Chapter 10: Rival
Kim Dowon arrived in Los Angeles on a Tuesday, three weeks after the Rifts, on a Korean Air flight from Incheon that landed at LAX at 2:17 PM and that carried, in addition to its standard complement of passengers, the highest-ranked Awakened in Asia and the third-highest-ranked Awakened on Earth.
Jake learned this from Sua, who learned it from Kang, who learned it from an encrypted briefing that the international Hunter Association network distributed to regional directors when S-rank Awakened crossed borders. The briefing was clinical — name, rank, affinity, threat assessment, diplomatic status. But the subtext was clear: Kim Dowon was not visiting. He was being deployed.
“The multi-Rift event two days ago,” Sua explained. They were in the assessment room. Training. Day seven. Jake was running shield-bolt-geyser combinations while Sua threw fire at unpredictable intervals and from unpredictable angles. “Seventeen Rifts in LA. The Seoul office views that as an escalation. Dowon is their response.”
“Their response to what?”
“To the possibility that LA is becoming a hotspot. Rift frequency correlates with Awakened concentration — the more powerful Awakened in an area, the more Rifts open. Seoul’s theory is that your presence is attracting them.”
“My presence?”
“Your mana signature is infinite. It’s a beacon. The Rifts might be responding to it the way metal responds to a magnet.”
Jake lowered his hand. The glow faded. “You’re saying I’m causing the Rifts.”
“I’m saying your mana might be correlated with Rift frequency. Not causing. Correlating. The difference matters.”
“Does it? If the Rifts open because I’m here, and people die because the Rifts open—”
“People die because the Rifts produce creatures. You kill the creatures. The net equation is positive.” Sua threw a fireball. Jake shielded reflexively — the condensed disc, now second nature, requiring no conscious thought. “Stop spiraling. Focus.”
He focused. Shield. Bolt. Geyser. The rhythm of a body learning to be infinite, one six-AM session at a time.
He met Dowon at the Hunter Association headquarters on Spring Street, in a conference room on the fifth floor that Jake hadn’t known existed and that was, based on its décor (real wood table, real leather chairs, a window that faced the actual skyline rather than the parking lot), reserved for situations that required an aesthetic above government-standard.
Kang was there. Sua was there. And Dowon was there.
The first thing Jake noticed was the light. Not the overhead light — the light from Dowon. A faint, ambient glow that surrounded him like a halo, barely perceptible, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it. A golden radiance that emanated from his skin and his hair and the air immediately around him, as if he were standing in a sunbeam that followed him everywhere he went.
The second thing Jake noticed was the suit. Not a government suit. A personal suit. Tailored. Dark navy. The kind of suit that cost more than Jake’s monthly rent and that communicated, without words, that the person wearing it understood the relationship between appearance and authority. Aunt Soyeon had been right — he looked like a drama lead.
“Jake Morgan,” Dowon said. Korean-accented English, fluent but specific, with the careful pronunciation of a man who had learned English academically and who treated each word as a precision instrument. “The Blue Light individual.”
“Jake is fine.”
“Dowon.” No handshake. A nod. The specific, Korean-male nod that communicated acknowledgment without warmth — the nod of a peer assessing a peer. “I watched your video. The Koreatown engagement.”
“Everyone watched the video.”
“I watched it differently. I watched it fourteen times. I studied the energy patterns. Your mana bolt technique — the way it interacts with the entity tissue — is not standard energy projection. Standard projection applies force. Your bolts apply negation. The entity matter doesn’t break or burn. It ceases. That’s a qualitative difference.”
Jake looked at Kang, who looked back with the expression of a man who had arranged this meeting and was now observing it the way a scientist observed a controlled experiment.
“Dowon has been assigned to the LA office,” Kang said. “Jointly, with Seoul’s approval. The multi-Rift event suggests that Los Angeles requires additional S-rank presence.”
“I’m S-rank,” Dowon said. “Currently ranked first in Korea and third globally. My mana capacity is 52,000 units — recently upgraded from the initial 47,000 assessment.” He said this without inflection, without bravado, the way a mechanic stated a horsepower figure. Data. Not a boast. “I’m told your capacity is infinite.”
“The System says so.”
“The System says many things. I prefer empirical validation.” He turned to Kang. “I’d like to spar with him.”
The room went quiet. Sua, who had been standing by the window with the posture of someone who was present but not central, straightened.
