The city glowed like a sick constellation.
From the narrow alley where she stood, San could see the neon signs of the main avenue reflected on the wet asphalt. Signs flickered blue, pink, white, promising fried chicken, karaoke rooms, all-night massages. Buses rumbled past farther away, heavy with exhausted passengers, while yellow taxis slid like impatient insects under the fine rain.
Here, though, the light barely reached.
The alley was wedged between two aging buildings in Gwanak-gu, a working-class district in the south of the city. The walls were covered with torn posters, graffiti in Korean and English, and damp stains that formed unsettling shapes. The air smelled of cold frying oil, cigarettes, and half-full garbage bags.
San liked places like this.
Not because they were pleasant.
But because they looked like what she had become: a scrap of night wedged between two façades that were far too bright.
She raised her eyes to the building that loomed over the alley.
Four stories, brick façade, air conditioners clinging beneath the windows like pale growths. A dim, dirty light leaked through the curtains of a few apartments. The rest were already asleep, or pretending not to see.
"Apartment 403."
Akio's voice crackled in her earpiece, punctuated by the faint patter of rain on the roof of the car where he was waiting.
"He came home twenty minutes ago. Alone. You've got a clear shot."
San nodded, even though she knew he couldn't see her.
Her hand went automatically to her neck, where the scar still ran, thin and pale, beneath the collar of her jacket. Twenty-one years hadn't erased anything. The doctors had done what they could: stitches, bandages, medication. The rest, Akio had taken care of.
He had taken the emptiness they'd left inside her and filled it with things much harder than fear.
San stepped out from the shadow of the doorway and crossed the alley. Her sneakers soaked up more water than they avoided, but she didn't slow down. She entered the building's lobby and pushed the glass door, which resisted weakly before giving way with a squeak.
The smell changed.
Here, it smelled of cheap disinfectant, fermented cabbage, dust. A sickly light spilled from a ceiling fixture clogged with dead flies. To her right, an old elevator with dented doors. In front of her, the stairs.
"Take the stairs," Akio ordered in her ear. "No need to attract attention."
She allowed herself a smile with no warmth in it.
Akio had always liked those little technical touches, those discreet details that made him such a valuable asset to the Gwanak Pa.
The gang controlled a good part of the neighborhood: bars, illegal gambling dens, loan-sharking, unofficial "security." Not one of the big monsters of the Korean underworld, not yet. But solid enough that its name circulated in the alleys, whispered under people's breath.
San wasn't officially part of it. No clan tattoo, no seat at a smoke-filled table. She wasn't a "sister" or a "junior."
She was something else.
A free electron that people sometimes glimpsed hanging around the training room. But she never spoke, never answered anyone. A fleeting shadow that slipped through cracks only to vanish again.
The young woman climbed the stairs two at a time, noiselessly.
First floor.
Second.
Third.
On each landing, she heard fragments of the lives the city spat back out late at night: a TV blaring a drama, a baby crying, a couple arguing behind a door, muffled laughter in another apartment. Seoul never really slept. It just changed frequency.
On the fourth floor, the hallway was darker.
A single lightbulb hung at the far end, leaving the middle of the corridor almost invisible. Shoes lined up outside doors: slippers, sneakers, boots. A crushed cardboard box served as an improvised trash can beside 401.
403.
San stopped in front of the door. The gold metal number was half peeled off.
"Jin-soo isn't on his guard," Akio commented. "He thinks we've got bigger problems to deal with. He's wrong."
He had been wrong a lot, lately. That explained San's presence.
She pulled a small black case from the inside pocket of her jacket. Inside, three thin picks, a bump key, a polished piece of metal. Her movements were precise, almost mechanical. The lock resisted for four seconds. Then yielded with a soft click.
The young woman opened the door just enough to slip her head through. The apartment was bathed in bluish light. The TV blared a variety show where overexcited idols were laughing far too loudly. The smell of cold tobacco and spilled soju overwhelmed that of laundry detergent. A fan turned lazily on the ceiling, stirring air that was already stale.
