Ma En straightened up and looked toward where the guns had fallen. None had slid far, but one had come to rest near the feet of the fat man and the thin man — both of whom reached toward it on instinct, then made the mistake of glancing at Ma En, and promptly pressed themselves backward against the wall as his eyes found them. The two held onto each other in the corner, as if trying to push through the concrete behind them. Their performance was so pitiful that Ma En felt no desire to do anything to them at all.

Compared to the three who'd actually been willing to draw and fire, these two looked nothing like criminals. He was quietly exasperated — were they really just numbers? What had possessed them to stand here? Their current behavior made him genuinely wonder what their purpose had ever been.

These two looked more like bystanders accidentally caught in the middle. But that didn't mean he'd simply let them walk away. Where "monsters" were involved, no matter how helpless and ineffectual a person appeared, he couldn't afford to lower his guard toward them. And he still wanted to try extracting some information — even if he had nearly no expectation that these people knew anything substantive.

His gaze completed its circuit of the fat man and the thin man, then returned to the three muscular ones.

The apparent leader — the most aggressive, the quickest to react — was clutching his ankle and letting out sounds of suffering, sweat running down his forehead. Apparently unwilling to expose weakness, after the first cry he'd cut himself down to suppressed groans. The other two had only taken the impact of a body collision and a wall — no real damage to either of them, he was quite sure — yet several seconds had passed and neither had managed to stand.

"You know," Ma En said, moving unhurriedly, kicking the three pistols further away, "I feel a certain sympathy for you right now. This job clearly isn't going to go well. Whoever ordered you to come here may be very angry — but whatever they do to you comes later. What matters right now is—"

He walked to one of the muscular men who was trying to climb to his feet, and put a boot into his abdomen. A man who had to weigh eighty kilograms went airborne like a balloon, struck the wall again, and landed with a sound like something being struck by a sledgehammer. He curled on the ground afterward, heaving up the contents of his stomach. Ma En had, of course, not let him vomit blood — the force was calibrated carefully. This kind of preternatural control over his own strength sat in him like a sense — something he was simply able to do.

"—whatever happens to you is going to be done by me." He crouched beside the next man, grabbed a fistful of hair, and lifted the drooping head until their eyes met — the face he was looking into held nothing but fear. "I think you should consider what information might be worth sharing, to minimize the discomfort. Wouldn't you agree?"

The man who'd been acting as leader was pulling himself along the ground like something that wanted to be somewhere else. He appeared to have been genuinely terrified. He couldn't understand why — he'd been hurt before, threatened before, had guns pointed at him before, and never felt this particular quality of fear. He didn't know why.

He watched his companion being worked over, heard the flat unhurried voice issuing its flat unhurried threats, and could only feel that his fear was utterly unreasonable. For just this degree of harm, just this degree of pain — why was he this frightened?

It was like being in a nightmare, and he couldn't understand any of it.

Then Ma En put down his companion's head, looked sharply toward him, and the leader felt his heart seize. He could not describe what was in that man's expression; could not describe the quality this completely ordinary-looking young man was emanating now — he was more visibly intimidating than the man looking at him, and he was trembling like a small animal. He couldn't make the trembling stop.

"Say something — not for the nation, not for anyone else. What does fighting back accomplish? Is there someone you want to protect? Or is it only yourself? Are you married? Do you care about your family? How much do you love your girlfriend? Or are you completely alone?"

"Enough! Enough!" The leader shifted himself, watching Ma En get closer, wanted to shout and found he couldn't — could only murmur, the disorientation of fear layered on top of physical pain making his mind feel like it had been replaced with paste.

Then Ma En stepped on his fingers. The faintest increase of pressure, and the pain drilled straight through him. He wanted to scream; Ma En's hand covered his mouth, fixed his neck, and held his gaze. Through those black pupils, he saw nothing resembling mercy.

Pain. Fear. In this moment, the muscular man felt his entire existence had been reduced to exactly these two colors.

Ma En had no intention of crushing the fingers — though it would have been easy. Just as earlier he hadn't crushed the ankle, he wasn't planning to do serious injury to these people. Those who'd been hurt would be back on their feet within a day; within three days at most, every external wound would have closed. But in this moment, the sensation in their bodies was of bones and tendons and nerves all snapping — Ma En rarely did this kind of thing, but that didn't mean he didn't know how. At the postal service, he'd had training.

He worked through the five in rotation, murmuring while he did so, almost as if talking to himself. He knew perfectly well that what he was saying was meaningless in content — it was psychological pressure, nothing more. Behavior, movement, manner, voice — those were the instruments that other people's bodies registered most readily, and they were usually the most effective tools.

He kept a count inside. When it reached a threshold, he stopped.

If these were ordinary people — even if they were monsters in disguise, as long as the disguise was functional — they couldn't, in theory, endure this combined physical and psychological assault.

