The Farm’s Pigs (2)
I climbed onto the mat.
Then I lowered my center of gravity and let out a long breath.
I could feel the faint current of inner energy rising from my dantian and spreading through my body.
“Hoo···.”
The man was loosening his shoulders in earnest now, too.
His expression was still bored, but his toes had turned slightly outward. He’d settled into a stance with his weight evenly distributed across both feet. Even his eyes had changed.
Crack!
He moved first.
A left jab shot straight for my chin.
Short, fast, clean—no wasted motion at all.
Whoosh.
I slipped back half a step with easy grace.
Just as the jab brushed past my nose, his right foot came up. A low kick aimed at my knee.
I had no choice but to pull back a little farther and open the distance again.
He’s pretty good.
There was almost no gap between the jab and the kick.
He used the punch to pin down my line of sight, then swept out with his leg to break my balance. He’d already planned his next move on the assumption that the first attack would miss.
“Tch.”
He spat and closed the distance again.
This time it was a right straight. The rotation from waist to shoulder came through perfectly.
I twisted my upper body slightly and let the punch slide past.
Snap!
It didn’t even feel like a fist—it felt like a spear passing by.
The wind grazed my ear.
Thump-thump—
Maybe it was the adrenaline rushing through me.
Everything slowed down, as if the moment his fist came at me, the world itself had begun to crawl.
The fingers of my hand, hooked like a claw, shot out and caught the inside of his forearm joint in an instant.
I was going to wrench his forearm the other way and collapse his stance right there.
“···Where do you think you’re going?”
He must’ve sensed something was off.
In a hurry, he turned his body in the same direction as my force and slipped free.
He seemed pretty familiar with joint locks like this. His response was damn sharp.
No wonder they made him an instructor.
The man escaped my grip and immediately swung an elbow toward my chin.
This time I was already waiting. I twisted my body and slipped into his blind spot.
Then, the instant his side opened up, I drove a strike into the area just below his ribs.
Thwack!
A short gasp burst from him.
The blow landed exactly where it needed to. In a normal person, that would’ve been enough to buckle the knee right out from under them.
And yet he gritted his teeth, shoved my hand away, and retreated anyway.
He was the kind of man who kept moving his body, always preparing for the next exchange no matter what.
“Tsk.”
I clicked my tongue.
I’d meant to finish this with that one shot.
Sure enough, his expression had changed completely.
The easy confidence at the corners of his mouth was gone, replaced by something feral in his eyes.
And then his attacks came pouring in.
Jab, straight, low kick.
Three strikes came at me in almost the same beat.
I let the jab go past, slipped the straight, then checked the low kick with my shin.
Crack!
Feeling the sting rise up my leg, I stepped in farther.
The instant the next punch came, I cut inside and grabbed his wrist again.
Gum-na-so.
Literally, the method of catching and breaking a joint with your hands.
I pressed the elbow above it with my other hand to lock the joint in place, twisted the wrist, and dragged him downward toward the floor.
Crunch.
This time I could feel the joint twisting cleanly between my fingers.
As his stance broke, I kicked the same spot as before, just under the ribs.
Pow!
“Fuck···.”
The man finally spat out a curse and backed away.
When he tilted his head back, his face red with effort, his neck cracked with a dull pop.
He tried hard to keep his expression intact, but the hand over his side was trembling faintly.
“Haa··· let’s try again.”
He reset his stance. This time, the feel of him was different.
He’d dropped lower than before, shortened everything, and started striking and slipping back immediately.
It was obvious what he was doing: he wasn’t going to give me any room to lock on a joint again.
He adapts fast after getting caught twice.
But by then, I’d already started to read his movement.
The instant his third jab pulled away, I drove in deep.
Then I struck straight up at his Yingxiang point.
Bang.
“Keugh···.”
A blow to the carotid sinus sent the pressure in the blood rushing straight to the brain, and sure enough, his pupils shook hard as the strength went out of his legs.
In the end, he dropped back onto the mat like someone had kicked his feet out from under him.