She slid inside and closed the door quietly behind her. The corridor was narrow. To the left, the kitchen, tiny, overflowing with dirty dishes and instant ramen cups piled on the counter. To the right, a closed door, probably the bedroom. At the back, the living room, washed in the flickering light from the television.
The target was there.
Baek Jin-soo, former logistics man for the Gwanak Pa, had thought he was clever enough to divert weapons and resell them to another clan. They had found the crates. They hadn't found all the money. Orders were orders.
San didn't need to know the rest.
She moved to the living room doorway, pressed herself briefly against the wall to observe. The man was slumped on the couch, one hand buried in an open bag of chips, the other clutching a glass. His greasy hair clung to his forehead. On the coffee table: three empty soju bottles, an overflowing ashtray, a handgun lying next to the remote control.
It was almost funny how people always believed danger would show up with noise and sudden movements.
San preferred silence.
She drew her knife. The short blade caught the light from the screen for an instant before disappearing again in the shadow of her hand. She inhaled once. Slowly. Then she moved.
In three steps, she was behind the couch. And in one motion, her left hand clamped over the man's mouth, crushing his cry against his teeth. Her right hand sliced clean across his throat, where the skin was softest.
Blood gushed hot over her fingers. Jin-soo grabbed at her arm, his nails digging into the fabric, trying to wrench himself free. His legs kicked, striking the table; the bottles rattled and rolled to the floor.
San tightened her grip, pinning him against the back of the couch. The wet gurgling sound filling the room seemed feeble next to the canned laughter of the TV show.
A few seconds were enough. His body slackened. His hand slipped from her arm. His eyes stayed open, fixed on the flickering light of the screen.
San pulled out the blade, then let the man sag onto his side. She wiped the knife on his shirt in a quick, automatic gesture before sheathing it. Then she straightened, looking over the scene with a strange detachment, as if everything were happening behind glass.
The red on the carpet, the slowly spreading pool, reminded her of another living room. Another night. Another red. But that memory stayed far away, as if someone had drowned it in water too dark for her to make out its shape.
"It's done," she said at last, her voice steady.
In her earpiece, Akio exhaled, a sound that almost resembled a smile.
"Still as clean as ever. Get out of there," he added quickly. "We don't want anyone seeing us hanging around."
San crossed the apartment, stepping around the growing pool, reset the lock and slipped out in silence. In the hallway, nothing had changed. A door opened farther away, releasing the smell of soup and soap. An old woman stepped out with a trash bag, her head low. She didn't see the figure already gliding toward the stairs.
Outside, the rain had picked up. The drops drummed on the asphalt, a constant noise that drowned out the rest of the city. Signs reflected on the ground in puddles of color. At the end of the alley, a black car waited, engine running, windows tinted. Condensation blurred the edges of the windshield like a faint halo.
San got into the back without a word.
Akio half turned toward her. The neon lights outside split his face into shards of light and shadow. Of course he had aged since the hospital. His features a little more marked, a few lines at the corners of his eyes—but his gaze was the same: dark, focused, calculating.
"Clean and fast," he repeated, pushing his glasses up in a habitual gesture. "The boss is going to love it."
She didn't answer.
That kind of compliment didn't require a response.
The car pulled away slowly, gliding out of the alley like a docile shadow. The wipers swept the rain aside in a hypnotic motion, revealing for a second at a time the nocturnal universe of Seoul: neon signs, night buses, silhouettes hurrying by under transparent umbrellas.
San watched the windshield, but her gaze seemed to cut through the colored reflections. It was as if she were looking at a city she would never truly belong to.
Akio kept darting quick glances in the rearview mirror, as if trying to guess what might be stirring behind her unmoved expression. He himself didn't stand out only because of his name—in this car, his face was also a quiet reminder of their origins. Their features did not quite match those of the neighborhood. Their accent, even after years here, had never gone completely unnoticed.
"You know… something crossed my mind earlier," he said.
His tone wasn't emphatic; it sounded almost like he was talking to himself.
