## Chapter 8: Four Minutes

  He made the call on Sunday evening.

  Sat on the edge of his mattress in the dark with the phone in his hand for ten minutes first, running the conversation in his head, trying to decide what he was actually doing and why. Shin had said not his problem. Shin was probably right. Getting involved in another fighter's debt situation was exactly the kind of complication a person in Jaeho's position couldn't afford — financially, physically, strategically.

  He called anyway.

  It rang four times. Then a click. Then silence — not the silence of voicemail, the silence of someone who had answered and was deciding whether to speak.

  "Akkerman," Jaeho said. "It's Park Jaeho. Seoul. We fought three weeks ago."

  A long pause. Then the line went dead.

  Jaeho looked at his phone. Dialled again.

  Three rings this time. Another click. Another silence.

  "I'm not calling about the fight," Jaeho said quickly, before the silence could make the decision again. "I know you're on the evaluation circuit. I know it's not voluntary."

  Silence. But the line stayed open.

  "I'm on the evaluation circuit too," Jaeho said. "We're probably going to fight again. Bout two, if we both win bout one." He paused. "I wanted to talk to you before that. Not tactics. Just — talk."

  Another long silence. Long enough that Jaeho thought the line had dropped.

  Then, flat and careful: "How do you know about the debt."

  "Someone who watches the circuit told me. Not details — just that it exists."

  A pause. "Who."

  "Someone who has no reason to make your situation worse. That's all I'll say."

  The silence shifted. A different quality — not hostile anymore, just wary. Jaeho heard a faint background sound on the line. A window, maybe. Traffic below it.

  "What do you want," Rens said.

  "I wanted to know if you're okay."

  A short sound — not quite a laugh. "You wanted to know if I'm okay."

  "After the fight you looked like you weren't."

  "I lost. People look bad when they lose."

  "It wasn't that kind of not okay."

  Silence again. Longer this time.

  When Rens spoke again his voice had changed slightly — the careful flatness still there but something under it giving slightly, the way a wall develops a small crack that doesn't compromise the structure but lets light through.

  "I'm fine," he said. "I'm handling it."

  "How much is the debt?"

  "That's not—" A pause. "That's not something I'm discussing."

  "Okay." Jaeho didn't push. "How long have you been in Seoul."

  A beat. The shift of a conversation finding new footing. "Eight weeks."

  "Your Korean is zero."

  "My Korean is zero." A pause. "My Chinese is also zero. Mandarin or Cantonese."

  "You're surviving on English."

  "And pointing at menus." Another pause — and then something that might, very distantly, have been the ghost of dry humour. "Mostly pointing at menus."

  Jaeho was quiet for a moment. Outside his window the Incheon night — the apartment block across the narrow street, someone's laundry still on the line despite the late hour, a convenience store sign blinking at the corner.

  "The underground circuit here," Jaeho said carefully. "The people running it at the higher level — Do you know who's managing your end of it. Who's holding the debt."

  "I know his name. I've met him twice." A pause. "Why."

  "Because it matters whether he's someone who'll release you when the debt is clear or someone who'll find a reason to extend it."

  A very long silence.

  "The second one," Rens said quietly. "I think the second one."

  Jaeho's jaw tightened. He'd suspected. It was the more common arrangement, Shin had implied as much without saying it directly.

  "When did you figure that out," he asked.

  "Three weeks ago. When I lost to you." Another pause — something careful in it, like he was deciding how much to say. "He wasn't angry about the loss. He was fine about the loss. He adjusted the debt upward to account for the lost purse and said we'd reschedule." A beat. "A person who intends to release you when the debt is paid is angry when the debt gets further away. A person who intends to keep you is fine."

  The logic was cold and clear and correct.

  "His name," Jaeho said.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "No," Rens said immediately. "No. You're not getting involved in this."

  "I'm already on the same circuit."

  "That's different. Stay away from it." A pause — and the careful flatness was fully back now, the small crack sealed over. "I'm handling it. I have a plan."

  "What plan."

  "Win everything. Fast. Build enough leverage that releasing me is easier than keeping me." His voice was matter-of-fact, the plan stated like a logistical problem with a logistical solution. "Win enough that other people with money notice. Make myself worth more as a free fighter than as a debt instrument."

  Jaeho sat with that for a moment. It was not a bad plan. It was, in fact, a reasonable plan for someone with Rens's ability. It was also a plan that depended entirely on the debt holder choosing rational economics over the satisfaction of control, and people who built underground debt arrangements were not always primarily motivated by rational economics.

  He didn't say any of that.

  "Bout two," Jaeho said instead. "If we both get there."

  "Yes."

  "I'm going to fight you properly. Not pull anything, not go easy."

  A pause. "I wouldn't want you to."

  "But if you win and I'm in bad shape — I need to know you'll stop when it's done. Not when he tells you to stop."

  A silence that lasted long enough to mean the question was being taken seriously.

  "Yes," Rens said finally. "When it's done."

  "Same from me," Jaeho said.

  Another silence. Different from the others — not hostile, not wary. Something closer to the silence between people who have understood each other.

  "Park Jaeho," Rens said.

  "Yes."

  "Why are you calling me."

  Jaeho thought about it. The honest answer, not the managed one.

  "Because you reminded me of someone," he said. "Someone who's also dealing with something that isn't fair and can't be argued with. Who just has to keep going until it changes." He paused. "I don't know. Maybe I just wanted you to know someone on the circuit knew your situation and it wasn't — I don't know. A secret held only by people who were benefiting from it."

  A very long silence.

  "Okay," Rens said quietly. Just that.

  "Okay," Jaeho said.

  The line went dead. Not hung up — disconnected, the call timer reading four minutes and twelve seconds.

