Saving seoul sword punk.., p.1
Saving Seoul (Sword Punk Book 1), page 1
Sword Punk
Book One Saving Seoul
Burning Bright
Contents
1. The Free City of Seoul
2. Yellow and Blue
3. King Kwan
4. Last Night of Freedom
5. Watching Tape
6. The Fall
7. The Purple Man
8. Better off Dead
9. Old Habits
10. Red Path
11. The Demon in Room 6
12. Consequence
13. The Tower
14. The Nest
15. Infamous
16. Friend in Need
17. Defiance
18. Like Old Times
19. The Game
20. Fair Fight
21. All the Stops
22. Rage
23. Loose End
Afterword
To all of the people who have been a part of my martial arts journey over the decades, from the parents who signed me up for my first Tae Kwon Do class at age 14, to the coaches, sparring partners and cornermen who built me up over the years in various gyms and dojos across the northeast, and the doctors who tried to put me back together again after a dozen fights too many.
Most of all, this book is dedicated to Shihan Mario, who supported me win or lose, and taught me to take more from the latter than the former, and whose wise words could only have come out of a Boston fighter’s mouth.
“I may be old, but I’m still hell for a minute.”
All in all, it’s not a bad mantra to grow into.
1
The Free City of Seoul
I didn’t know who I was kidding skulking around like a hooded ghost in the neon night. Certainly not Joon. He always knew when I came around, even if I didn’t always have the good humor or patience for a visit.
It wasn’t really raining, but it was misty. On the forested mountain paths, the vapor probably would have cast an ethereal beauty over the landscape, glittering like starlit dew on bark and leaves. That wasn’t to say that the mist couldn’t be pretty here, in the Free City of Seoul, it was just that it only stayed pretty if you kept your eyes up, drinking in the microscopic jewels of water that passed like a film through the blues, yellows and blazing reds of the cityscape.
But my eyes were usually down at street level, as they were tonight. Down here, the mist coated everything, mixing with the gasoline oil in the street to form the worst sort of rainbows, and clinging to window panes and brown bricks and tipped-over traffic cones. It drew the hoods up over the ears of passersby, making it easier for them to fall into the sort of danger that lurked in this part of town, and easier still to ignore others falling into it around them, in the alleys like the one where Kenta had found me.
Danger had never been shy about this part of town, but it had always been sensible, keeping to the shadows. Skulking in the alleys and slithering in the sewers. Now, it was a beast grown brazen as the old fool had been in life, before the same pride that had kept the whole neighborhood—hell, half the city, it felt like—safe had ultimately seen him pay out the rest of his debt in blood.
I often found myself pacing on the sidewalk outside of Ken’s Place the evening before a fight. I always thought it was going to bring me comfort, and remind me of more pleasant times. But when I was there, listening to the cars and cycles whiz past and cats and drunkards retching beneath nearby eaves, I always ended up thinking about Kenta’s death instead of his life.
I suppose that’s why Min visited Joon even more seldom than I did. She’d always been the smart one.
“Go in or leave, you ass,” I whispered, rebuking myself for hesitating more over the decision to speak to a friend close enough to be my brother than I did before engaging with some of the most violent men and women in the East in semi-lethal combat on a weekly basis.
Ken’s Place was a better name for a bar or a restaurant, but you couldn’t mistake it for anything other than a dojo if you had a glance inside the fogged windows and glass door. A bar would have done better business. Of that there could be no doubt, but no other place could make better men.
I was getting old enough not to realize when a saying belonged to me or to the man who’d taught me.
In truth, I don’t know why I was so hesitant to speak to Joon. Our last few conversations had been contentious, but that wasn’t uncommon for the two of us. Brothers never seemed to mince words at the best of times. Those raised in combat could hardly be expected to buck the trend.
“Just say hi,” I told myself, frozen in the mist just out of sight from the main door. I could hear the muffled sounds of children’s Kiai leaking through the window panes of the dojo, their little war cries acting as the chorus to Joon’s clipped verses as he ordered them through katas far more advanced than you were supposed to teach kids who could barely ride a bike in a straight line.
Are you going to tell him?
The question came up unbidden. It reminded me of all the choices I’d made, especially in recent nights. It reminded me of deals struck. Bargains made. Joon had wanted me out of the League since I’d joined it, but I doubted if even he would want me to leave it on these terms.
I sighed and decided to walk toward the front door of the dojo, ignoring the gnawing guilt at the choice I made along the way. Surely it was the moral choice, to spare Joon the burden of the truth. He didn’t have to know about my bargain with the League, and through them, with the organization that had been directly or indirectly responsible for the death of our master. Let him bask in the bliss of ignorance.
I did tell you Min had always been the smart one.
Just before I reached for the slick aluminum handle of the fogged-up glass door, I heard the sound of something hard meeting something soft, followed by a grunt. It wasn’t a low sound. Not low enough to belong to an adult, and before I turned from the door, I could already feel the blood rushing up into my temples, making my ears warm enough to feel like they could start steaming in the drizzle.