"The people in the Gwanak Pa still call us 'the Japanese.' It's been over twenty years, and it's still like we just got here."
San didn't answer. She saw no reason to. So he talked more, as he often did when his mind was stirring up old things.
"You were too young to understand what that meant back then," he went on. "But even before… before everything happened, we weren't exactly a normal family."
He shook his head, a humorless smile tugging at his mouth.
"Our father was not the kind who pretended."
The rain beat harder against the windshield. Akio continued:
"We lived in Korea, but he refused to fit in. Every part of him was Japanese and he wanted it to show. He spoke to us in Japanese, thought in Japanese… He couldn't stand the idea of me hanging out with Koreans."
A short laugh escaped him.
"So imagine what he thought when he found out I was already involved with guys from the Gwanak Pa at fourteen."
San turned her head slightly, almost imperceptibly. Her brother had this irritating habit of digging up old stories, more for himself and his conscience than for her.
Akio noticed, but chose to go on.
"You remember that night?" He paused. "No… of course you don't. You were far too young to remember the moment Father found out I was spending time with the gang. He waited for me in the living room. He knew I was with those guys. I was coming home late, reeking of alcohol from back-alley bars, of smoke… I tried to hide it, but he wasn't stupid."
A silence.
"What he couldn't stand wasn't that I was running with a Korean gang. It was that I was slipping out of his grasp."
The click of the turn signal ticked softly as he turned into a darker street.
"He hit me that night. For the first time. Not because I'd put him in danger. Not because I was fourteen and exposing myself to things I shouldn't even have seen."
San stayed still, her breathing barely perceptible.
"I left," Akio went on. "Not for long, just a few weeks. But long enough for him to make up his mind. You remember how he was? Inflexible?"
He shot another glance at the mirror. This time there was an old bitterness in his eyes.
"He kept you away from me. Arranged things so our paths crossed as little as possible. As if I'd become a danger to you. As if just existing near him meant he had to protect you from me."
San didn't move. Her face showed nothing. Akio was stirring up past memories that belonged only to him.
"I hardly saw you grow up, San. Not because I didn't want to. Because he forbade it. Because he thought I'd drag you down the same slope as me."
He let out a short, sad laugh.
"As if I had any idea what I was doing back then."
The car rolled past a convenience store blazing with light. Two high schoolers were laughing by the drinks vending machines. Akio watched them for a moment before continuing.
"I was angry. I was stupid. And I had no discipline. The Gwanak Pa was the only thing that made me feel like I existed somewhere. Not because it was noble or beautiful. But because they looked at me like I could be useful."
He gave her a quick sideways glance.
"You didn't need that at six. You had a family. You had him. You had…"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
Silence. A real one. The kind where all you hear is water running down the glass.
"When they told me you were the only survivor…" His voice dropped. "I think I froze for a whole minute. A full minute trying to understand why you, why then, why that."
His fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
"You know what I swore to myself?" he asked. "That if I hadn't been able to be your big brother before… I'd become one after. Whatever it cost. Whatever it meant."
A brief smile, carrying a brutal kind of affection.
"The Gwanak Pa took us in because we had nowhere to go. But me…"
He turned again. The car slid into a drier street where the neon lights still reflected the recent rain.
"…I chose to bring you into it because I had no intention of leaving you behind anymore, and because I knew there were bigger plans for us than whatever that house could have given."
He looked straight at the road.
"You don't talk much, San," he added. "You've never needed to. You listen. You watch. You learn. And because of that, you and I… we stand a chance of getting higher than anyone else in this gang."
He inhaled, as if to chase away that thick block of memory clogging his thoughts.
"Here, the Koreans will never see us as one of them. Good. That means we won't owe them anything. And it means, above all… that we'll be free to build our own place."
The car kept gliding through the night, carrying with it two Japanese silhouettes that had been kept apart too often—and that now had nothing left but the Gwanak Pa as their anchor point.
