Too Good for a Hobby
It wasn't an exaggeration.
A Senkai champion had reached the summit of the Japanese MMA scene, a world where fighters like me or the Head Coach numbered in the hundreds, in the thousands. Being champion there meant something.
......So what?
"Doesn't matter who the opponent is."
I had never once cared. I'd fought battles where refusing was never an option. There had been countless times when I'd marched out to fight without even knowing how many enemies there were — whether they were men or beasts.
All I ever did was prepare in whatever environment I was given, and then go out and fight.
Crack!
I stepped in off my rear leg and landed a lead hand. But the Head Coach's guard swallowed it.
Sharp eyes. Fast reactions, too. To land anything on a man like this, you either had to deceive him or out-speed him.
The punches my still-underdeveloped body produced simply couldn't outrun his reflexes.
Having gauged the speed of his counters, I retreated a step behind my guard—
Thud!
His lead hand missed as I slipped with a step, but his rear hand caught my guard. My feet couldn't chase the flurry he threw as he dashed in. The instant I retreated another step out of range, a rear kick came flying.
Smack!
I raised my arm to block, but it rang down to the bone — muscles stinging, skin burning. And I relish that kind of sensation, the kind that puts every nerve on edge. The tension of trading moves, measuring and feinting against each other — that too.
I followed his retracting leg and dropped my level, as if to shoot a tackle. Fooled by the level change, he planted his foot and let his guard sink — and my rear hand landed square on his exposed face.
Smack!
One of the Head Coach's knees buckled. But even as he collapsed, he latched onto me, chest to chest, wrapping up my legs.
It was a desperate survival tackle, pure instinct, with his head and chest glued tight to mine — impossible to punish with strikes, and my hips were already too late to slip free. So I did the next best thing: spread my captured legs as wide as I could, rotated sideways with his momentum, and braced my core to shove him off. And then—
"Hah!"
He pushed off the floor once more with his other leg and shot in deep. My legs, already caught in both his hands, were being sucked in with him. But when he failed to break through, I — who had meanwhile wrapped up his waist — didn't resist the force at all. I simply rolled backward with it.
Whoosh!
Because he'd shot twice, the force coming in was tremendous — and the rolling worked all the better for it. I stayed glued to him all the way down and flipped the position. Me on top, him underneath.
Tap. Tap-tap!
I nudged a few punches over his guard, and the Head Coach turned his torso, shielding his face with one arm while pushing at my knee with the other, trying desperately to wriggle free. He used his core strength and explosiveness to escape—
"What the—?!"
He couldn't move an inch. Because through all the ground-and-pound, I kept my hips dropped. This body has buried and pinned everything — men bigger than me, even beasts far stronger and more explosive than any human — countless times. Once it settles properly on top of you, it's like having a boulder laid across your chest.
"Hold still."
I crushed his squirming core and landed a few more punches. The Head Coach grabbed at my wrist — and in that instant I faked an elbow drop with my weight behind it. As he released my wrist and I smothered him with my upper body, he pushed at my head with his arm.
That was the moment I cleared the elbow, drove his head down, and wrapped up both his arm and neck.
Squeeze......
Then I swung my hips in the opposite direction and rotated counterclockwise. The arm-triangle grip coiled tighter around arm and throat, and the Head Coach made a strangled sound. Just as even that sound was about to die away—
Tap! Tap!
He patted my shoulder, I released the grip, rolled off, and heaved for air. My arms were so drained I couldn't even hold them up.
"Holy shit."
"He actually beat the Head Coach?"
"No way. Yugyeom was this good?"
"Wow......"
That's right.
I won.
"Haah, hah......"
My lungs were burning, but I felt fantastic.
"Wow, is it because that bat of yours is so heavy? Your ass weighs a ton. I couldn't budge you at all."
The Head Coach said. So I answered.
"It's less about my hips being heavy and more about using the opponent's strength and center of gravity as much as I can. My stamina and raw power are still weak. My body's slow, too."
"So that's why you keep hunting submissions in jiujitsu?"
"With guys weaker than me, I go for submissions so I don't kill them."
"......"
"With you, Coach — yeah. I figure that's what happens because I'm physically outmatched."
I'm far more confident in my wrestling, but jiujitsu is built from techniques that can overcome a strength gap to some degree, so the flow just naturally goes that way.
And it makes for great practice, too.
