Jaeho counted his breaths.

  That was the habit — four counts in, four counts out, lips pressed shut, jaw loose. He'd started doing it the night Bak Chunsam came to the apartment and his father said nothing. Counting kept his hands from shaking. When the hospital called. When Sooyeon cried and pretended she wasn't. When the debt number went up instead of down.

  He was counting now, standing in a narrow corridor beneath Mapo-gu, Seoul, at eleven forty-three on a Tuesday night.

  *One. Two. Three. Four.*

  The corridor was lit by a single fluorescent tube that kept stuttering, throwing the concrete walls in and out of shadow. Behind the steel door at the end, something was roaring — not an animal, but fifty drunk people who wanted to see someone get hurt. The sound came through the walls in waves, vibrating up through the floor and into the soles of his shoes. His taped hands were still bruised purple from his second fight, the knuckles swollen enough that gripping a pen hurt. His nose had a bump in it now that hadn't been there a month ago.

  He was twenty years old. He weighed sixty-one kilograms. He had been in two fights in his entire life before last month, and both of them had been accidents in middle school.

  *Three. Four.*

  *Two hundred thousand won.* That was the purse for tonight. Two hundred thousand if he won. Nothing if he lost — and the debt collector's next visit was in nine days.

  ---

  Three weeks ago, Bak Chunsam had come to their apartment in Incheon at eight in the evening, while Jaeho's mother was washing rice and his father was watching the news with the sound low. Jaeho had been on his mattress reading, or trying to. He heard the knock. He heard his father open the door. He heard Bak's voice, the kind of voice built for saying unpleasant things in small spaces.

  *"You've got until the end of the month. After that, daily interest. And then I stop being polite."*

  Silence from his father. Not a pause — silence. His father, who had once stood on a factory floor in front of two hundred workers and argued with management for four hours without raising his voice, who believed in facing things directly and saying what needed to be said — his father had sat across a kitchen table with his hands folded and his eyes down while Bak Chunsam poured himself a glass of their water and let himself out.

  Jaeho had lain on his mattress and counted to ten. Then twenty. Then he'd kept counting until the number didn't matter and his breathing was even and his fists had unclenched. Then he'd opened his phone and scrolled until he found the number a guy at his warehouse job had quietly passed to him a week earlier, after noticing the dark circles and saying *you look like you need money, not just a shift.*

  *Manager Oh's Underground Circuit. No questions. No names. Bring your hands.*

  His first fight, three weeks back: a stocky construction worker from Gyeonggi-do. The man had broken Jaeho's lip in the first five seconds, left him bleeding and dizzy against the chain-link with the crowd laughing, and then gotten overconfident. Jaeho had grabbed the man's arm in a panic, twisted it in a direction he'd seen on YouTube at two in the morning, and held on until the elbow threatened to bend the wrong way and the man tapped.

  Not skill. Survival.

  His second fight, a dock worker from Busan had broken his nose with a straight right that Jaeho never saw coming. The sound was like a door slamming inside his skull. He'd won by headbutt — by accident, while trying to clinch — and spent the next three days with tissue stuffed in both nostrils and a face that looked like a bruised peach.

  Not skill. Dumb luck and stubbornness.

  Two wins. Two purses. Barely enough to cover two months of Sooyeon's dialysis and half of what Bak was owed. Not enough. Never enough.

  *Third fight. Tonight.*

  ---

  The steel door opened. Manager Oh leaned out — short, shaved head, cigarette behind his ear, clipboard in one hand. He ran this circuit the way a man runs a business he's neither proud nor ashamed of. Practical. Organized. Occasionally compassionate in the way practical people sometimes are.

  "Park Jaeho."

  "Who am I fighting?"

  Oh checked the clipboard. "Goes by Mantis. Chinese. Sanda background. Six months on the circuit. Hasn't lost."

  Jaeho's stomach dropped like a stone down a well. "You told me I'd fight someone at my level."

  "I lied." Oh didn't apologize. "Every fight on this circuit is above your level. That's the point. You want the money or you want to go home?"

  The roar behind the door surged hard enough to rattle the frame.