“Spar,” Kang repeated.
“A controlled assessment. My output against his. I want to understand what ‘infinite’ means in practice.”
“We’ve been running assessments for two weeks—”
“Your assessments were against equipment and against an A-rank.” Dowon glanced at Sua. Not dismissively — clinically. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Sua said. Her voice was flat. The flatness of a person who was accustomed to being measured against people who outranked her and who had processed the emotional content of that measurement long ago.
“An S-rank sparring match,” Dowon continued, “will provide data that equipment and A-rank engagements cannot. His defensive response to an E-rank threat and a C-rank threat have been documented. His response to an S-rank threat has not.”
Kang looked at Jake. The look was a question.
“Sure,” Jake said.
The spar happened in the El Segundo hangar. Same room. Same circle. Same sensors — the upgraded ones, the ones built to handle outputs above 10,000 units per second, though Jake suspected that even these had limits that the afternoon might test.
Dowon entered the assessment room the way he did everything — with precision. He removed his jacket. Folded it. Placed it on the table by the door. Rolled his sleeves to the elbows. The ambient glow intensified, the golden light brightening as he prepared, as if his mana responded to intention the way Jake’s responded to emotion.
Sua was in the observation room. Kang was beside her. Through the mana-glass window, Jake could see their faces — Sua watchful, Kang analytical, both of them aware that what was about to happen in this room had not happened before. An infinite-capacity Awakened against the third-ranked S-rank on Earth. There was no precedent. There was no protocol. There was only the circle and the sensors and two men who channeled energy that didn’t exist three weeks ago.
“Rules,” Dowon said. “Escalating engagement. We start at ten percent output and increase. Either party can call stop. No lethal intent.” A pause. “I assume you can calibrate your output?”
“I’m learning.”
“Then learn fast. My ten percent is approximately 5,200 units per second. What’s yours?”
Jake thought about it. Five percent had been 8,400 units — the number that had maxed out the original sensors. Ten percent would be… he didn’t know. The math of infinity defied percentages. Ten percent of infinity was infinity. The percentage was meaningless. What mattered was the subjective scale — how far he opened the valve, how much of the reservoir he allowed through.
“I’ll match you,” Jake said.
“Don’t match me. Be yourself. I need to see what you are, not what I am.”
Dowon raised his hands. The golden light concentrated — flowing from his ambient glow into his palms, condensing, brightening. His light was different from Jake’s. Jake’s mana was generated — produced from an internal source, created from the warmth in his chest. Dowon’s light felt drawn — pulled from the environment, gathered from the ambient electromagnetic radiation, the visible light spectrum, the solar energy that permeated the atmosphere.
He’s a collector, Jake realized. I’m a generator.
Dowon fired.
The beam was golden-white. Not a bolt — a sustained beam, a continuous emission that crossed the room with the speed of actual light and hit Jake’s hastily-raised shield with a force that drove him backward two feet. His shoes scraped on the concrete. The shield held — the condensed version, the layered disc that Sua’s training had made instinctive — but the pressure was enormous. Not the blunt force of a fireball or the invasive vibration of a frequency attack. This was focused radiation, a concentrated beam of photonic energy that was, at a fundamental level, the thing that stars produced.
“That’s my ten percent,” Dowon said. He was standing in the same spot. Unmoved. His expression had not changed. “Your shield absorbed approximately 4,800 units of the 5,200 I projected. The remaining 400 units pushed you backward. Your shield efficiency is ninety-two percent. That’s excellent for an untrained Awakened.”
“Thanks,” Jake said. His arms were tingling. The shield dissolved.
“Twenty percent.”
“Wait—”
The second beam was harder. Not twice as hard — the relationship between percentage and force was not linear. The beam was wider, denser, a column of golden-white light that filled Jake’s field of vision and that hit his shield with a pressure that made his bones vibrate. He braced. Both hands. The condensed shield expanded — wider, thicker, the layers stacking as his warmth responded to the increased threat.
The beam lasted three seconds. Jake held. His arms shook. His shield cracked — not shattered, but cracked, a visible fracture in the blue plane that spread like ice cracking under weight.
Dowon stopped. “Shield fracture at twenty percent. Approximately 10,400 units. Your current defensive limit is in the S-rank range but not the upper S-rank range.” He tilted his head. “You’re matching me. I told you not to.”
