What Kind of Person Are You?
The man leaning against the counter and drinking coffee. And I saw the truck drivers near the entrance exchange glances.
It was brief, subtle—so subtle a normal person might’ve missed it—but to me now, it was everything.
And where their eyes were headed was obvious.
Elena, sitting across from me.
They’re rattled.
There was a faint flicker of unease in the men’s eyes.
Elena’s condition, which was far better than they’d expected, seemed to have thrown off their calculations.
And that confusion was the only reason they hadn’t rushed us yet.
“Looks like we’re already mixed up in it,” I said.
At my words, Elena turned her head before she realized it and swept her gaze across the diner.
Her eyes widened a fraction. A look of oh, crap flashed across her face, but it was already too late.
That tiny motion.
That was the signal that changed the atmosphere in the diner from taut to deadly.
The big man watching us from the counter pushed off the wall and got to his feet.
I could feel the other three shifting in the corners of my vision, adjusting their posture.
Then the hulking man strode toward us.
His steps were long, his center of gravity low. He wasn’t just big—he knew how to use his body.
He came straight at Elena and reached out without hesitation.
And at that exact moment, I lengthened my breath according to the Soft Mind Method, making it thin and slow.
The faint inner energy pooled deep in my dantian spread lazily through my entire body.
My senses sharpened.
My heart pounded, and adrenaline slammed into my brain.
At the same time, everything around me seemed to slow down unrealistically.
The man’s hand coming toward my face. The ropey muscles rippling over his thick forearm. Even the faint lines of blood vessels beneath the skin.
Everything was grotesquely clear.
Block it first.
Instinctively, I threw out my hand. Of course, it wasn’t just a simple reach.
There was the subtlety of the grappling hand techniques I’d used so often in my past life.
A martial art for seizing the opponent’s joints and pressure points to immobilize them.
Soft, precise movements, like a snake coiling around its prey.
My left hand slid up along the man’s forearm.
Right before his hand could touch Elena’s shoulder, I pressed into the inside of his upper arm.
Tianquan Point. Strike here hard enough, and the neural signals through the entire upper limb are cut off for an instant.
In a flash, my index and middle fingers drove deep into the point.
“······!”
The man’s mouth flew open, but no scream came out.
His whole arm went slack as if the power had been cut, and his shoulder dropped.
The hulking body lost balance and pitched forward.
I stood as I moved, naturally catching him.
With one arm around his back, I eased him toward the chair.
Just enough to make it look like I was helping a drunk stagger into a seat.
“You all right? Hey, stay with me.”
As I said that, I moved quickly and placed a hand on the back of his neck.
Mute Gate Point. The spot where the skull meets the cervical spine.
Thud.
Just once, with the heel of my fist, perfectly placed.
The big man collapsed weakly onto the chair.
The other three, watching from over here, all froze.
It made sense. Their comrade had gone down in barely two or three seconds.
And that tiny gap was the only chance I was going to get.
I shoved off the table and bolted.
***
“Check!”
One of the men near the entrance barked the word and reflexively reached inside his jacket.
A gun.
You’re going to shoot in here?
No. He wasn’t. He couldn’t.
Firing a gun inside this cramped little diner was asking for trouble.
Just as I expected, all three of them came in fast, empty-handed.
From three different angles. Left, front, right. A three-sided pincer attack.
Not bad.
I drew on the forms I’d learned in my past life.
The Tang Clan’s fist techniques, claw techniques, and grappling methods. The most efficient strike points and angles.
My eyes tracked the vital spots almost by reflex.
Philtrum, solar plexus, carotid artery, patellar tendon.
Left first.
I twisted and lunged straight at the man coming in from the left.
Then I immediately thought, Shit.
It was that same speed of mind, that same razor edge of instinct I’d had in my past life.
But I’d forgotten, for a moment, that my body now couldn’t keep up.
A tiny opening of half a second.
The man in front didn’t miss it.
His heavy fist crashed into my left side.
Pow!
“Ghk···.”
Agony ran along my ribs and shot up into my spine.
My teeth clenched on their own.
Damn, that hurts.
But I didn’t have time to show it.
In fact, the pain sharpened my focus.