  Jaeho sat in the dark for a moment. Then he put his phone face-down on the mattress and lay back and stared at the ceiling and thought about the evaluation circuit, eleven weeks away, three bouts in one night, two million won for winning all of them.

  He thought about Rens's plan. Win everything, fast. Build leverage.

  He thought about his own plan, which was nearly identical, driven by completely different arithmetic.

  Then he stopped thinking and counted his breaths until he fell asleep.

  ---

  The next eight weeks were the hardest of his life and the most structured.

  Shin ran the physical sessions on Tuesdays and Saturdays, two hours each, and they were nothing like the blindfold exercises of the early weeks. They were conditioning work — running, rope, bodyweight circuits that left Jaeho's arms shaking and his lungs raw — layered with the striking repetitions that Shin had said would take ten thousand to make automatic. Jab, cross, hook, body shot, again, again, the combinations running until his shoulders ached and his knuckles were permanently tender under the wraps.

  The anteroom work continued in parallel, woven through the physical sessions in ways that made both harder. Shin would call for the state mid-circuit, while Jaeho was already breathing hard, and Jaeho would try to find the doorway through the noise of physical exertion. It was vastly harder than finding it in stillness. The first three weeks it was nearly impossible.

  Then something began to shift.

  Week four: he found the anteroom once, briefly, mid-combination. Held it for six seconds before the technique demand collapsed it.

  Week five: twice. Eight seconds, then twelve.

  Week six: he was hitting the mitts and the anteroom opened and *stayed open* through a full thirty-second combination, the striking running automatically while the state held clean underneath it, and Shin stopped the session and wrote something in the notebook and didn't explain what.

  Week seven: the gift activated during mitt work.

  Not strongly — not the full stutter, not the ghost image. Something smaller. A fractional read, a half-breath of early information in his body before Shin shifted the mitt position. But it came from the anteroom, not from the threshold. It came from a state he'd built, not from desperation.

  He didn't tell Shin immediately. He stood on the mats with his hands wrapped and his breathing elevated and felt the small event settle in his chest.

  "You felt something," Shin said. Not a question.

  "A read. Small. From the anteroom."

  Shin was quiet for a moment. He set the mitts down. He looked at Jaeho with the expression Jaeho had learned meant something had happened that confirmed a calculation.

  "Again," Shin said. "From the beginning."

  ---

  Between sessions Jaeho fought.

  Oh continued booking him — once a week, sometimes twice, the opponents getting harder as the word of his record spread through the Seoul underground circuit. A Thai boxer in week three who moved beautifully and telegraphed nothing and whom Jaeho barely survived by ground-and-pound after a first round that left him bleeding from both eyebrows. A Georgian wrestler in week five who was technically inferior to Gankhuyag but dirtier, using elbows in the clinch and eye-adjacent strikes that Manager Oh's rules technically prohibited and that Oh didn't stop.

  Jaeho won both. Not cleanly. Not impressively.

  But the anteroom was present in both fights, flickering and imperfect, and the gift activated once in the Thai fight — a single clean preview that saved him from a spinning heel kick in the second round — and the cost was lower than it had ever been. Not zero. But lower.

  After the Georgian fight, Doyun found him outside the cage.

  Jaeho had seen Doyun at every fight since the first one — grey tracksuit, folded cash, the corner by the fence. He'd watched Doyun's betting pattern shift across the weeks: first betting against Jaeho, then declining to bet, then making small neutral bets on outcomes rather than on Jaeho specifically. He'd never spoken to Jaeho directly.

  He spoke to Jaeho directly now.

  "You're fighting the evaluation in—" Doyun checked something on his phone. "Nine days."

  "Yes."

  "Bout one is a Brazilian. Gustavo Ferreira. Twenty-four years old. Muay Thai and BJJ." Doyun said it casually, the way people mention facts they've had for some time. "He finished his last four opponents inside two rounds."

  Jaeho looked at him. "How do you know who's on the evaluation card."

  Doyun shrugged with the ease of a man who had spent years being adjacent to information. "I pay attention." He folded his cash. "Bout two depends on bouts one and two. If you both win, it's you and the Dutch kid."

  "I know."

  "Bout three — if you get there — is a Korean. Kim Sungjin. Local. He's been on the full circuit for eight months." Doyun paused. "He hasn't lost."

  Jaeho waited.

  "He also—" Doyun seemed to be making a decision. "He also knows you're coming. Someone told him about the Gankhuyag fight and the Akkerman fight. He's been preparing."

  "Someone told him."

  "Specifically about how you fight. The movement, the ground game, the way you don't go down easy." Doyun looked at him directly for the first time in seven fights. "He's not walking in blind. He's walking in with a plan."

  Jaeho absorbed this. An opponent who had specifically prepared for him. That was new. That was a different category of problem from anything he'd faced before.

  "Why are you telling me this," Jaeho said.

  Doyun was quiet for a moment. The garage noise around them — the crowd dispersing, the music cutting, the normal sounds of a Tuesday night underground circuit resetting.

  "Because I've been watching you since fight one," Doyun said simply. "And I want to see how this ends."

  He tucked his cash into his jacket and walked away into the crowd.

  Jaeho stood in the cold air of the emptying garage.

  Nine days.

  A Brazilian who finished fights in two rounds. Rens Akkerman and his nine years and his debt and his compressed anger. And a Korean who'd been told Jaeho was coming and had spent time preparing for the specific way Jaeho fought.

  He rolled his neck. Right crack. Left crack.

  He took out his phone and texted Shin: *Bout three is a Korean named Kim Sungjin. He's been preparing for me specifically. I need to know everything about him.*

  The reply came in under a minute.

  *Already pulling footage. Come Tuesday.*

  Jaeho pocketed the phone and started walking.

  Nine days to become someone that a prepared opponent hadn't prepared for.