Another Level
"Hah… hahhk."
Rough breaths tore out of me. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it would climb right up my throat. And yet — it was exhilarating.
A shiver ran through the silent arena. Everyone had crowded toward the cage where I stood, a seething mass of bodies, and not a single one of them could find their voice.
"Ahh. Yeah."
I nodded to myself.
So this is what it felt like.
It was the first time. In this life, no one had ever traded blows with me this fiercely, this much like a real fight.
Which was exactly why the afterglow lingered. My opponent was an amateur, but he had skill enough to genuinely threaten me right now, and that sense of danger had dredged up instincts long buried in distant memory.
When you caught an opponent like this, the high was beyond compare.
Clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap clap······.
At last, the applause broke loose. The roar of cheers that followed was simply the natural order of things.
"WOOOOAAAH!"
"What even was that?"
"Insane! That's literally another level!"
"He fought three matches and all three were highlights!"
"Shouldn't we be paying for this?"
"He's climbing the ranks for sure, damn!"
Gasps of awe burst out from every corner of the venue.
Our corner was no different.
"Shin Yugyeom! Shin Yu Gyeom! SHIN YU GYEOM!"
Park Nam-rae was chanting my name at the top of those famously huge lungs of his.
"Nobody can call you a fluke now. A kid who's been at the gym for less than a month — this is real?"
Maybe he'd said it extra loud on purpose, because the bit about "one month at the gym" sparked a stir.
"A month?"
"What's he talking about?"
A murmur began to spread, rippling outward without any sign of dying down.
"Yugyeom, great work. Best fight I've ever seen."
"Come on, you were yelling your head off and cursing at me right up until the second I stepped out of the cage······."
When Nam-rae shot him a teasing sidelong glance, Coach Baek Jun-gyeong cleared his throat and mumbled, embarrassed.
"That was just the heat of the moment. Who could've imagined a picture like this? I swear I nearly pissed my pants back there. Fine. You win!"
Their endless comedy duo routine drew a smirk out of me every single time. And honestly, I couldn't blame them. To their eyes, my movement must have looked like pure unorthodoxy.
Take, for instance, the fact that I had no rule in my head like: when the opponent shoots for a takedown, pull your hips back and sprawl. None of that common sense — or rather, convention — applied to me, because what I practiced wasn't modern MMA. It was Pankration, in its truest form.
The best defense is the attack.
Haken, the instructor from my pankration training grounds, surfaced in my mind, the man who'd hammered those words into us. If he could have known that a lesson taught in ancient Greece still worked two thousand years later, he might have wept.
And really, it wasn't just Haken. If the fighters of that era could have seen the world I lived in now, they would have burned with envy. A world where you didn't have to wager your life to be cheered, to seize wealth and glory.
"I don't know about anything else, but I think this sport suits me perfectly!"
Reaching back into my past life's memories had brushed something like wistful longing across a corner of my heart. But it didn't throb the way thinking of my family once had. No — even thoughts of family now brought only a faint emptiness and tenderness; I didn't shed tears the way I had when the memories first returned. Like an old scar, the facts and the feelings remained while the pain had dulled.
It would be a lie to say memories this old had no influence on my personality, but my sense of identity was inevitably closer to the sixteen-year-old Shin Yugyeom living in the present than to the man of the distant past.
And so I walked over to my fallen opponent. Not as the merciless warrior of the sand, but as an ordinary (?) middle schooler whose war had ended with the final bell, I asked:
"Are you okay?"
But the player who looked like a walking pelt, surrounded by his lookalike friends and the medical staff, was not looking at me the way one looks at a middle school boy.
"No. You vewy stwong."
"······."
"You weally, weally stwong. I awmost died."
There was nothing to laugh at, not with that accent — because the expression sitting on top of his battered, swollen face was just too sorrowful.
"I'm sorry······."
"Not your fault."
The pelt shook his head.
"I thought if it went to gwappling, I could win. But I got cweamed."
"That's exactly why I tried to finish it before it ever got to the ground."
Granted, if I'd still had my old body, technique or no technique, I could have demolished him with wrestling alone. But right now, my physicality fell far short of his. And that was precisely what made this win mean something. I'd beaten an opponent with that kind of overwhelming physique anyway.