There weren’t many things that got me angry enough to rage, but hitting a kid was at the very top of a short list.
I glided past the windows, aware that Joon saw everything that passed by his inherited dojo. There was no choice but to go in and speak to him now. But first, I had to take out the trash.
The alley between Ken’s Place and Shark’s Convenience was wide. Black iron stairwells that doubled as fire escapes climbed the brownstone walls, passing over cracked windows and flapping plastic sheets. It looked like a scene out of a 1980s comic book. If you had told me I was in classic grunge New York City, I’d have believed you. It was strange. The more neon-lit the cities of the world seemed to get, the more dark places seemed to crop up, like mold.
Two men in leather jackets and studded jeans loomed over a black-haired kid who crouched defiantly against the rain-soaked wall. The kid was propped up on one foot. He rubbed at his cheek with one hand and clutched the strap of his pack tightly with the other. A black-and-silver handle stuck out of the pack, and I recognized it as the end of a sai that should have been hung up on the wooden pegs on the dojo wall. His face was mixed Korean, and his hair was spiked in the wet. He looked a lot like me, which didn’t help my mood, and certainly wasn’t going to help his accosters.
The kid noticed me first. He drew in a sharp breath at first, likely afraid that another thug had arrived to cut off his escape. However, his look morphed from fear to confusion when I pulled my hood down to reveal my own mixed features and my personal brand of spiky black hair. When recognition dawned, he broke into a smile, and the thugs turned toward me.
These two were harder to place. They could have been Japanese, but there was something about them that recalled soviets. Either way, their lack of recognition showed that they weren’t from around here.
As did the fact that they had chosen to assault one of Kenta’s … one of Joon’s students mere inches from the dojo.
“Akio!” the boy shouted, causing one of the thugs to step threateningly closer to him. He shrank back.
“You two aren’t from around here, are you,” I said.
They exchanged a glance. I could tell by the way their hands twitched toward their pockets that the only thing they were packing was switchblades. Either they were too low level to carry guns, or they were smarter than they looked. I was critical of the SPDF in many respects, but Min’s department had managed to get a lot of Tokyo’s guns off of our streets in the last two years.
“Okay,” I sighed. “Listen. I’m on a bit of a time crunch tonight, so here’s how this is going to go—”
“Move along,” the thug on the right said. He was a little smaller than the other one, but the command came with a forward step which exposed him as the alpha. The thing about alphas, however, was that they were only as strong as their pack. And a pack was only as strong as its selection of prey.
“You really aren’t from around here, huh?” I said.
“This is Akio,” the boy said. “He’s a League champion!”
One of them spit onto the wall, causing the kid to squirm backward grimacing. Funny, the things kids focused on.
“That true?” the spitter asked.
I shrugged. It wasn’t really the point I’d been trying to make.
“Latex and glow sticks,” the other said. “The real thing happens out here.” He spread his arms out like a messianic figure, and revealed a short, black-handled knife with a deft flick of the wrist.
I was through t alking, and my conscience had already been cleared on account of the warning I’d given them. It wasn’t a warning on the back of what I’d accomplished on the professional martial arts scene. It was one on the back of these streets and alleys, where I’d grown up, and where I’d received as many lessons as I’d been forced to dole out. This was still Seoul, no matter what the Hachinin had to say about it, and Seoul still belonged to us.
Still, I always felt better when the other guy threw the first punch, so I simply walked forward. Not fast. Not slow. Just steady, like I was on an evening stroll.
It had the desired effect. The knife-holding thug screamed in at me with bad intentions. By the movement—a crescent-shaped downward slash—he was clearly used to killing, but certainly was not anyone who knew what he was doing around a blade. I flashed forward, deflected the swinging hand up by striking his forearm with the back of my wrist, and turned into him, sliding my heel in between his too-wide stance while I guided the knife hand over my opposite shoulder, snapping my fingers over his wrist like a vise grip. I didn’t hesitate in bringing his arm down over my shoulder. I didn’t pay much attention to the positioning of his elbow. The point of the move was to throw him. The ensuing snap was just graham cracker crumble on top of the cake.
The knife clattered to the pavement with a ting while the thug’s body followed after, trailing a different sort of scream and a much nastier-sounding crash.
Chances are, the other thug was simply staring slack-jawed, unable to react quick enough to make a decision on either side of the fight-or-flight debate, which is why Kenta always added the third ‘F’ into the equation.
“Freezing’s the worst of the lot, friend,” I said as I dug an elbow into his boney midsection, folding him over and only just escaping the half-digested street sausage he wolfed up into the alley as he toppled.
I reached down and pulled the kid up, tousling his hair and giving him a light slap on the cheek to jar him out of his shock. His lip was bleeding from where he’d been struck.
The lead thug had struggled onto his knees while the other one continued to heave. “Now, now,” I said, holding up a hand. The thug clutched his broken arm, his eyes shaking as he looked from the knife to me, weighing his odds.
“You two have any employers I need to be made aware of?”