Give them the part that won’t cripple your movement, then take the vital point.
The instant the man who’d hit my side pulled his arm back for a follow-up strike, I instead slipped inside his reach.
His eyes widened.
He’d expected me to go down from the hit, not charge in after it.
My right hand slid in like a snake along his extended arm.
This time it was the claw technique. Five fingers curved like hooks, seizing the inside of his wrist—Neiguan Point.
Crack.
The joint screamed. A short groan tore out of the man’s throat.
As I twisted the joint upward and forced his upper body to bow, my left knee drove into his solar plexus.
Thunk!
“Ugh······!”
The man folded and dropped like he’d been shut off. Two.
I lifted my head just in time to see the fist of the man charging from the left right in front of my face.
Too late.
I gave up on dodging.
Instead, I tilted my head just enough to make the fist hit my forehead instead of my temple.
Bang!
The impact rang through my skull. It felt like sparks burst in front of my eyes.
But the forehead is the hardest bone on the human body. If anything, his fist had come off worse.
“Fuck!”
While he cursed and clutched his mangled fingers, I was already driving in from the left.
The basic principle behind every martial art of the Tang Clan: avoid the front and attack from the blind side.
The man’s flank opened up.
I joined my fingers and stabbed toward Zhangmen Point.
The entry point on the spleen’s channel, a vital point that triggers pain in the liver region. My fingertips drove exactly into the soft tissue beneath his ribs.
“Graaagh······!”
His eyes rolled back, and he clutched his side with both hands.
His knees gave out, and he crashed to the floor.
Three.
The last man. The one near the bathroom entrance.
He didn’t rush in recklessly. He kept his distance and watched me.
He’s the best one.
He was properly trained.
Low center of gravity, hands up lightly, posture steady.
Even after seeing three of his comrades go down, his eyes never wavered. A professional.
A brief silence settled between us. One second, two···
In that tiny span of time, we read each other’s balance, foot placement, and line of sight.
The man moved first.
From his left leg, a low kick swept toward my knee. Fast and precise.
I managed to step back half a pace and barely evade it, but it was a feint. The moment he drew the leg back, his right fist was already rising toward my chin.
Damn it.
I threw my head back.
The fist grazed my chin. The sound of my teeth clacking echoed in my skull.
But I didn’t take the hit for free.
The instant his arm fully extended and left that tiny opening, I looped my left arm over his.
The core of the grappling hand technique: seize and break.
His elbow bent backward at the wrong angle, and a scream tore out of him.
“ARGH—!”
The moment his posture collapsed under the pain, I drove the edge of my right hand into Renying Point beside his carotid artery.
His eyes lost focus and went slack.
His knees buckled first, then his torso pitched forward.
I caught the falling body and sat him down on the empty chair beside him.
Four.
The diner fell silent.
The men slumped in their chairs looked as though they’d simply drunk too much and passed out.
I was breathing hard, wiping the blood from my mouth with the back of my hand.
My side throbbed. My forehead tingled, and my jaw ached where it had been grazed.
Still, it didn’t feel like anything was broken. Probably.
This isn’t over yet.
Two were still outside.
They might’ve noticed the commotion inside, or they might not have.
Either way, striking first would be to my advantage.
My heart felt like it might burst from the strain of all that movement.
Heat flooded through me, but my mind was colder than ever.
Even in that short span, the situation around me had been sorted and filed away in my head.
Two outside. One by the pickup in the lot. One near the back door.
It felt like I’d gone back to my old life.
Steadying the breath that had climbed all the way to my throat, I opened the diner door.
From here on out, it was a hunt.
And hunting people was what I had been best at in my past life.
***
Outside the diner, the parking lot was miserably dark.
The desert night air cooled the sweat on my cheeks to a chill.
I slipped into the darkness beyond the reach of the diner’s lights.
Hold your breath. Erase your presence.
Those were the first things I always did before an assassination, back when I was Dok-ryeong.
I lowered my breathing and heartbeat to the absolute minimum, erasing the very fact that I existed.
Carefully adjusting my breath through the Soft Mind Method, I moved through the darkness.
If I could use movement arts, that’d be great...
Right then, I wanted Thunder-chasing Body more than anything.