The car drove deeper into Gwanak-gu. This was no longer bright, buzzing Seoul, with its wide display windows and glass-front towers. It was another city, older, grayer, where buildings seemed to bend beneath their own fatigue. Signs in hangeul flickered now and then like eyelids struggling to stay open. The sidewalks shone with damp, and the air had that familiar smell: a mix of stale frying oil, rain, and stale tobacco.
The car stopped in front of the renovated warehouse. From the outside, nothing hinted that it was the Gwanak Pa's den. A dull façade, a few windows barred with metal, a flickering streetlamp: from the street, it looked more like an abandoned workshop than a headquarters.
San got out and studied the gray façade, with no sign above the door. The lamps above the entrance sputtered with a regular buzz, like an artificial heartbeat.
Two men stood guard, shoulders massive under their black jackets. When they saw Akio, one of them gave a slight nod and pulled the sliding door open. A wave of dense air rolled out, thick with sweat, leather, dried blood, and smoke.
The young woman stepped inside.
The first room was large, lit by fluorescent tubes that hummed faintly. A boxing ring stood in the middle, surrounded by worn ropes. Several punching bags hung from the ceiling, swinging under the repeated blows of two men who trained without pause. The dull thuds of impact echoed through the space like a monotonous drum.
It was a boxing gym.
Officially.
Gloves abandoned on a bench, damp towels, a bucket of water already clouded with sweat—everything was there. To the neighbors, the place was just a shady sports club, open at odd hours.
But the men training here didn't have the build of amateurs.
Nor did they move like them.
One of them stopped as San passed in front of him, gloves still raised. He looked at her as if she didn't belong in that setting. Or perhaps as if she belonged there far too well.
"She never talks?" he asked under his breath, not even trying to be discreet.
"You know she doesn't," another replied with a shrug.
Then, in a darker murmur:
"She creeps me out."
Akio walked on without slowing, but San registered every stare. Heavy stares. Stares trying to pierce through her silence and blank expression. Some men feared her. Others despised her. All of them watched her.
At the back of the room, behind the ring, the cover story fell apart.
The punching bags gave way to a long table cluttered with bills, glasses, overflowing ashtrays. A television hissed, badly tuned, playing a baseball game. Three men were in the middle of an improvised poker hand. Thick smoke hung under the lamps, giving the air a yellowish, almost dirty tint.
"Here come the Japanese," grumbled a man near the poker table.
He had a square jaw, bloodshot eyes, a cigarette wedged between two yellowed fingers. The word "Japanese" wasn't quite an insult, but it was far from neutral. It was underlined. Like a reminder. Like an invisible border.
Akio didn't seem bothered.
He answered with a courteous smile, almost aristocratic in its politeness.
"Nice of you to notice us, Sung-won."
He gestured lightly toward the table.
"Looks like you lost again."
The men around the table traded muffled chuckles.
Sung-won grimaced.
"You're getting pretty cozy in here, huh?"
His gaze slid slowly toward San, as if her silence were a personal offense.
"Especially her. The little shadow. She works well… but no one ever knows what's going on in her head."
Another man added, in an undertone:
"Maybe there's nothing going on in there."
This time, several laughs rang out. Nervous laughs more than mocking ones. Because no one ever laughed entirely at ease around San.
She didn't react.
Not a blink.
Not a twitch.
She didn't even look at them.
That was exactly what made her seem like she didn't quite exist in the same way they did. A presence too straight. Too quiet. Too unshakable.
An anomaly in a world already built on anomalies.
Akio leaned slightly toward Sung-won, still smiling, though his eyes had grown noticeably darker.
"That's what bothers you, isn't it?" he murmured.
A whisper.
"She's hard to read. And even harder to control."
Their eyes met.
A few men stopped playing, just for a moment.
"We just like to know who we're dealing with," Sung-won muttered.
Akio nodded, mock understanding on his face.
"And it annoys you, I guess."
He slipped his hands into his pockets.
"Shame for you. She's already… very useful where she is."
The words hung in the air, ambiguous.
"Useful" could mean many things.
The men exchanged looks. The information—or rather, the insinuation—sank into them like a splinter of glass.
Useful to whom?
Useful for what?