That was the end of it.
“···Hrk, khh. Damn it.”
The man sat there on the mat for a long moment before cursing again.
Then he muttered in disbelief, “Ha, close-quarters combat at a pretty high level, huh? You bastard DA freaks.”
After a moment catching his breath and staring up at the ceiling, he got to his feet.
He rubbed the side I’d hit, then said, “Your damn kung fu skills are solid. I don’t feel like getting my ass kicked any harder just for the sake of embarrassment, so let’s skip close-quarters combat in the curriculum.”
He said it like a complaint, then added, “Instead, I’m thinking of focusing the curriculum on marksmanship, field combat, and tactics—the stuff you’ve got marked as weak. Sound good?”
Had the test pleased him?
His mouth was still rough, but there was a little more goodwill in it now.
I shrugged. “Works for me.”
That seemed to satisfy him.
He twitched a brow for a moment, then held out his hand.
“Cole McKinnon. I’m with the CIA’s most miserable little Special Activities Center, SAC.”
I took his hand in mine.
“I’m Lee.”
Before I knew it, it had already been more than three weeks since I’d arrived at Camp Peary.
Of course, that didn’t mean I’d gotten used to the hellish heat or the bugs here. It just meant I was starting to adapt to this damned routine that began at 5:30 in the morning.
“You pigs, form up!”
As always, the day started with the instructor’s roar.
A five-mile run, followed by brutal physical training like burpees and swimming.
After that came basic classroom lectures for CIA officers in the morning—how to collect information in the field, how to recruit and handle sources, how to maintain security while conducting contact, reporting, and meetings.
In the afternoon, we were sent through the outdoor training course for marksmanship and SDR (Surveillance Detection Route) drills.
And at night, there were advanced shooting and combat sessions with the kindly Mr. McKinnon.
Really, aside from the six hours we slept, every moment was training.
···Fuck.
Yeah. Curses came out on their own.
If anything had changed, it was that my running speed had improved a lot.
As I got used to dividing and using my inner energy efficiently over long stretches of time, I’d surged up into the upper ranks.
I’d never even used my energy this precisely in my past life. It was ridiculous.
Marksmanship training had also expanded beyond pistols like the Glock; I’d started handling rifles like the M4 as well.
Luckily, once I got the feel for shooting, my rate of improvement was ridiculous. Later on, the bullet holes on the target paper clustered into a single large dot.
“He can do that, and I can’t?! Why the FUCK NOT?! Damn sky itself!!!”
For the record, Nad turned out to have even less talent for shooting than I’d expected.
I won’t even mention that his howls while watching me continued every single day.
Then, on an afternoon in the third week:
Advance
A short signal sounded in the communications earpiece tucked in my ear.
I moved into the alley and gently raised my inner energy.
The back view reflected in the window of a storefront glass pane.
There was a man walking about thirty meters behind me.
His walking rhythm matched mine. When I slowed down, he slowed down; when I sped up, he lagged half a beat behind and then matched me again.
One.
I casually turned into an alley on the right.
When I came out onto the main road through the alley, the presence behind me was gone.
Instead, a woman sitting on a bench to my left caught my eye. She had a newspaper open, but her gaze wasn’t on it.
Two.
These were the things I’d learned in SDR training here.
How to change your route and use glass to visually confirm the other side’s reaction.
It was the textbook method, but for me there was a slightly more efficient way.
The feeling you got when someone was watching you from behind, the direction of their gaze, the rhythm of their breathing, the spacing of their footsteps.
To my senses, sharpened by inner energy, all of that was readable.
“Mm···.”
As I crossed the square, I shortened my stride.
A man pretending to browse items behind a roadside stall.
He was gripping his bag strap too tightly.
Three.
A silhouette visible between the curtains of a second-floor window in a building.
I could feel their head moving to follow my line of travel.
Four.
I kept changing course, shaking off each pair of eyes that trailed me.
I went into a dead-end alley, slipped out through a stairway at the back, then crossed a narrow passage between buildings to emerge on the opposite street.