If they actually held out, he'd escalate. The umbrella held enough medication to do the job without leaving external marks, at the cost only of several subsequent days of mental fog.

"So — are you ready to talk?" He straightened up, dusted his trousers, picked up the umbrella, leaned against the wall, and asked the five men — now crouched like five frightened quail — in a voice as steady as his inner state. A few minutes had passed and nobody had entered the alley, which struck him as fortunate. Though it was possible they'd cleared the area in advance. Either way, the current situation still favored him, so there was no reason to worry about the cause.

Others might arrive to "rescue" these five?

The thought passed through him. He wasn't afraid — as long as they weren't monsters, even a dozen gunmen wouldn't be a problem.

About ten seconds of silence, then a voice said: "I — we don't know anything either. People with real power don't show up in front of people like us."

"Then tell me what you do know." Ma En tapped the umbrella tip against the ground — a dull, contained sound.

"Last night — last night, someone found us." The muscular leader, covered in sweat, said: "Said they wanted to teach you a lesson. We don't know who that person is — only that they're someone who works for someone who works for a powerful person. You have to understand, powerful people don't leave traces — their people always have others who know how to read a room. There's always another layer."

"You could have refused," Ma En said.

"No — there's no refusing." Another of the muscular ones said: "You don't know how powerful people operate. We can't fight back against them. Fighting back accomplishes nothing — even if you want to, you can't find the real person behind it all. No one speaks for people like us. Those with power only stop being powerful when they fall. Until then — we're nothing but chihuahuas in front of them."

"—Don't be so pessimistic," Ma En said. Though they sounded resigned, the brutal reality of what was pressing them might genuinely be the real perpetrator here — but he still felt nothing for it. He didn't believe all of them were simply coerced. "If the order came from a powerful person, you must have also known: I'm not someone easy to deal with."

"Yes." The fat one said, trembling. "So that person gave us three guns."

Ma En looked at him. The fat one instantly contracted into a smaller shape.

"Meaning you also don't know who found you? You only know they were someone working for someone working for someone with power? That's quite the chain."

"What we're saying is the truth!" The thin one jumped in: "I don't even know how it happened — maybe our brains weren't working right — but he produced three guns! Three guns!"

"We don't normally use guns. Mostly we use knives." Another muscular one added.

"These two don't seem to be your regular people?" Ma En looked at the fat one and the thin one, addressing the other three.

"They're... they're just new, not used to it yet." The leader explained, slightly defensively. "They have potential — once they've seen more, they'll be fine."

"Three experienced ones, two new additions—" Ma En found this genuinely stupid. "This mysterious person found you in this particular combination, handed you three guns, and you just did what you were told?"

"Yes. Yes." Except for the leader whose leg wouldn't cooperate, the other four had managed to stand — but even standing, they didn't dare move freely, only waited obediently for Ma En's questions. "He only said: take the briefcase."

"Why take the briefcase?"

"We don't know. We don't know what's in it, and we don't want to know." One of the muscular ones shook his head quickly, as if afraid of hearing something he shouldn't. "Don't tell us now either. We don't want to die."

"Don't want to die? You sound quite confident that even though this job failed, going back won't get you punished." Ma En caught the unexpected implication.

Another silence. Then the apparent leader said, reluctantly: "Yes. That person said — we couldn't win. He honestly didn't care at all about the outcome. He just wanted us to come at you holding guns. I — I get the feeling we're not going to see him again."

"Why?" Ma En adjusted his voice slightly, asking more gently: "Why do you think he'd do it this way?"

The five looked at each other, then said: "It's probably a warning?"

A warning. Ma En felt this was too simple an answer — but these five clearly didn't have anything more to offer.

"At first you thought he was joking — baiting you into feeling challenged?" Ma En said.

"Yes — a little." The thin one said. "I mean — with three guns, what couldn't be resolved?"

Ma En's face was expressionless. He performed an internal eye-roll. As normal a thought as could be imagined.

"Putting it together: last night a mysterious person connected to a powerful person found you, said they wanted to give me a lesson, specifically handed you three guns, told you I had something wrong with my umbrella, and told you that you couldn't beat me."

"Correct."

"Isn't that contradictory?" Ma En asked back. "If you can't beat me — how were you supposed to give me a lesson? You took a beating for nothing."

"I — we didn't have a choice. And — it was too hard to believe. You — what are you, exactly — no, don't tell us." The fat one carefully covered his own ears. "Just treat us like nothing. Like a fart."

"..." Ma En produced a soft sound. "It seems the mysterious person also told you: I wouldn't do anything serious to you. At most you'd feel some pain."

"Yes. That's what he said." The leader admitted. "You see — we don't know anything. We just came here to get hit."

That's the problem.

The thought crossed Ma En's mind. This mysterious person would not have done any of this without purpose. There was another clear intention. But as these men said — they genuinely didn't know, and genuinely didn't want to know anything about it.