  Jaeho thought of Sooyeon. Pale face against a white pillow. IV in her left arm because the right vein had collapsed from too many insertions — he'd watched a nurse search for a new site for six minutes while Sooyeon stared at the ceiling and he stood useless in the doorway. Seventeen years old. Forty-four kilograms. Kidneys failing at seventeen years old, quietly and without drama, the way truly unfair things happen — not with fury but with patience.

  Two hundred thousand won was twelve sessions. Twelve sessions was three more weeks of his sister being alive.

  "I want the money," Jaeho said.

  He rolled his neck. Felt it crack twice — right side, then left. Then he walked through the door.

  ---

  The cage hit him like a wall of noise and heat.

  A hexagonal pen of chain-link fencing, six meters across, sitting in the center of what had been a parking garage below a building that was supposed to have been demolished two years ago. Fluorescent strips on bungee cords swayed from the ceiling, throwing moving shadows across everything. Fifty people pressed against the fencing on all sides — workers, office men with their ties loosened, a few women who looked like they'd wandered in from somewhere else entirely. Beer cans. Cigarette smoke layered in the air like weather. A speaker in the corner running bass-heavy Korean hip-hop that Jaeho felt in his sternum.

  Near the far corner of the cage, leaning against the chain-link with his arms crossed, was a heavyset man in a grey tracksuit Jaeho had seen at his first two fights. The man's name was Doyun — he'd heard someone call him that — and Doyun always stood in the same spot and always had a folded wad of cash in his right hand and always watched every fighter walk in with the eyes of a man who was calculating whether he was going to make or lose money tonight. Doyun looked at Jaeho now. Looked down at the cash. Didn't unfold it.

  *Not betting on me. Smart.*

  A kid — couldn't have been older than sixteen — was working his way along the fence collecting cans in a garbage bag, stepping over feet and ducking under arms. He caught Jaeho's eye for a second and made a small face, something between pity and apology, and then moved on.

  Jaeho climbed through the cage entrance and the crowd barely registered him. No announcement. A few heads turned, assessed, looked away.

  He looked across the cage.

  Mantis was already there.

  Late twenties, lean and long, with arms that genuinely did look wrong — too long for the body, elbows carrying natural angles that suggested they'd do damage just resting. He wore Sanda shorts and nothing else, his torso mapped with bruises in every stage of healing, yellowing around the edges. His guard was open-handed, Sanda style, chin slightly down, feet already moving in a slow orbit. A fighter's eyes — not aggressive, not cruel. Just measuring. The way you look at a problem you've already solved.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  His eyes moved over Jaeho. Down. Up. The assessment was over in three seconds.

  He didn't look worried.

  Manager Oh's voice from outside the cage: *"Fight."*

  Mantis came forward without preamble.

  No feinting, no circling, no testing. He'd done this enough times to know that the first thirty seconds told you everything you needed. He threw a jab — quick and sharp, a real jab, the kind that isn't meant to hurt but to find — and before Jaeho had even fully registered the jab was a feint, a low kick connected on his left thigh like a bat swing.

  White pain. Jaeho stumbled sideways, arms flailing for balance.

  The crowd laughed. Not cruelty — just recognition. *There it is. We knew.*

  Jaeho reset. Shook the leg. His thigh was already screaming.

  *Breathe. Four counts. Think.*

  Mantis circled, patient and unhurried, letting Jaeho come back to him. He wasn't performing. He wasn't punishing unnecessarily. He was just working, and working efficiently, and that was worse than anger.

  Another combination: jab — cross — low kick. Same thigh. Jaeho blocked the jab badly, took the cross on the forearm hard enough to numb it, and the kick landed clean on the same spot. The muscle seized. Three more of those and the leg would buckle — he knew it from watching, from hours of Muay Thai footage at two in the morning, watching fighters' stances dissolve from the inside out.

  *Stop reacting. Do something.*

  But thinking wasn't saving him. Mantis was faster, had better technique, had six months on three weeks, and the gap between them wasn't a learning curve — it was a canyon wall.

  Mantis moved in again. His shoulder rotated back. Right cross loading.

