenly transform into a human, will I.
That was the biggest problem. The unpredictable, strange transformations he had experienced over twenty years had no pattern to them, making it impossible to ever let his guard down completely. He’d change in the middle of eating, in the middle of sleeping……
While Mio was fretting, Cheongmyeong came to a stop in front of a thick, solid-looking silver metal door and took out a new ID card from his pocket, holding it up to the security reader.
Agent ID
Industrial Security, Team 1
Yu Cheongmyeong
Not the fake ID he had presented earlier — this was his real identity.
Transported in the man’s arms, Mio was now sitting on the clear table in the conference room, gulping water down hurriedly.
‘He goes on about raising me or not raising me, and only gives me water now.’
Either way, drinking water feels like I might actually live. His body, which had been drooping limply with no energy, seemed a little better too — he stretched his hind legs out long.
Mio then looked around. He was looking for something to wipe his wet mouth with. A fussy cat cannot stand a damp muzzle. Finding no tissue in sight, Mio rubbed his muzzle clean on the sleeve of Cheongmyeong’s white shirt.
“Smart little thing. Even knows how to wipe his mouth.”
Setting aside Cheongmyeong’s impressed exclamation, Mio lowered himself onto the table. Beneath the dim white lighting, a long, narrow transparent glass table stretched lengthwise — see-through all the way to the floor. Mio padded across it without a thought. A few steps more, and the man who had been staring at Mio’s backside abruptly reached out and blocked him.
“Stop.”
The implication was — don’t think about running. Not that Mio had been planning to. He simply liked the feel of the glass under his paw pads and had been walking. Back to square one. Mio swatted Cheongmyeong’s hand away irritably as it tried to touch the tip of his tail, and watched the people taking their seats one by one out of the corner of his eye.
The people filing in all had different faces and voices, but what they shared in common was that every single one of them looked utterly exhausted. Mio stared blankly at the sunken, hollow eyes of a gaunt man, then turned his head and glanced sideways at Cheongmyeong. The only person in this conference room wearing a broad smile was Yu Cheongmyeong. What was there to be so happy about?
“May.”
The moment he called the name, every person taking their seat glanced at Mio once. Mio felt self-conscious from the attention converging on him and straightened his back, then licked both front paws at once.
When things are hard, groom yourself. When you’re embarrassed, groom yourself too!
Recalling the elder cat who had taught him the habits of a cat, Mio committed earnestly to grooming.
Just about the time Mio’s white paw tops were becoming thoroughly soaked in his own saliva, the hour for the meeting arrived. The last person to enter was a middle-aged man in a gray suit without a jacket, wearing glasses — and the moment he did, everyone seated along the long vertical table rose simultaneously to their feet.
Even cat Mio, who had been irritably throwing punches at Cheongmyeong’s hand for keep poking his cheeks, rose up bewilderedly off the table alongside them. Whether the effect of standing was visible given his short legs, he couldn’t be sure.
The director, his necktie pulled loose and hanging down, shuffled in dragging his heels and settled into the head seat.
“I keep saying I don’t drink iced coffee. I have a cold constitution.”
The director pushed away the blue canned coffee that had been placed at his seat — and discovered something. A gray cat sitting all alone on the transparent table. Half-hidden behind someone’s mug, only a fluffy round bottom and a tail with fur standing on end were visible — but it was unmistakably a cat. He fixed his temples with the look of someone who had finally caught the culprit.
Thud! The chair knocked back against the wall as a commanding voice filled the wide conference room.
“Whose cat is that — who brought a cat into the conference room? What is this, an animal shelter?”
“That would be me.”
Cheongmyeong, showing not a flicker of surprise at the director’s raised voice, raised his left hand with a perfectly calm face. If anything, it was cat Mio who was tense. The others were only looking on with confused eyes. Nobody had pointed out the existence of Chae Mio — the cat — so he had thought it might be fine, but of course it wasn’t.
Mio flinched and shrunk his body, then crawled inch by inch behind a black mug to avoid catching the director’s eye further. But he seemed to have forgotten about the tail attached to his bottom. The extended gray tail was still visible slanted beside the mug.
Here he was trying to hide a fist-sized body even further by curling himself into a ball. Cheongmyeong pressed his palm against his forehead and exhaled something between a sigh and a word.
“My apologies. Our little meow is still a baby, so he can’t live without his daddy.”
“……Fine. Let’s start the meeting. Keep your meow close.”
The director waved his hand with a look of sheer exasperation and sat back down. Just a few exchanges of words and a stifled sigh slipped from the corners of his lips — aged years in an instant.
Cheongmyeong had been entirely out of control ever since he had returned from an overseas assignment a few years back — an industrial espionage mission — with a head injury. He was exactly like a five-ton truck with the steering wheel and brakes completely smashed.