And why did this brother keep her so close?
Akio walked past them and moved away from the group as if the conversation were of no importance. Then he turned to San and gave her a brief nod.
"Come on. The boss wants to see you."
She followed.
Crossing the room, she could feel the gazes on her back. Not desire, not admiration—just that instinctive wariness reserved for things that don't fit into any known category. Some men whispered, others frowned. A third looked away, the way you do when you'd rather not understand something.
San walked on, unbothered.
As if their judgments slid off her without touching her. As if she weren't made of the same material as the others.
They arrived at a metal door hidden behind a sliding panel. Akio opened it easily, revealing a staircase leading down into the basement.
The real HQ.
Down there, the air was colder.
Drier.
More serious.
A meeting room occupied the main space, with a long wooden table, rows of chairs, stacks of files, and maps of the neighborhood pinned along the walls. Some photos were annotated, a few crossed out with red marker. The atmosphere was one of calculation. Strategy. Power.
Farther on, a second door, massive, soundproof.
Two guards stood in front of it.
Motionless.
Akio slowed down and gave them a small nod.
The basement already felt different from the rest of the building. But behind that door—this heavy sheet of insulated metal—the air shifted again. It grew denser. Slower.
As if every particle knew that here, a single word could cost a life.
Akio went in first. San followed, with the same fluid, silent motion that always characterized her.
The room San stepped into wasn't large, but it imposed a silence even the discreet hum of the ventilation didn't dare disturb. No smoke, no music, no footsteps. Nothing but that particular smell: polished wood, leather, and a faint cologne that brought to mind a law office more than a criminal's lair.
The boss's desk was impeccably tidy. Too tidy. Every folder aligned with almost obsessive precision. A black pen rested perfectly horizontal, parallel to the edge of the table. Two armchairs faced each other: the boss's, large and imposing, and the visitors', lower, deliberately less comfortable.
San could feel the difference in height the moment she walked in, even without sitting down.
Behind the desk, the boss of the Gwanak Pa slowly lifted his head.
Yun Seong-min was in his fifties, but he wore his years like a weight he himself had chosen. Tall, broad-shouldered, he radiated that quiet authority found in men who no longer have anything to prove. His posture was straight, kept in line by an old discipline—not the rigid kind of a soldier, but that of a predator who never wastes a movement.
His face was marked not by fatigue, but by experience:
fine creases of distrust at the corners of his eyes;
high cheekbones, a straight nose, a slightly square jaw that had lost none of its strength.
His eyes, above all, drew attention:
cold, dark, razor-sharp, as if they knew how to dissect a man at first glance.
Eyes of authority.
Eyes of judgment.
His hair, flecked with gray, was combed straight back without a single strand out of place; the silver at his temples only hardened his features further. He wore a dark coat over a perfectly tailored suit, completely custom, without a visible logo. Nothing about him was flashy, but wealth clung to him all the same.
He had the look of a man who could have become a politician, a CEO, or a judge… and who had chosen, or been forced, to become a gang leader instead.
A man shaped as much by the choices of others as by his own.
His gaze moved from Akio to San.
He didn't say a word.
No greeting.
Not even a nod.
It was a test. An old boss's test: weighing discomfort, silence, presence.
Akio lowered his head slightly.
"Yun Seong-min."
San stood straight, hands clasped behind her back, her face perfectly blank.
Yun Seong-min studied Akio for a long moment, then focused fully on San, as if she were a piece of equipment he was evaluating.
His gaze betrayed no emotion. No distrust. No admiration. No fear.
Only a cold curiosity.
"Congratulations on completing your mission," he said at last.
His voice was low, muffled, yet carried a natural authority, the kind that never needs to rise to be obeyed.
Akio gave a brief nod.
"She doesn't talk much," he pointed out, unbothered.
"I know," Seong-min replied.
Silence.
Heavy.
Deep.
San did not look away. She held the leader's gaze without flinching, without moving, without the slightest sign of impatience or nervousness.
It was that absence of reaction that made Seong-min lean back slightly in his chair.