  The world stuttered.

  That was the only way Jaeho had ever been able to describe it to himself — a stutter, like a film frame doubled, one moment laid over the next, giving him a ghost image of where the fist was going to be a half-second before it got there. His left shoulder dropped on its own. His head moved right on its own. His body answering information that hadn't arrived yet.

  Mantis's cross passed his cheekbone close enough to pull at the air around his ear.

  Dead silence from the crowd. Half a second of it — genuine, confused silence.

  Even Mantis stopped.

  *There it is,* Jaeho thought, somewhere underneath the adrenaline that was now screaming through every vein in his body. *That's the thing.*

  He'd first felt it in his second fight, when the Busan dock worker had loaded up a haymaker and the world had doubled and he'd moved before he'd decided to move, and the fist had gone somewhere he wasn't anymore. He hadn't known what to do with it then. He'd filed it in the category of *strange things that happen when you're about to die* and not thought further.

  But it had happened again since. Always the same conditions. Danger that was real — not sparring-real, not practice-real, but the kind of danger the body recognizes at the cellular level, the kind that triggers everything evolution built into a human nervous system to prevent death. When that signal hit hard enough, when the adrenaline reached whatever threshold the thing needed—

  The world gave him a frame. Half a second. Maybe less. A ghost image of where the hit was going.

  *I don't understand it. But it's real. Use it.*

  Mantis recalibrated, fast. His easy confidence had cracked — not broken, just fractured. He settled his feet, reassessed, decided on something flashier to end this cleanly. He feinted low and came high with a spinning backfist — fluid, fast, committed. The kind of technique you throw when you're confident enough to risk the rotation.

  The ghost image flickered. Jaeho ducked under it with half a second to spare.

  And then, acting on pure animal panic with no technique behind it, he drove his shoulder into Mantis's ribs and wrapped up his arms in a clinch.

  They hit the chain-link together like a freight collision. The fence bowed. People on the other side stumbled back. The speaker in the corner skipped. The crowd erupted — surprise and chaos and money changing hands in rapid argument.

  Jaeho had Mantis's arms tangled. He had maybe three seconds. Mantis was already twisting, knees searching for his thigh, elbows finding angles.

  *Three seconds. Think. YouTube. Clinch. What breaks a clinch.*

  He knew this. He'd watched it for hours. Pushing away was what the bigger man expected and wanted — it created the space they needed to work. The counterintuitive answer was going *in*. Shifting weight into the rotation instead of resisting it, using their push-back response against them.

  He dropped his hips, shifted hard left, pushed *into* Mantis.

  Mantis's instincts responded exactly the way they were supposed to. He pushed back.

  Jaeho yanked himself sideways and Mantis's own momentum carried him forward and down.

  The takedown was ugly. Neither of them landed clean — both hit the concrete hard, Jaeho's knee skidding raw, his palms taking skin off on the floor. His ribs took an elbow on the way down that knocked the air out of him in a sharp gasp. But when the scramble settled, he was on top, and his forearm was across Mantis's throat.

  Not a choke. Just his weight and his forearm in precisely the wrong place.

  Mantis bucked hard. Twisted. Drove another elbow into Jaeho's ribs — same spot, harder — and the pain was bright and specific and his grip nearly broke. Someone in the crowd was screaming in Chinese, screaming loud enough to hear over everything else.

  The thought came without language, just images: *Sooyeon's face. Dad's hands on the table. Bak Chunsam pouring himself a glass of their water.*

  He held on.

  Twelve seconds.

  Fifteen.

  Mantis's movements became less precise, more frantic. The technique draining out, replaced by desperation.

  Seventeen seconds.

  Mantis tapped the floor. Twice. Hard.

  ---

  Jaeho let go and rolled off and lay on his back on the concrete for two full seconds, staring up at the swaying fluorescent lights.

  His ribs were on fire. His thigh had moved past pain into a deep numbness that he knew would come back as agony in about an hour. His knee was bleeding. His eyebrow had opened up somewhere in the scramble and blood was running in a warm line down his temple and into his ear. His palms felt like he'd dragged them across sandpaper.