‘Do you have any idea how much the cars and equipment you’ve destroyed cost? The entire industrial security team’s budget is hemorrhaging through your hands, you bastard!’
In truth, wherever Cheongmyeong had passed through was left in such chaos that not a single blade of grass remained. The tip of his fingers trembled as he signed off on paperwork stating that two supercars belonging to law-abiding citizens had been destroyed and would have to be compensated in full. Squeak — the ink dragged across the paper like a scrawl.
By nature, alphas sometimes had a temperament that couldn’t overcome their impulses. It was close to a mental illness that even modern medicine couldn’t fully cure. Twice a year — the alpha’s ‘rut’ — a moment where not just reason and emotion but their very nature was destroyed. Since injuring his head in Vietnam, Yu Cheongmyeong had been bold to the point of recklessness, impulsive every single day — as if it were a permanent rut.
The director, who had been branch chief at the time, had issued a one-week suspension order to show who was in charge. But then Cheongmyeong — who had quietly nodded his head and said he would reflect — spent the entire suspension period openly tailing the branch chief.
He had parked his car right in front of the man’s house and surveilled him day and night without shame, and when the director had thrown open the car door and grabbed him by the collar in fury, the answer that returned from that expressionless, stoic face had cured the director’s low blood pressure on the spot.
‘I’m not surveilling you. I’m keeping watch in case you get stabbed while I can’t come to work.’
‘Has this madman lost his mind?! If you don’t want to get fired, get out of here right now!’
He had hollered and sent Cheongmyeong away — and that very night, the director, who had been branch chief then, had been stabbed — literally, word for word — by a foreign mercenary. It had been the moment he was doing trash sorting, in his pajamas. A winter night, with snow falling. The angel who had approached the director as he lay collapsed with a blade in his side was that lunatic subordinate of his.
‘You told me not to take out the target. So this time I left them alive — and you also told me not to stand guard in front of your house for five days. I executed exactly what I was told, perfectly.’
‘……You…… you……’
‘Even if you’re frustrated, you could have held on for just one more day. If I had still been out front, I would have caught the culprit right away.’
Unhappily — or perhaps fortunately amid misfortune — the first person to report the collapsed director had also been Yu Cheongmyeong. He had been a lifesaver, but that earned him not a shred of gratitude. He was utterly insufferable, and just seeing his face felt like it shattered the biorhythm of the entire day.
The director deliberately shifted his posture to sit with his back to Cheongmyeong.
“This situation is extremely serious. I’ve been receiving morning briefings every day for a week, and I believe it’s now time for our intelligence service to establish a response before it’s too late.”
The moment the director, drained by his own words, finished speaking — on the screen where light spilled out imperfectly, the image of a man appeared with vivid red blood smeared around his mouth and chest. A dark night. Whether it had been filmed with extreme zoom, the image was blurry and the angle shaky. It was footage of a homeless man in worn clothing inside a narrow, musty alley. The poor image quality made his face difficult to make out.
“Is it a foreign operative?”
Someone asked, peering at the screen. The moment eyes narrowed in concentration — the homeless man’s shoulders twitched, and from above his head, where white hairs were scattered throughout, two triangular ears sprouted.
“……Cat ears?”
Stunned disbelief, barely held back, burst out here and there throughout the room. The director at the head seat started slamming the table repeatedly — bang bang! — telling them to look carefully — and the vibration startled Mio into bolting and clinging to Cheongmyeong’s hand, scrambling down beneath the table.
A homeless man with cat ears sprouting from his head. Mio planted his bottom in Cheongmyeong’s palm and propped his chin on the edge of the table, holding his ground. The vibration was frightening, yes — but the footage on the screen was something important to Mio.
Cat ears.
A person with cat ears?
The man in the footage didn’t appear to be wearing a headband or a cat-ear hat. Someone seated across the room asked whether it was digitally altered — and the only “altered” Mio knew was from the middle school science textbook his second-oldest brother had used to teach him lessons.
‘Could it be a shifter like me?’
Mio blinked his pale green eyes several times. No, no. That couldn’t be. Mio shifted between human and cat — he had never experienced ears sprouting or a tail suddenly popping out. It was probably just footage someone had filmed as a prank for fun. Besides — if there were another shifter, the first people to know would be Mio’s family. His brothers had never once mentioned the existence of another shifter.
“Director, on this matter — the police……”
“That kind of careless mindset is exactly the problem. And not just within our NIS. These days with the MZ generation or whatever they call it — everyone wants to do work that looks impressive from the outside, so who does the hard, unglamorous work. Who protects national security……”
Someone had spoken up, and the director had launched into a lengthy tirade over it — when he suddenly turned his body, and from within his jacket a yellow piece of paper fluttered down to the floor.
“Ahem.”
Tall, narrow paper with red characters written vertically. It was a talisman. The director let out a loud, forced cough, quietly picked the talisman up from the floor, shoved it into his pocket, and changed the subject.