He always expected some kind of movement. A blink. A hesitation.
As usual, he got nothing.
He placed both hands on the desk.
"People say a lot of things about you, San, now that you've been here this long," he said calmly.
His tone was neither threatening nor kind—just factual.
"That no one ever knows if you're listening or judging. If you understand, or if you're ignoring everything. Personally, I think you understand perfectly."
San remained silent.
Most recruits would have been shaking.
Others would have started talking, stammering, trying to justify themselves.
Not her.
She simply existed.
Present.
Focused.
Almost mechanical—and yet unnervingly alive in her stillness.
Seong-min turned his head slightly toward Akio.
"You confirm she's reliable," he stated.
"Yes, Boss."
"And that she never fails you."
"Never. Not on any mission she's been given."
The gang leader drummed his index finger lightly on the wood. Slowly. Deliberately. A thought-out rhythm.
"You lean on her a lot."
It wasn't a question.
It was an observation… and a warning.
Akio stayed perfectly still, but his eyes grew more serious.
"I lean on what works," he replied. "And we're at your disposal."
A faint smile tugged at the edge of Seong-min's mouth.
"People who can kill without hesitation attract attention," he said. "People who can kill without emotion… attract suspicion."
San didn't react.
So Seong-min rose to his feet. His movements were slow, controlled, as if he refused to create any unnecessary noise. He walked around the desk and stopped in front of her, hands clasped behind his back.
He stood close enough that she could smell the stale tobacco on his coat.
"I want to understand, San," he murmured. "Ever since you came here, you've kept your distance from everyone. What are you looking for?"
Silence.
He tilted his head slightly, studying every detail of her face.
"Money?"
Nothing.
"Loyalty?"
Still nothing.
"Revenge?"
A barely perceptible flicker in San's eyes. A tiny shadow. An almost invisible tremor.
But a man like Yun Seong-min saw everything.
His lips curved just a little.
"Interesting."
He stepped back and returned to his chair. His gaze sharpened.
"Akio."
"Yes?"
"Don't you ever lose control of that."
Akio bowed his head, without arguing.
"I don't intend to."
"Good."
Seong-min slid a file toward the edge of the desk.
"I have something for you. But not tonight. First I want to test her… behavior."
He looked at San one last time, the way one might examine a rare animal.
"The quietest tools are often the most dangerous."
Then he made a brief gesture with his hand.
"San, you can go. Akio, stay. I need a word."
Akio bowed, while San stepped back, her movement perfectly controlled, almost military, before heading for the door.
She stood there for a long moment, motionless, under the weight of the two guards' wary stares. She didn't care. She was used to it.
Eventually, the office door opened and her brother's silhouette appeared. He pushed his glasses up his nose with a finger and drew a deep breath, as if he were leaving a pressurized chamber. San, as always, didn't show anything; she still looked like a figure crossing a room she never truly belonged to.
They had barely gone a few steps when the boss's voice rang out behind them, calm and precise:
"Akio."
The two guards stepped aside at once, and one of them turned the handle. The door swung back open without a creak. Seong-min was still behind his desk, now standing, hands clasped behind his back. He studied San for a long moment before saying:
"Take her back upstairs."
He paused briefly, then added in a slow, almost gentle tone:
"I want to see with my own eyes."
He hadn't raised his voice, but the order had the sharpness of a blade.
Akio inclined his head.
"Yes, Boss."
The boxing gym swallowed them up again, with its smell of sweat, leather, and stale tobacco. Conversations died the second they appeared. A few men exchanged uneasy looks; the siblings didn't usually linger among them.
Akio didn't stop. He walked straight to the ring, then turned toward the fighters.
"Off. Now," he said simply.
They obeyed at once. The background hum of the room faded; even the poker players leaned forward to see what was about to happen.
San followed Akio, without questions, without slowing, without the slightest hint of hesitation. She stepped into the ring with an almost unsettling calm.
Only then did Yun Seong-min appear beside the ropes, and every sound in the room cut off.