The Tang Clan’s secret movement technique, capable of explosive speed in a split second at the cost of a massive drain on inner force.
With the pitiful inner strength I had now, I couldn’t even perform it properly.
Still, I can imitate the principles.
Shift your weight from the outside of the foot to the inside, minimizing friction against the ground.
Shorten your stride, ride the flow of the air, and move fast.
I spotted the man standing beside the pickup truck, smoking a cigarette.
He was positioned to watch the diner, but since he hadn’t heard anything loud from inside, he still seemed unaware that something had gone wrong.
Three meters behind him.
Two meters.
One meter.
The man started to turn, sensing something at last.
In that instant, I was already at his back.
My left hand clamped over his mouth while my right seized the pressure point between his neck and shoulder.
Fengchi Point, between the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid. Pressure there and consciousness vanishes in an instant.
I poured every last thread of remaining inner energy into my fingertips.
The man convulsed once violently, then went limp. Not a sound escaped him.
I laid him down beside the truck as quietly as I could.
Five.
The last one. Near the back door of the building.
I rounded the diner and headed for the rear.
The silhouette of the last man standing beside the back door came into view.
He was wearing earbuds.
He’d been trying to contact the others inside, and with no reply, he was growing more and more restless.
The man took a step toward the back door and muttered, “Alpha, status.”
Of course, there was no answer.
I saw him reach into his jacket as if to draw his gun.
This time, I didn’t have time to be patient.
I closed the distance from behind and grabbed the wrist holding the gun.
Before the weapon could even hit the ground, I twisted his arm behind him and wrenched it upward, then slammed the heel of my right hand into the back of his neck, into the Mute Gate Point.
The man dropped without even managing a groan.
Six.
I looked down at the man sprawled on the ground and took a moment to catch my breath.
Every muscle in my body felt like it was screaming. My hands were shaking uncontrollably.
That was the price of forcing both inner energy and muscle beyond their limit.
And yet my senses were still razor sharp.
After listening to the sounds and feeling the presence around me for a moment, I let out a short breath.
That should be everyone.
The desert night wind blew past.
The dry, cold air was already cooling the sweat on my skin.
I trudged back toward the diner’s front entrance.
Through the glass door, the diner inside looked quiet.
***
Elena hadn’t moved an inch from her seat.
She had seen everything.
From beginning to end.
The instant the enemy reached for her.
The man’s hand sliding like a snake.
After that, it became a blur so fast her eyes could barely follow it.
In the time it took the hulking attacker to go limp and collapse onto the chair without a single scream, barely two seconds had passed.
What came after that felt even more unreal.
Three men attacked at once, and the man somehow read every movement and slipped between them with impossible precision.
He took hits, but he didn’t go down. Instead, he fought with ruthless focus, targeting nothing but the enemy’s vital points.
Honestly, it was a little grotesque.
It felt like watching an action movie where every beat was perfectly choreographed.
And Elena knew exactly how impossible that was.
Even to her—someone professionally trained by the CIA—what she was seeing was far beyond a man who simply knew how to fight well.
It was the level of combat skill only someone who understood the human body and its pressure points inside and out could display.
The kind of movement even elite special operators rarely showed.
This guy’s a civilian?
That was nonsense.
The man left the diner, and came back in less than five minutes later.
In that short span, he had finished off the two outside as well.
Soon the diner door opened, and the man came back inside.
His T-shirt was a mess. Blood trailed from his split lip. And one hand was pressed lightly against his left side.
But what struck Elena hardest wasn’t his condition.
It was the cold, still look in his eyes—the complete absence of emotional disturbance.
He didn’t look like a man who had just brutally incapacitated several people.
And the killing intent coming off him...
It was the kind of presence that would make even someone like her, who was used to such things, feel a chill crawl down her spine.
“You··· what kind of person are you?” Elena asked before she could stop herself.
Her voice was trembling.
At that moment, his expression changed as if by magic.
He let out a long sigh, suddenly looking exhausted, and collapsed back into his chair.
Then he grabbed his side, made a face, and answered flatly, “Just a traveling Korean medicine doctor.”
Even he seemed to think that was ridiculous.
He gave a snort of laughter and rubbed at the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.