  He got up.

  And then — it hit him.

  Not the crowd. Not the noise, which had exploded into chaos and laughter and argument. Something internal. The adrenaline that had been flooding his system dropped away all at once, like a switch thrown, and the absence of it landed like a physical blow. His vision greyed at the edges. His legs went watery. He put a hand on the chain-link to stay standing and the fence swayed under his weight and for a terrible three seconds he thought he was going to fold right there in the middle of the cage in front of everyone.

  *Not here. Don't you dare.*

  He breathed. Four counts in, four counts out, grip tight on the fence, until the grey receded and his legs were solid again. His skull was pounding — a deep, specific ache behind his eyes, as if someone had pressed their thumbs into his eye sockets from inside. That was new. He hadn't noticed it after the first two fights. But those gifts had been smaller, shorter. Tonight he'd ridden the preview twice, back to back, hard.

  *There's a cost,* some cold part of his brain noted, even through the pounding. *Remember that.*

  Mantis was on his feet across the cage. He rolled his neck, touched his throat, and looked at Jaeho with an expression that had travelled through surprise and come out somewhere colder and more professional on the other side. He nodded once — not respect, not a compliment. Just: *that happened. I'm noting it.*

  Then he left without a word.

  Doyun, in the grey tracksuit by the fence, was looking at Jaeho with a different expression now. The cash was still folded in his right hand but his thumb was moving across it thoughtfully. Recalculating.

  The sixteen-year-old kid with the garbage bag had stopped collecting cans and was staring openly, mouth slightly open.

  Manager Oh pushed through the cage entrance counting bills. He held them out to Jaeho without ceremony.

  "YouTube," Oh said. It wasn't a question.

  "YouTube," Jaeho confirmed.

  Oh looked at him for a long moment — not at his face, at something underneath his face, the way experienced men look when they're trying to classify something that doesn't fit the existing categories. Then he pocketed his clipboard.

  "Thursday. Mongolian wrestler. Three hundred thousand."

  Jaeho pressed the bills into his pocket and felt them there, solid and real. "Record?"

  "Fourteen and zero. Name's Gankhuyag. Ninety-three kilos. Nobody's put him on the mat yet." Oh paused. "I told him you were a warm-up."

  "So he won't give me anything."

  "Smart kid." Oh almost smiled. "Come back Thursday."

  ---

  The night air outside hit him like cold water — good cold, the kind that cuts through fog. Seoul at one in the morning, the bridge traffic above rumbling steadily, a convenience store blinking orange across the street. He pressed his back against the outside wall and breathed.

  He pulled the hem of his shirt up and pressed it to his eyebrow, holding pressure, and tilted his head back and looked at the orange-grey Seoul sky that never showed stars.

  Three fights. Three wins. Every single one barely. Every single one leaving him in worse condition than the one before.

  Behind his eyes the headache pulsed, steady and deep. The gift's price. He needed to remember that. Riding the preview once was survivable. Twice back-to-back had nearly put him on the floor. He didn't know what riding it five times would cost him. He didn't know what the limit was, or whether exceeding it was survivable.

  *How do you train a cheat code?*

  He didn't know. He knew three things: it needed genuine mortal fear to activate, it gave him a fraction of a second of foreknowledge, and it got him upright when nothing else could. He didn't know if it could grow. He didn't know if it could be forced. He didn't know what happened at the edges.

  He rolled his neck. Felt it crack — right side, then left. Then he started for the subway.

  Thursday. Ninety-three kilograms. Fourteen unbeaten fights. A man who had never been taken to the mat and who had been told tonight was easy.

  Good, Jaeho thought. *Let him keep thinking that right up until the moment it isn't true anymore.*

  He kept walking. Four counts in. Four counts out. Hands loose at his sides. Head pounding.

  Alive.

  ---

  *Next: Gankhuyag hasn't lost in fourteen fights and has never hit the ground. He's been told Jaeho is a warm-up. But Jaeho just realized the gift has a critical flaw — it shows him where the hit is going. It says nothing about the hit that comes after.*