In that way, I lured the fifth and final tail into an alley and broke contact by escaping through another exit.
Piiiip—
When I reached the endpoint, the communications device gave its end signal.
At the same time, the instructor who had been watching me, along with the agents who’d been playing the role of tails, gathered around.
Every one of them looked like they’d seen a ghost.
“Damn it, you spotted all of them and shook them off? Is that even possible?”
“There’s been a rumor among the trainees that you’re some ninja from East Asia. Was that actually true···?”
I could hear every word, of course, but I pretended not to and quickly slipped away.
On the way back to the dorms, Mo and Nad came up to me.
“Lee, be honest with me.”
As always, Nad poked at me with that sly tone of his.
“You didn’t secretly get injected with some kind of serum the CIA’s developing, did you? Like, a super-soldier serum or something?”
“What the hell are you talking about now?”
“No, seriously, think about it. How does some guy who knew nothing at all turn into this after only three weeks? Unless he’s a fucking super soldier, how is this even real?”
Ah. So now it was super-soldier, huh?
After the Eastern Black Nightmare, the runaway ninja who’d turned his back on his clan, Bruce Lee’s reincarnation, and Genghis Khan’s descendant, it looked like another rumor was getting added to the pile.
And naturally, the source of every one of those stupid rumors was this damned Nad.
That mustached, loudmouthed Arab bastard. One day I’m going to shave that whole damn mustache off him.
I was about to brush off Nad’s nonsense and keep walking toward the dorms when I felt a strange gaze from behind.
Turning my head slightly, I spotted a man standing near the entrance to the SDR training grounds.
He looked to be in his fifties, with short gray hair and an instructor’s uniform on.
I didn’t know his name, but I’d seen him a few times before. He was one of the people who watched the trainees from the back of the classroom during the theory lectures.
What’s with him?
I looked at him for a moment, then turned away before our eyes met.
I hadn’t sensed any real threat or emotion from him. If anything, it felt like observation.
“What are you doing? Hurry up, super soldier.”
Mo, who had been trailing behind us, nudged me and said it like a joke. I shot a quick glare at Nad, who was snickering beside him, then started walking again.
I could feel that gaze following me for a long while after my back turned.
Office, second floor of the instructor building.
Russ Wallace pressed his lips together in front of the report form on his screen.
Midterm Evaluation Report
It was the regular report he had to send up to the Operations Directorate in Langley, with trainee performance trends and instructor comments attached.
He’d been doing this for years. Normally, it was a simple task that took thirty minutes at most.
But right now, his cursor had been sitting on one file for almost an hour.
Name: Lee
Classification: Separate Track
He remembered the first time he’d received this trainee’s file.
No military background at all, a civilian with no formal training to speak of.
A separate track, compressed from the full CTS course into three months.
On top of that, they’d assigned a dedicated SAC instructor to speed things along.
That’s an absolutely impossible schedule for a normal person to survive.
Honestly, Wallace hadn’t thought Lee would last long under that murderous timetable.
But now the numbers in front of him were leaving him with no easy answer.
SDR Detection Rate: 100%
Marksmanship: 91.7% - 3rd in the class
Physical Assessment: Top 10%
He’d seen hundreds of trainees come through here over the years.
There had been Delta Force veterans. There had been SEALs. But even people like that needed an adjustment period.
Yet this trainee had shown no such minimum adjustment period, no plateau at all.
“Hmm···.”
Wallace stared at the final blank in the report.
Instructor Comment:
A snort of laughter escaped him.
To think he was agonizing over the evaluation phrasing for a single trainee like this.
In the end, he wrote it down in a few short lines.
The trainee’s growth indicators across all evaluation categories are atypical. Continued observation and reevaluation are recommended through the end of Phase 2.
He hit send.
The screen flashed, and a transmission complete notice appeared.
“Hngh··· that took longer than I expected.”
Wallace closed the screen and took a sip of coffee.
The coffee was already cold. The bitterness left in his mouth lingered strangely long.