"All right, you win." He stepped away from the wall, released a compound through the umbrella mechanism — a calming agent dispersing into the air — and said to the five: "I genuinely won't hurt you."

As he said it, the sensation each of them had been feeling — the quality of dread that had pressed like needles against their skin — gradually faded. The fear softened. The man in front of them seemed to drift back toward ordinary. As if the pain and terror they'd just endured were something they'd imagined — except the pain was still there, and it was absolutely not imaginary.

Their breathing opened up again. The alley returned to ordinary color.

Watching their expressions shift, Ma En knew precisely what was happening. He'd deployed the agent before the fight began as well. It wasn't only monsters who knew how to make people feel genuine fear — the postal service's operatives were specialists in this too, and did it better.

He walked past the five, moving as if to leave — and just as they exhaled — he delivered a clean strike to each of their necks with the umbrella in turn. Five muffled sounds, five bodies going slack onto the ground. Simultaneously, five micro-bugs slid from the mechanism and adhered to the inside of their collars.

These micro-bugs were valuable things. Since arriving in Japan, he hadn't used them even in the apartment building on the thirteenth floor — not even there, where he knew he was surrounded by hostile attention. He was spending them here because these five had a chance of seeing the mysterious person again — and the mysterious person might be nearby right now. He wanted to gamble on this possibility, to test his hypothesis.

Ma En picked up his briefcase and umbrella, walked back out onto the street without incident, merged into foot traffic. He didn't move far — just circled around the alley's perimeter, keeping himself within the signal radius, waiting for feedback through the earpiece. He wasn't sure whether this would expose him. The bizarre incidents earlier had already proved that certain eyes were still watching him. He could only do his best to look confused.

But very quickly a sound reached his ear. The five were already awake — faster than he'd anticipated. He was confident his calibration had been correct, but he didn't feel surprised by this. He couldn't be surprised by the enemy anymore.

"...Damn it. What was that thing. This hurts."

"I think we found someone we shouldn't have."

"Could've told me that before."

"At least we didn't die. Just hurt more than expected."

"I'm in agony! Someone come help me up!"

A deliberate sound — leather shoes on pavement, approaching in a particular cadence.

"Who is— — you... it's you..."

There.

Ma En affected a mildly blank expression and leaned against the railing along the street.

"We — we did as you asked."

"He was too strong. Too strong — he's not human at all. He IS a monster!" An urgent, defensive voice.

"That's right. Everything you told us was correct."

"Let me see." The mysterious person spoke — a low, indistinct voice that gave Ma En nothing to build a face around.

A rustling sound. "No — no wounds," a trembling voice said.

"Clean work." The mysterious person seemed to sniff the air. "The air... isn't normal."

"Can we leave now?" someone asked.

"This was a classic test." The mysterious person didn't answer — murmuring as if to himself. "An alley, a phone booth, an ambush, five men, three guns — benchmarked against the individual capability of standard operatives and special forces soldiers, multiplied by a coefficient... Absolutely abnormal. But nothing remarkable."

"Wha — what? What are you saying?"

"His grandfather was a farmer who conducted agricultural experiments under Yuan — an internationally recognized agricultural scholar. His father was a master technician, top grade, employed at a military-to-civilian aerospace manufacturing company, able to gauge deviations of less than one-tenth of a millimeter by touch alone. His mother is a serving female soldier — a logistics technical officer in the special intelligence department. The man himself was subjected to Spartan-style examination-focused education from childhood. At four, he was force-fed the conviction that learning is painful; he studied until past midnight every night, until the pain became habit and the pleasure that follows pain became an addiction. Mathematics was his game. Books were his friends. Cold-water swimming was a rule he had to follow. He endured pressures that would have broken others — and when he began working, everything drilled into him as foundational knowledge found its way into practice: integrating, growing, advancing through that practice. Not a genius. But viewed as a human-made monster."

"What — what are you even saying?"

"What you ran into was indeed a monster. But only a human-made monster." The mysterious person gave a contemptuous snort. "Measured against the greatness of God, this kind of monster is nothing but an ugly, powerless toy."

"You — you... you — no! No!" The other five seemed to be reacting to something enormous — speech breaking down.

Then, without screaming, a series of sounds: flesh being pierced. The earpiece went quiet.

It was over.

Ma En waited a few minutes, then removed the earpiece without ceremony.

He couldn't say with certainty why the mysterious person had said what he'd said. Perhaps an excess of confidence. But one thing was now a clear fact: his past identity had been fully exposed. And that was the most significant problem. He'd resigned from the postal service — but his identity was not supposed to be this easily accessible. No one should have been able to breach it this casually.

This mysterious person knew him in extraordinary depth, had analyzed him with extraordinary care. Someone like that could not be a total stranger — and the intelligence channels would have to be connected to his homeland somehow.

Though the voice was hard to identify, among all the people Ma En knew in Japan, there was only one who fit.

— Kamishima Kousuke?