"Still. It was thwillimg and fun. Weally."
"Me too. It huwts, but it was fun. You weally stwong. I go hospital now."
He clapped me on the shoulder with a little joke, and the swelling was so bad that his eyes warped into slits when he grinned. To be reduced to this after eating only a handful of shots — his fists, at least, must have been a natural gift, even if his physique hadn't fully matured yet. Though of course, having beaten countless men half to death in my past life had honed my own chops considerably.
"Next time, we twain togedder."
Having said his piece, the pelt took his place beside the referee. I stepped forward and faced front as well, and the referee grabbed my wrist and hoisted it high.
"Winner of the KFC One-Day Tournament Featherweight Final — SHIN YUGYEOM!"
Clap clap clap clap clap clap······.
A fresh wave of standing ovation erupted at the ring announcer's cry, and I moved to exit the cage amid the din.
That is, if a man in a cap and face mask hadn't stepped in first.
"Shin Yugyeom."
"Yes?"
I answered on reflex, but I wasn't the only one thrown off balance.
"What do you think you're doing?"
The referee reacted, and then—
"Who's that?"
"What now?"
"Seriously, what's going on this time?"
As the crowd stirred yet again, the man pulled off his cap and mask. The face revealed beneath was one I'd never seen before — but there were people in the crowd who recognized it.
"Huh?"
"Ji Hyeon-tae? Isn't that Ji Hyeon-tae?"
"Looks like him. What's he doing here?"
"Did he come as event staff······?"
Ignoring the whispers, the boy my age they were calling 'Ji Hyeon-tae' spoke.
"I'm Ji Hyeon-tae, KFC Featherweight ranked number two. Which means from now on, we're in the same promotion and the same weight class. Watching your fights got my blood boiling, so I came up here. I think I misjudged you. After seeing you just now, I called the matchmaker and got permission. You win just two more fights, and they'll put me against you."
"Holy sh—"
"What kind of development is this?"
"Are they allowed to do that?"
I asked, dumbfounded, and Ji Hyeon-tae answered like it was nothing.
"The promotion says it's fine. They were probably watching this live anyway. Figured if an unranked nobody beats two pros on the big stage, a fight against me would sell — that kind of thinking."
"No, that's not what I meant."
"······?"
"The number two ranker has nothing to gain fighting an unranked amateur like me. Why bother?"
"You look strong."
Ji Hyeon-tae said it plainly.
"If you're all hype, I pick up one more win. If you're the real deal, we were going to fight eventually anyway. And I'm confident I won't lose to a weakling — not even by some fluke."
Kind of cool, honestly.
Judging by the cheers that erupted, I wasn't the only one who thought so.
"WHOO!"
"So cool!"
"Damn, what a man!"
"No wonder he was the youngest ranker ever."
Clap clap clap clap clap······.
"Well, I'm grateful. But······."
The thought that I could skip ahead to fighting stronger opponents genuinely delighted me, and Ji Hyeon-tae nodded and prompted me.
"But?"
"How old are you?"
"······."
"You look about my age."
"Seventeen."
Ji Hyeon-tae added:
"Which makes me your hyung."
"Ah."
Noted.
Speaking of which—
"But you're not supposed to hit your elders, are you."
I hadn't aimed for it, but an even bigger roar went up from the crowd.
"Unbelievable."
The KFC One-Day Tournament, held every year to replenish the promotion's fighter roster, was streamed live for free, like most amateur events. It was a fan service move meant to cement their image as the nation's top promotion in a country still barren soil for combat sports — and also a strategy to lower the barrier of access and grow the pie itself.
But amateur-level events had their limits. No matter how entertaining a scrappy brawl might be, without real substance it was just watered broth — so they hadn't filtered out pro-caliber applicants like Kim Chang-soo or Magomed Ulinbekov. And both of those men had been broken by a single fighter.
Overwhelmingly.
Worse, the kid who'd dismantled them with a performance so insane the live crowd gave him a standing ovation was young. And handsome. On top of that — though the truth of it was unverified — his team coach claimed he'd only been training at a gym for a month. A prodigy.
