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Teenage Mercenary Webtoon Gets Animated Adaptation
posted on by Rafael Antonio Pineda & Joanna Cayanan
LINE Manga announced on Thursday that YC and rak hyun's (also romanized as rakhyun and Rakyeon) original webtoon Teenage Mercenary (Nyūgaku Yōhei in Japanese) will get an animated adaptation (it is not yet confirmed if the adaptation is Japanese animated or not).
WEBTOON started publishing the series in English in June 2021 and describes the story:
At the age of eight, Yu Ijin (Sōma Tatewaki in Japanese version) lost his parents in a plane crash and became stranded in a foreign land, forced to become a child mercenary in order to stay alive. He returns home ten years later to be reunited with his family in Korea, where food and shelter are plenty and everything seems peaceful. But Ijin will soon learn that life as a teenager is a whole other feat of survival. With only one year of high school left, Ijin must master new tactics to maneuver his way around the schoolhouse battleground. Can he survive a year of high school? Or rather, will the school be able to survive him?
The series launched in Korean on Naver WEBTOON in November 2020. The series then launched on LINE Manga in Japan in April 2021, and has a cumulative domestic view count of over 730 million (as of May 2025). The series won first place in the "LINE Manga 2023 Annual Ranking," and also the next year in the "LINE Manga 2024 Annual Ranking (serialized)."
The series is distributed in 10 languages and has a total of 1.86 billion views worldwide (as of May 2025).
Sources: LINE Manga's X/Twitter account, Comic Natalie, PR Times