“I’m not matching you. This is my defense. This is what my body does.”
“Then your body is calibrating to my output rather than exceeding it. Interesting.” He raised his hands again. “Thirty percent. I want to see the burst.”
“What burst?”
“The omnidirectional emission from your assessment. The one that cracked the window and pushed Park Sua across the room. At thirty percent, my beam will overwhelm your shield. Your instincts will trigger the burst. I want to see it.”
“That burst was uncontrolled—”
“I know. That’s why I want to see it. Controlled techniques tell me what you’ve learned. Uncontrolled responses tell me what you are.”
He fired. Thirty percent. The beam was — there was no word. Not in Jake’s vocabulary. Not in the vocabulary of anyone who had lived in a world where light was something that bulbs produced and that travelled in predictable, physics-compliant ways. This was not that light. This was concentrated stellar output channeled through a human body, a beam of such intensity that the air around it ionized, producing a violet corona that smelled like ozone and tasted like metal and sounded like the inside of a thunderstorm.
Jake’s shield shattered. Both layers, all condensed planes, broken simultaneously, the blue light fragmenting into shards that dissolved in the air like ice in boiling water. The beam hit Jake’s chest.
The warmth responded.
Not with a shield. Not with a bolt. Not with a geyser or a strike or any of the techniques he’d learned and practiced and named. With the thing that had no name. The thing that was not a technique but a state. The thing that existed below his training and below his instincts and below his consciousness, in the deepest layer of whatever he was.
The burst.
But it was different this time. Not the uncontrolled, omnidirectional wave of the assessment. Different. Shaped. The warmth erupted from his chest but it didn’t expand — it focused. Forward. Toward Dowon. A wall of blue mana that was not a shield and not a bolt but a wave, a tsunami, a front of energy that traveled across the room with the inevitability of gravity.
And it was absorbing. The wave hit Dowon’s beam and didn’t block it — ate it. The golden-white light was consumed by the blue wave, integrated, converted, the way the Warden’s frequency had been converted on Broadway. Dowon’s thirty percent output became fuel. The wave grew larger, brighter, denser, feeding on the S-rank’s light, and it crossed the room toward Dowon with the unstoppable momentum of something that was being powered by the very attack meant to stop it.
Dowon’s eyes widened. The first non-clinical expression Jake had seen on his face — the expression of a man whose math had just failed him. He cut his beam. The wave continued — still advancing, still growing, still humming with the absorbed energy of 15,600 units per second of S-rank output.
Dowon raised both hands. A shield — golden, dense, the S-rank version of the defensive technique. The wave hit it.
The shield held. For one second. Then two. Then the wave’s absorbed energy — Dowon’s own energy, reflected back at him through Jake’s conversion system — overwhelmed the shield and it shattered. Golden fragments. The wave hit Dowon’s chest and pushed him across the room. Not gently. Not the measured, assessment-room push of the original burst. Hard. Dowon’s feet left the ground. He flew backward, hit the wall — the reinforced, upgraded wall — and the wall cracked.
The wave dissipated. Jake stood in the center of the circle, breathing hard, his entire body outlined in blue light that was slowly fading, dimming, retreating back into his chest.
Dowon was on the floor. Against the wall. The crack behind him was three feet long. He was not injured — Jake could see that immediately, the golden glow around him pulsing with a defensive frequency that had absorbed the impact — but he was on the floor. An S-rank. Third in the world. On the floor.
The silence in the room lasted seven seconds.
Then Dowon laughed.
Not a big laugh. Not a joyful laugh. A short, sharp exhalation that was half-laugh and half-something-else — the specific sound of a man whose worldview had just been recalibrated. The sound of a professional at the top of his field discovering that the top of the field was not the top.
“You reflected my own energy back at me,” he said. From the floor. Against the cracked wall. “You absorbed thirty percent of my output, converted it, and used it to fuel a wave that overwhelmed my defense with my own power.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t apologize.” Dowon stood. Brushed off his slacks. Checked the crease — still intact, the fabric somehow surviving an impact that had cracked reinforced concrete. “That technique — the absorption-conversion-projection chain — is the most efficient offensive response I’ve ever encountered. It turns any attack against the attacker. The stronger the input, the stronger the output.”