And it didn't end there.
"When we first opened the stream there were a thousand viewers. Word must've spread, because we're past 120,000 now."
"A hundred and twenty thousand?"
Jung In-san, CEO of KFC, doubted his own ears.
"Not ten or twenty thousand? You didn't misread the units — it's not 12,000? Pull up the stream."
At his words, the PR team leader who'd been staring down at his phone worked the remote. The figure labeled LIVE VIEWERS glared out, unmistakable.
"That's insane! We barely scrape that number when we pit our two biggest headliners against each other!"
"It is, sir."
"Internet word travels fast, sure, but······ how does an amateur event pull 120,000? Because the fights were good?"
"Impossible, sir. It's live."
"Then how?"
"I apologize. I hadn't checked — apparently that kid was already fairly famous on YouTube. People say he can really fight."
"And in a field like combat sports — not some other niche — a channel with that kind of reach, and nobody here knew about it?"
"Yes, sir. It only blew up recently. I have no excuse."
"Water under the bridge······ so all those viewers flooded in for that one kid?"
"So it seems."
"A windfall just rolled right into our lap!"
Even setting the fame aside, the skill and the showmanship alone reeked of money. It felt like the goose that laid golden eggs had waddled straight into his arms — trailing an entire family of golden-egg-laying geese behind it.
"······Anyway. Why was Hyeon-tae out there?"
"Ah, that — according to Team Leader Hong, he'd apparently had his eye on the kid for a while. An unranked amateur with no career to speak of, racking up fame on YouTube with fight-related content? Given Hyeon-tae's temperament, it would've gnawed at him. And you know Team Leader Hong — sudden or not, when a kid who never asks for anything makes a request, she greenlit it within her authority."
"Figures. Well, either way, the two of them played their parts beautifully at exactly the right moments. The board's laid out this far — only an idiot wouldn't eat. Right? Talk to Team Leader Hong and draw up an angle that keeps both our headliner and our next-gen star happy."
"Sir? I believe she promised Hyeon-tae the fight if the kid beats one ranker and one more pro."
"Who's going to be the one to scrap that?"
"Sir? Then······"
"We never promised he'd fight one of OUR ranked fighters. The next-gen star's fame is already enormous, so — awkward as it is to say — let's use it as bait to rein Hyeon-tae in, and dangle the fight toward Japan for now."
"With Sencal······?"
CEO Jung In-san nodded.
"Put him against one of their ranked fighters, and it fits everything we told Hyeon-tae, doesn't it?"
"Hyeon-tae's going to be upset."
"Then soothe him by pushing for another title shot. The champion's in the twilight of his career — it's about time we started the generational handover."
The PR team leader was quiet for a moment, then nodded.
"Yes, sir. I'll speak with Team Leader Hong."
Jung In-san gripped one of his shoulders firmly.
"We run a business here. If we were the UFC, with fighters flooding in without us lifting a finger, that'd be one thing — but we have to think about the entire combat sports industry, not just one fighter. See the forest, not the tree. In the end, that's what serves the fighters too. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"······Understood, sir."
Hearing the answer, Jung In-san patted the team leader's shoulder and smiled.
"For those kids, we compensate based on buzz. Carrot and whip — neglect either one and you're finished. The reason we, unlike boxing, where promotions take years just to lock down a single match, can show fans the fights they want right when they want them is that we make our fighters employees, not freelancers. Create the fights the fans crave, and deliver them. Never forget — that's our job."
Having triumphantly closed out the KFC One-Day Tournament and been promised a full professional contract — no longer an amateur — I left the venue showered in congratulations from the crowds who'd watched it all.
Then I came home, settled in to rest, and opened up my YouTube 'channel' — the one where it was honestly hard to say which was the hobby and which was the real job.
"Phew."
I edited the footage Nam-rae had filmed for me and hit upload.
The organizers of the One-Day Tournament had permitted fighters to release and use their own footage, so one click here and my video would ride alongside the KFC content that was blowing up right now, with a high chance of spreading far and wide.
And then, at long last, my channel would finally be known.
"This is scarier than stepping into the cage."
Murmuring that, I realized my finger was already hovering over the mouse.
······Click!