"Akio," he said, his voice carrying without a shout. "Pick a man. Any man."
Akio turned toward the room under his sister's attentive gaze. Eyes dropped. Some men pretended to tidy their gloves, others to retighten their wraps, as if the mere idea of the test made them want to vanish.
Then the silence filled with a single name.
"Min-jae."
A massive man with a tight topknot and scarred forearms rose from the poker table. He hadn't earned his reputation by luck: he was one of the most brutal in the gang, but also one of the most disciplined.
He grabbed his knife—a short, matte steel blade sharpened with near-craftsmanship care—and climbed into the ring without a word.
"San," Seong-min called from beside the ropes, "I want you to stay still. Completely still."
She raised her chin slightly, the movement so small it could have passed for a change in the light. But it was an answer. An acceptance.
Min-jae approached and glanced quickly at his boss, then nodded. He rolled the blade between his fingers, let it glide against his thumb to test the edge, then took his stance in front of her.
The silence grew almost tangible.
You could have heard a pin drop.
"Don't move," Seong-min repeated.
Min-jae struck.
The blade sliced through the air in a precise, controlled, dangerous motion. It stopped less than a centimeter from San's skin, right where the scar disappeared under her collar.
She didn't flinch.
Not a twitch.
Not a shorter breath.
So Min-jae went on.
Faster. Closer. Harder.
Each strike stopped a fraction of a second before impact. Each movement demanded absolute control from her. And each time, she gave the same answer:
Nothing. A perfect emptiness. Obedience so complete it became unsettling.
The first time someone had told her "Don't move," she'd been six years old.
She hadn't been in a ring, but in a dark, tiny room, knees scraped, eyes swollen with tears.
A man who reeked of cigarettes had been slapping her cheeks, again and again.
"If you move, we start over."
She moved.
So they started over.
The next day, the hands were replaced by a stick. Then the stick by a knife that was stopped just before touching her skin. Every time, her breathing quickened, her heart pounded, the tears flowed.
"You want to die like your parents? Then don't cry. Don't move."
One day, finally, nothing came.
No tears.
No scream.
Her small muscles learned to lock up on their own.
The man had nodded, almost satisfied.
"There," he had said. "Now you're becoming useful."
Min-jae's blade rose again, tracing a bright arc beneath the flickering neon—only this time, he left a thin line of blood running down San's cheek.
He attacked faster and faster, as if violence had become a language he spoke without thinking. The strikes followed one another, precise, controlled. Sometimes they nicked her, sometimes not. Her arms, her stomach, her neck.
She remained still. Almost inhumanly so. Her gaze fixed straight ahead, the muscles beneath her dark shirt smooth and steady.
Min-jae tried one last feint: a flick of the wrist meant to surprise her, to break the pattern. She didn't react any more than before.
Yun Seong-min leaned farther over the taut rope of the ring, like an ancient judge, eyes burning with focus. He had been watching San for a long time without a word, without a gesture, as if gauging the exact tension of a bow.
Then he spoke.
One word. One order.
"Attack."
The word slipped into the air, calm, almost delicate. But San heard it like a crack of a whip.
The test flipped in an instant.
Without a twitch, without even glancing at Min-jae, without the slightest hesitation, she moved—for the first time since the exercise had begun. Her body reacted before anyone could understand what was happening.
In a single breath, she pivoted: her foot slid over the canvas, her hand shot toward Min-jae's wrist. Her fingers clamped down on his flesh like a vise. The blade slipped free at once and clattered onto the ring with a muffled sound.
Min-jae didn't have time to protest, or even react. She shoved him back with a clean, sharp motion, powered by training so old her body seemed to know the rhythm by instinct.
She followed through.
First impact: the edge of her hand striking his throat—controlled, but brutal.
Second impact: her knee driving up into his ribs, not quite hard enough to break them.
Third impact: a forearm blow that sent Min-jae staggering backward several steps, arms raised by reflex.
He was breathing hard. Very hard. As if the air itself had turned thick.
San didn't seem to have breathed at all.
She froze again, one arm still slightly raised, ready to continue… or to stop.