The knife thug frowned while the retching thug looked askance at him.
Not Hachinin, then. That certainly made things more simple.
“You’re going to walk out of this alley and turn left, and keep walking until you’re well past Sister Red’s, and then you’re going to keep on walking,” I said. “You’re going to do it before I start counting. Trust me when I tell you that, despite my reputation as the more emotional of the two of us, if Joon catches you sniffing around here, he’ll kill you and feed you to whatever street dogs are going to be at that sausage soup as soon as this party’s over.”
The thugs didn’t waste time arguing. They scrambled to their feet, one clutching his arm to his side and wincing all the while as the other stumbled with both arms clutched over his stomach. When they had gone, I looked back at the kid, who continued to stare after the thugs, his eyes glazed.
“Hey,” I said, snapping him back into the present. He blinked up at me. In the rain, he looked even younger than I had thought. At heart, if he was anything like I had been at his age, he was a lot older. He was brave like all Seoul youths were brave, but he could still be given a scare. Given the way he looked at me—with a mix of admiration and something else—it could have been me he was afraid of, now that he’d seen me go to work without a glowing League suit and thousands of cheering fans for window dressing.
“Let’s get you inside. And don’t worry about Sensei Joon. He’ll forgive the tardiness.”
The kid nodded, all earnestness. Still had some innocence, then. That was good. More than I could have said at his age.
“Thanks, Akio,” he said, seeming to flush with embarrassment. “I’ll take the long way next time.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Joon would have encouraged him, but my instinct was to tell him that he shouldn’t have to plan out a route least likely to put him in the clutches of street thugs or the things far worse than them. Things that wore nicer clothes and scanned the city streets through tinted windows in cars as expensive as tanks.
“Now you can see why Sensei doesn’t want me around the dojo,” I joked, leading him out of the alley and checking to make sure he wasn’t sporting a limp or exhibiting any signs of concussion.
“Why’s that?” he asked, confused.
“I’m always breaking things.”
He only shook his head. “Sensei Joon is always talking about you,” he said.
“That so?”
I opened the fogged-up door of the dojo and scanned the street as I ushered the boy inside. No sign of retribution. I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped inside, and I felt Joon’s eyes on me before the door closed behind me.
“Ah,” he said, his voice ringing out clearly from the front of the dojo as the children and teens on the red and black mats paused in their katas. “Uncle Akio has decided to grace us with his prese—”
I shot him a cutting look and nodded toward the kid. Joon’s eyes were as sharp as his black bangs. He took in every detail of his student, likely noting cuts and bruises from the front that I hadn’t even catalogued, and nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Bow onto the mats, Jace,” he said. “And tell Akio to do the same.”
Jace smirked at me and did as he was told, and I found myself kicking my shoes and socks off and sliding them onto the rug to the side of the dojo floor along with all the grimy, torn pairs from the feet of Seoul’s treasured youth.
Joon wore a blue training gi and had his hair tied back in a tail. His hands were clenched into fists and rested in front of his belt as he readied to start class. Most of the kids were already drenched in sweat from their kata-laden warm-up. Joon might have had a better bedside manner than Kenta, but he was an even more demanding teacher.
I hung my hoodie on a brass hook on the wall and stepped forward, bowing onto the mats as Jace raced past me, having pulled the twin sais out of his training pack. As I walked toward the front of the dojo, Jace hurriedly hung the sais back on their wooden pegs to Joon’s right. Above the forked metal weapons, two dark wood sabers with more scars than those Kenta had sported hung crisscrossed: my old training swords, which had never broken, no matter how many times I’d tried.
I could feel the children’s eyes on me as I walked between them and took my place next to Joon. I turned and adopted my own ready stance, feet shoulder-width apart, fists down in front of my belt, which was leather instead of cloth. In the place of a gi, I wore jeans and a black tank top. The kids were no different. Joon had managed to scrape together old gi pants for some of them, but most wore sweats or shorts, and none sported colored belts. That was a practice we’d never taken to.
Jace took his position at the back of the dojo, bumping into a German-looking girl with sandy hair and green eyes, who shouldered him away.
“Uncle Akio will be teaching class tonight,” Joon said, stepping aside. “He’s going to show us what he’s been teaching those fancy League fighters all season long.”
Joon had a funny way of punishing people.
I scanned the three rows of street roughs, picking out the ones who held themselves with surety and which ones had dipped shoulders and twitchy eyes. There were eleven altogether. They were young. Very young, in places, but tough. I nodded.
“Feet together!” I intoned. They complied. “Bow!” They did, and the earlier worries of the night melted away as we set to work.
Two hours later, as the last of the kids—Jace, his hair plastered with sweat instead of misted rain this time—spilled out onto the Seoul streets, Joon and I sat on the wooden shelf before the bay windows. I had to move a few old trophies aside, and before we could settle into anything approaching small talk, all the worry Joon had kept suppressed throughout the class came bubbling out.
“How many were there?” he asked, his eyes boring into my temple. “Were they armed? Did they bear the ma—”
