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Kim Soleum’s boss is a little strange.
He is, after all, an alien. He goes about his life with the head of a lizard. It would be weirder if he wasn’t strange.
For the most part, he’s a great boss. He’s never once told Kim Soleum to kill himself. He’s never poured coffee in his face, or even on his clothes, and every time a superior turns up to try and scam Soleum into more near death situations, Lee Jaheon forms a solid wall in front of him to stop their efforts.
“You will not harm my successor in front of me,” he says each time, in a flat voice, “if you fear your position in the face of god.”
See. That’s the only issue.
Lee Jaheon is a perfect, 10/10 boss who can punch through walls and probably walk on water—but the things he says are sometimes just plain weird.
Soleum doesn’t let it bother him, for the most part. Sure, Soleum is called his successor for some reason. Park Minseong is called my fellow rebel against fate. Eun Haje was apparently called something once, but not anymore, and Park Minseong refuses to tell Kim Soleum what it was in case he gets the same treatment that Lee Jaheon did when he first came up with the title.
But these are small issues to deal with in the grand scheme of things.
The important thing is that Lee Jaheon keeps them all alive.
“Are you prepared?” Lee Jaheon asks him, standing over his desk. “We fight fate at dawn.”
Kim Soleum shuffles the papers of the manual that he’d been reading. “Yes, Squad Leader,” he says. “I’ve looked through everything.”
The Darkness they have to enter is a pretty standard one. It’s almost guaranteed that they’ll both come out alive. Soleum has meticulously memorized the information in the manuals nevertheless, and stocked up on supplies, and scrolled the wiki while hiding in the bathroom just in case there was anything he forgot.
“It will be dangerous,” Lee Jaheon says. “But we will stand together. There is no hell on earth that will not succumb to our strength.”
“Absolutely, Squad Leader.”
Sure, he says some weird things. But it’s fine.
With a crazy TV host in his pocket and a psychopath for a roommate, his boss being a bit melodramatic is the least of his worries.
/
Honestly, no one knows anything about Lee Jaheon.
He seems to have been at Daydream forever. Kim Soleum asks him about it once. Just once.
“He was sent here by forces outside of our mortal comprehension,” Park Minseong says, in a flat voice that makes it clear that he’s repeating exactly what he was told.
Which is fair. Their boss is an alien. Who knows what happens in his life.
For all they know Lee Jaheon is here to destroy them all and got distracted along the way and started helping them punch things instead.
So Soleum doesn’t ask anything more. Sometimes he even indulges it. “Strange forces in the air, sir?” he’ll ask, when Lee Jaheon has stared too long out the window.
“Yes,” Lee Jaheon will say. “Our time may come sooner than I expected.”
Not the sort of thing you want to hear when you’re trapped in a world with a literal prophecy about the apocalypse.
“That sounds terrible,” he’ll say.
“You’ll make it through, my successor,” Lee Jaheon will say. “You must. To take my place.”
He’ll turn to Kim Soleum with his sharp lizard eyes.
They always look right into his soul.
“If you don’t,” he’ll say, “There will be no hope for either of our worlds.”
“Um,” Kim Soleum always says, intelligently.
Lee Jaheon grips his shoulder tightly, like a wise mentor sending him off on a long quest.
Then he sits back down and gets back to his paperwork.
/
The thing is, if Lee Jaheon is like this—it must for sure be an alien thing.
So the first time that Soleum meets another alien, he knows exactly what to expect.
When he turns up at the Alien Store for their advertised Personal Shopping Experience, the figure in front of him looks completely familiar. At first he thinks it’s his boss. It has to be. They look exactly alike.
But looking closer, they start to seem a little different.
“Kim Soleum-ssi,” the figure in front of him says. “Please sit.”
The lizard stands behind the table, gesturing politely to the chair placed in front of it.
“It’s nice to meet you at last,” the lizard says. “The Alien Store is always grateful for your purchases. We’ve got some new items if you’d like to check them out? Or are you here for a repeat purchase?”
The lizard shuffles in a box under the table, and then pulls out several packages of Happy Maker syringes. “You’re quite fond of these, I’ve seen,” he says. “Would you like any more of them?”
Kim Soleum blinks.
The lizard… the man…? No, that’s definitely still a lizard—the lizard is smiling at him with cheerful lizard eyes. Soleum has never seen this expression on the Squad Leader’s face before. Lee Jaheon always looks like he’s contemplating the end of the world. And also his own death. And also his own immortality. The only times that Soleum sees him smile is when he wins a battle and needs to say something cool after it.
He’s never very creative. The last time they’d cleared a darkness, he’d said victory has always tasted this sweet.
Soleum is pretty sure that’s not how the line is supposed to go.
But the point is—Lee Jaheon never smiles this pleasantly.
He never talks so… human.
“Squad Leader…?” Soleum tries hesitantly.
The lizard shakes his head. “I’m not him,” he says patiently. “As you can see, I am quite normal.”