"Jiujitsu is the kind of thing that takes years to get good at. That's what I thought — and then you shattered every ounce of common sense I had. You've never even trained jiujitsu, so how are you pinning a brown belt...... I'm having a crisis here. Is this what they call a white belt beating a black belt?"
"That's because it's MMA. In pure jiujitsu sparring I couldn't beat you."
"I'm an MMA fighter too, you know."
"......"
"Same with striking. I thought he's flowing nicely — then one clean shot lands and my head goes blank. That's not power a guy your weight class should be throwing. Accuracy, timing, weight transfer — it's all unreal."
So there was a reason he was praising me until his mouth ran dry.
"Yugyeom. Have you ever thought about moving to a bigger gym?"
the Head Coach asked.
"Lee Ho-sung took an interest in you, remember. How about going somewhere great like that — a team run by a former UFC fighter? Our gym doesn't even have a proper fighter's team yet, so there's so little I can give you. I'm the only veteran with pro experience, and you need a world-class coach and stronger training partners."
"I like being close to home. The people here are good, too."
I wiped the sweat stinging my eyes and asked instead:
"So what were the weak points?"
"None."
"I'm sorry?"
"Maybe that there's a lot of room for you to get better physically than you are now — but that's less a weakness than something to look forward to. You're very unorthodox, sure, but it's so unsettlingly natural that I'd hesitate to touch it. My honest take? If we can just build up your conditioning and a little luck follows you on fight night, you've got a real shot even against the Senkai champion."
The Head Coach's eyes were blazing.
"The champion should probably hear that, too."
I said it, but honestly, whether the opponent was a champion or nobody didn't stir me much. Fighting is simply fun, and the process of getting stronger is fulfilling. And it wasn't only my body and technique that were growing.
After finishing my after-school training, instead of uploading the sparring footage with the Head Coach, I edited and posted only the video of the education — the retribution — I'd delivered to that well-built tattooed thug named Kang Jin.
The title: [An unwelcome guest came to my gym looking to catch these hands..]
The response was nothing short of explosive.
The taller and deeper the mountain I had to climb, the less I felt despair — and the more my hunger to conquer it swelled.
Because that's who I was, when Dad spoke up carefully over dinner that evening, I wasn't the least bit flustered.
"Son. A while back, I heard something almost impossible to believe. If it were all a dream, it would've been the stuff of nightmares. But I checked the facts, and it seems to be true."
I nodded.
"It probably is."
After all, before KFC or Senkai made anything official, I'd need to sign a pro contract — which required my parents' consent.
Fighting at school without a word, running a YouTube channel, signing a pro deal on my own, and even booking a clash with the Japanese champion — if I got a stern scolding at this table, I'd have had nothing to say in my defense.
Just then, my little sister, who'd kept the secret so faithfully, was fidgeting with her rice bowl, eyes darting left and right—
"You were being bullied."
What came out of Dad's mouth was about neither the fighting nor the YouTube.
"Why didn't you tell us?"
"How much you must have suffered......"
Mom's face was heavy too — she and Dad had apparently already talked it over. And I realized it hadn't been my imagination, the way she'd avoided meeting my eyes ever since I walked in the door.
"At the time, half of it was shame, and half was not wanting to worry you. But something changed in me after the trip to Europe, and now I honestly think it's turned out to be a blessing in disguise."
"A blessing in disguise?"
"This might come out of nowhere, but do you know what the most essential talent in fighting is?"
"What?"
"Deprivation."
I went on.
"The hunger to become strong. What the weak — people like me — want most. That's what becomes your motivation."
"......!"
Dad nodded.
"Watching your videos, everyone praises you to the skies. You've never once come home with an injured face, and now you're talking about a pro debut — so it doesn't seem like nonsense. But as your parents, honestly? We'd rather you kept fighting as a hobby."
"Fighting isn't the only thing you're good at. Your grades are excellent too. We'd like you to choose your path carefully."
Mom added.
"We're not forcing you."
"I am doing it as a hobby, for now."
I chose, first of all, to put my parents somewhat at ease. Being bullied had been hard on me, but how much harder must it have been for them to learn, so late, that their son had been bullied?
I'd been a father myself in a past life, after all. I couldn't bear to leave the two of them sitting there like defendants racked with guilt. Besides, my dream, even now, was strictly to be a YouTuber......
Can't a hobby also produce a world champion?
***
A month later, after weeks of focused training, I arrived at the Meridian Hotel in the Head Coach Baek Jun-gyeong's car. That was where the press conference was scheduled, ahead of the event match between KFC and Senkai — a Korea–Japan showdown.