Waiting for the next command.
The entire room had gone still.
Even the poker players, accustomed to violence, were dead silent. Some held their hands suspended over their chips. Others clenched their jaws, uneasy without knowing why.
Akio wasn't looking at Min-jae.
He was looking at San.
As if what she had just done confirmed something inside him—something very old, very dark.
Min-jae wiped the corner of his mouth, where a thin thread of blood had begun to show. He tried to laugh, but his voice shook slightly.
"Not bad, little shadow. Not bad. I never saw you coming."
From the ropes, Yun Seong-min answered in a neutral tone:
"That's normal. She only reacts when she's told to."
San still didn't move.
She stood exactly where her last blow had left her, like a machine waiting for a new instruction.
Seong-min watched her for a long moment.
Then he said, still calm:
"That's enough."
Only then did San slowly lower her arm.
Her expression hadn't changed.
Nor had her breathing.
She stepped out of the ring with the same controlled fluency, while the other members of the gang instinctively moved aside, as if her body emitted an invisible warning.
Akio's gaze followed her, dark eyes lit with a glint no one else understood—a mixture of pride, ownership, and perhaps something else.
Sung-won finally muttered:
"That's not a girl. That's a tool. The boss's tool."
Akio leaned toward him, low enough that only Sung-won and San could hear:
"No. She's mine."
An even colder silence crashed down over the room.
And San said nothing.
Because for her, there was nothing to say.
There was only an order.
Then another.
Then the void.
Day broke without softness. A flat, gray sky smothered Seoul under a pale light. In the tiny room San occupied—a nearly empty space where only a futon, a metal locker and a too-narrow window hinted at human life—she woke before dawn, as always.
She didn't stretch. She didn't sigh.
The cold floor greeted her bare feet. She crossed the room and stopped in front of the mirror hanging on the locker door. The glass, cracked in one corner, reflected her face with an almost intentional lack of precision.
She ran a hand through her dark bob, perfectly cut so the straight ends stopped just above her shoulders. Her smooth fringe fell over her eyes for a moment before she pushed it back with her fingers. In the half-light, that straight line gave her an almost childlike look… until you saw her eyes.
Her black eyes held no trace of turmoil, hard as polished glass.
They reflected nothing.
Asked for nothing.
When she lifted her chin slightly, she caught sight of the scar that ran along the right side of her neck: a pale, thin mark, almost delicate in appearance, but cutting through her skin like a line of fate that could never be erased. She didn't linger on it; it wasn't a memory, just a fact. Like the faint pink burn along her right arm, where the fire had licked her skin twenty years earlier.
She tied her hair back into a low ponytail, leaving the scar visible simply because she had never seen a reason to conceal it. The skin of her neck stretched a little, accentuating the irregular shape of the mark.
Then she pulled on her dark pants, her fitted black shirt, and her light boots. Every movement was plain, precise. No hesitation. No extended pause before the mirror.
When she stepped out of the room, her silhouette had regained that mechanical calm, that silent presence that seemed to absorb all the air around her.
Akio was waiting in the hallway, as usual. He lifted his gaze to her, briefly taking in the dark fringe, the scar, her upright posture—as if mentally ticking off an invisible list.
"You're ready," he said.
She nodded.
Barely.
"Seong-min wants to see you," he added.
They descended the stairs in a near-religious silence.
The warehouse, still half-asleep, bore the traces of last night's chaos: motionless punching bags, full ashtrays, scattered playing cards. As if violence had simply closed its eyes for a few hours.
The basement door was already open. The two guards stepped aside.
San walked into the room alone as they shut the heavy door behind her.
Yun Seong-min sat there, fingers steepled under his chin, watching the young woman with an intensity that dissolved all unnecessary words.
"San," he said at last. "I have a delicate mission for you."
He placed a closed file in front of him.
"I'll give you the details later," he went on. "But know one thing: what you do today… will determine your place here."
San didn't move.
The scar on her neck, caught in the desk lamp's light, looked like a straight line drawn toward her future.