Kim Soleum squints at him.
He does seem suspiciously normal.
There’s a pleasant smile on his lizard face, kindness in his lizard eyes. More importantly, he greeted Kim Soleum with a polite please sit and not with a chair turn and a you have arrived, my successor.
But that can’t be right.
Why is an alien with a lizard head being normal?
“Why are you being normal?” Kim Soleum asks, because if there’s one thing he’s learned from his boss it’s that you should always ask questions with zero tact.
“Most of Us are,” the lizard says. “Your Squad Leader, unfortunately… wasn’t raised quite right.”
Was Lee Jaheon raised at all? Soleum always assumed he just crash landed into earth as a fully grown adult in a three piece suit.
“He received some questionable advice as a child,” the lizard says, a little mournfully. “And he’s never quite grown out of it.”
“What sort of advice?”
“Life advice, is the most I can say. We try not to talk about him, honestly.” The lizard looks briefly haunted. “Once we mention him, his voice gets louder in Our heads.”
He stares blankly into the distance.
“I can hear him now,” he says, with incredible pain in his voice. “Why must he be like that?”
“...what is he saying?”
“I wish I knew,” the lizard says. “I wish I knew.”
/
“Squad Leader.”
“You have arrived, my successor.”
“Yes. About that.”
“...?”
“Is it true that you weren’t raised right?”
Kim Soleum winces the moment the words leave his mouth.
Perhaps he learned a bit too much from his boss.
Lee Jaheon considers him seriously.
“I was raised to protect the world I was thrown into,” he says, his lizard eyes staring at him intently. “Whether that is to be raised right, or to be raised wrong—it depends on whether you consider this world worth protecting.”
“Yeah,” Soleum says. “That’s very true, Squad Leader, but what I meant was—why do you talk like this?”
Lee Jaheon stares into the distance.
He does this often, when he needs to make a point.
“To be human,” he says at last, in the quiet admission of a man who has seen far too much in this world. “To grasp at the fragile threads of my humanity, I taught myself the ways of the ones I hoped to be.”
“...”
“...”
“...uh.”
“...”
“Squad Leader.”
“Yes, my successor.”
“You talk like this to sound human?”
“I see you have understood.”
“This isn’t how humans talk, though?”
“...?”
Lee Jaheon blinks at him slowly.
“Ah,” he says at last. “It appears that you too have failed to learn the ways of the human world.”
“...no. What? No, sir, I mean—humans really don’t talk like this. Really.”
Lee Jaheon stares at him some more.
There’s a quiet sadness in his eyes, as if he’s mourning the fact that Soleum had, clearly, not been raised right either.
At last, he reaches inside his desk drawer and pulls out a book.
“When I was young,” he starts quietly, “I was far too foolish. Much like you. I spoke words that were far too simple to gain the favour of the gods, and I was overlooked by fate at every chance I got at life.”
He traces the cover of the book with the reverence of someone holding a religious text.
“And then I was given this.”
“...”
“To survive in this world, I was told, I would have to learn to be a part of this world. And to be a part of this world, I would have to learn about the people who could survive.”
“...”
“This book was the key to all of that. The key to learning how to be real, how to be human, how to be—as the gods tend to call us—the protagonists."
A chill goes down Kim Soleum’s spine.
He has a really bad feeling about this.
Lee Jaheon hands him the book carefully. “Read this,” he says seriously. “Read it and learn the ways of this world. It will save you.”
Kim Soleum looks at the title.
I was Reincarnated as the Third Male Lead of a Cheap Romance Novel but for Some Reason it’s Up to Me to Save the World?
Kim Soleum continues to look at the title.
It does not change in front of his eyes.
“Squad Leader,” he says.
“My successor.”
“This is trash.”
“It is not.”
“Were you… using this as a manual?”
“Yes.”
“... this is trash.”
“It has an 8.7 rating on common internet platforms. The comments refer to it as ‘a fascinating analysis of the human condition’ and ‘a description of the life they would wish to lead post their own death’ and ‘a solid 10/10 for when you have an exam tomorrow but you’d rather die than study for it, lol.”
There comes a time in everyone’s life when they must choose which battles to pick.
To fight every battle is to lose every battle, and Kim Soleum has lost enough in his life to keep losing even more.
So he steps back.
He will not fight this battle.
There is more damage here than he can ever hope to counter.
“I see,” he says instead. “Okay, Squad Leader.”
Lee Jaheon watches him try to escape with sharp eyes.
“Kim Soleum,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Take the book.”
Soleum’s shoulders slump.
He lets Lee Jaheon hand him the book. The title still has not changed before his eyes. The male lead stands heroically on the front cover, a sword slung over his shoulder, staring into the distance in the same way that Lee Jaheon tends to do.
“It may seem difficult to understand at first,” Lee Jaheon tells him. “But it will all be revealed in due time.”
He grips Soleum’s shoulder tightly, as if sending him off on a long journey.
Then he turns to leave.
/