“It’s not a technique. I didn’t design it. My body just—”
“Your body is smarter than your mind. Your body understands what infinite capacity means better than your mind does.” Dowon walked toward Jake. Stopped three feet away. The golden glow and the fading blue light overlapped in the space between them, creating a brief, temporary color that was neither gold nor blue but something between — a green, almost, a living green, the color of growth, the color of spring.
“I came here to evaluate a threat,” Dowon said. “Seoul wanted to know whether the infinite Awakened in Los Angeles was a danger. Whether you needed to be managed. Contained.”
“And?”
“You need to be trained. Not contained. The power is there but the control isn’t. You generated an absorption wave that could have leveled this building if you’d pushed harder. You did it by reflex, without intent. That’s not a threat — that’s a liability. And liabilities, Mr. Morgan, require investment.”
He extended his hand. Not for a handshake. Palm up. An offering. The same gesture Sua had used after the assessment.
“I’ll stay in LA,” Dowon said. “I’ll train with you and Park Sua. Three Awakened: S-rank, A-rank, and whatever you are. The Rifts are escalating. The next event won’t be seventeen E-ranks and a Warden. It’ll be worse. And when it comes, we need to be ready.”
Jake looked at the hand. At the man who had been knocked across a room by his own reflected power and who was now offering partnership. At the golden glow and the cracked wall and the sensors that were, he was certain, displaying numbers that no one in the observation room had been prepared to see.
He took the hand.
“Six AM,” Jake said.
Dowon’s eyebrow rose. “Six?”
“Sua’s rule. Six AM. Every day. If you’re late, she throws fire at you.”
“I’m S-rank. Her fire doesn’t concern me.”
“It’s not about the fire. It’s about the principle. She says the Rifts don’t keep business hours.”
“She’s right. They don’t.” The handshake ended. Dowon retrieved his jacket. Unfolded it. Put it on. The suit looked exactly as it had before the spar, because the suit was S-rank tailoring and S-rank tailoring did not surrender to minor inconveniences like being knocked through a wall.
“Tomorrow,” Dowon said. “Six AM. I’ll bring coffee.”
“Sua drinks black.”
“Everyone in Korea drinks black. It’s not coffee, it’s discipline in liquid form.”
He left. Jake stood in the assessment room. The cracked wall. The shattered shield fragments, dissolving. The space where an S-rank had stood and been knocked down and had laughed and had offered his hand.
Through the observation window, Sua was watching. Her expression was unreadable. Kang was beside her, speaking into a phone, the conversation rapid and low. Jake raised a hand. Sua raised hers back.
His phone buzzed.
SUA: You just knocked Kim Dowon through a wall.
JAKE: He asked for it. Literally.
SUA: Tomorrow is going to be interesting.
JAKE: What’s interesting about 6 AM?
SUA: Three of us. In one room. Fire, light, and infinity. The sensors are going to melt.
He drove to Glendale. The sun was setting. The sky was intact — no cracks, no nameless colors, just the orange and purple and pink of a Southern California sunset, the kind that postcards sold and that real Angelenos barely noticed because beauty, in LA, was ambient.
His mother was at the door. The second knock. The arms. The smell of something cooking.
“New friend?” she asked.
“How do you know I made a new friend?”
“You’re smiling. You only smile when you meet someone you respect.”
“I don’t only smile—”
“You only smile. Don’t argue with your mother. Come eat. I made kimchi-jeon.”
He ate. The kimchi pancake — crispy, sour-spicy, the batter golden, the kimchi fermented to the exact degree that his mother’s palate demanded, served with a dipping sauce that was soy sauce and vinegar and sesame oil and a single dried red pepper that had been floating in the mixture for, according to family legend, seven years.
He thought about Dowon. About the golden light. About the cracked wall and the hand and the word “investment.” About the three of them — fire, light, infinity — in a room at six AM, learning to be something that the world needed.
He thought about the Rifts. About the escalation. About what came after E-rank and C-rank and S-rank, and whether there was a rank beyond S, and whether the thing that made the System and the thing that opened the Rifts and the thing that turned ordinary people into Awakened had a plan, and whether the plan included a freelance web developer from Koreatown whose mana was infinite and whose mother made the best kimchi-jeon in Glendale.
He ate. The warmth hummed. The sky held.
Tomorrow: 6 AM. Fire, light, infinity. And coffee — black, because discipline was liquid and mornings were early and the Rifts didn’t keep business hours.
None of them did. Not anymore.