Rain hammered the city like a fist on iron, turning streets into braided veins of water and light. Inside the club, the storm took another shape: smoke, bass, heat. Strobe lights slit through the haze, throwing faces into stuttering half-masks. The floor glittered with condensation and spilled drinks; every surface reflected neon in fractured, misleading ways. Chairs slumped where last-minute quarrels had been interrupted; a tray lay broken under a table, its contents smeared into the puddled floor. The whole room smelled of stale beer, cheap cologne, cigarette tar, and the copper sting of fear.
Saitō moved through that atmosphere like a shadow that had learned to breathe. His hood was up, collar folded so the light caught nothing but the edge of a cheekbone. His boots kissed the slick floor with practised care; he placed each weight deliberately, measuring micro-balances with toes and ankles the way a fighter measures distance with eyes. Years of pugilistic memory sat like coiled wire in his hips. He didn't move to be seen. He moved to see.
The courier was a nervous man in a cheap suit, briefcase braced between knees, the cardboard edges dark with condensation from ice packs inside. Two lieutenants broad, slow, and precise flanked a corridor that opened to the service exit. The taller one had tattooed bands that disappeared under his sleeves; the smaller kept his hand close to the knife at his belt, thumb drumming on the handle like a metronome. Saitō did not need to be told who they were. He catalogued them in one long glance: muscle tone, breathing cadence, the way their feet shifted when they anticipated a shove. Every puddle, every glass shard, every outstretched arm became a variable to fold into his motion plan. He catalogued escape routes with the lazy speed of someone who spends entire operations mapping death away: service door, staff stair, alley beyond the loading bay, fire escape ladder, a delivery van's blind spot around the corner. He stored them like priestly names.
Then the door banged.
A man hurtled through the side entrance, a body shaped by panic and inadequate training. He carried a pistol like a late idea bought with cash and despair. His eyes were white with too much adrenaline. The courier's face went slack. A group around the bar scattered, chairs screeching like geese.
"Move!" someone shouted, but the word dissolved into the music.
Time slowed. Not real time, Saitō's brain stretched the moment into precise frames: the muzzle's arc, the flash at the trigger, the courier's flinch, the flight of a coaster. He read the angles and stepped into the slice.
He closed like a lock. His right hand seized the gunman's wrist at the webbing, fingers crushing tendons like the pinch of a vice. The world narrowed to bone, leather, and the gun's metallic heat.
The gunman's finger tightened, and a report cracked the air. The bullet hit the neon strip above the bar, shredding plastic in a shower of sparks. The man won't aim right, Saitō thought, and then he did what he always did: turned the man's intent into leverage.
His left elbow struck across the assailant's sternum, a compact, practised blow that carried the torque of cavalry, not theatre. The man inhaled raggedly, cartilage crying out. Saitō rotated his hips, using the attacker's upthrust to lead him into an ouchi-gari variation: dropping his weight, sweeping the opponent's inside support with the back of his own calf. The attacker slid, a long arc on wet tile, glass singing under him. The gun skittered away, a useless black insect.
"You okay?" someone shouted. That someone's voice was small.
"Move!" the taller lieutenant barked, and the room changed shape again, instinct shifting into machine precision.
Another man, broad and angry, barreled in at the courier, big enough to catch two men in his swing. He committed, overshot on his strike; his shoulder became a fulcrum. Saitō stepped inside, grabbed the limb with his forearm like a brace, anchored his feet, then torqued the wrist into a small, ugly wristlock, the kind of pressure that triggers reflex and compliance before long-term damage. He yanked the skulking man's arm down while planting his shin behind the opponent's support leg, a sweep executed with the economy of a man who learned judo and jiu-jitsu in alleys where mistakes had teeth. The man cartwheeled across the bar, wood breaking, bottles exploding into glittering shards; liquid painted the air.
The third attacker moved like a stray dog: wiry, quick, knife glinting low at his side. He lunged with a blade, aiming for the courier's ribs, thinking speed would bypass technique. Saitō slid, a micro-rotation of his hips, and the knife phase became a useless slash ripping air. He trapped the striker's wrist with a two-handed grip, fingers locking over tendons, and converted the wrist control into a ude-garami / Kimura-style twist that torqued the shoulder and elbow and punished the attempt to stab. With his right leg, he reaped the man's back foot a sweep combined with the arm control and the assailant crashed into a smashed table in a heap. The knife skated across tiles, a dark fish on neon.
"Damn," the small lieutenant hissed, eyes sweeping the wreckage for opportunity. "You move like an anaconda, old man."
"Funny thing," Saitō murmured to himself, feeling the metallic hinterland behind his teeth. "I learned to move when I had to."
Not craft, not pride. Just a calculation. His stomach hummed with rhythm: inhale, extension, pull, hip turn, release. Those were the syllables of violence.
The room broadened like an animal inhaling. Two more attackers came from the bar, one ducked, brandishing a pipe, the other bounced on the balls of his feet like a boxer craving a match. The pipe man cursed and swung with violent intent.
Saitō met metal with his forearm. The pipe's impact sent a throb up his arm, a reminder that even steel spoke in pain. He parried, used the pipe man's follow-through to hook over his elbow and drop under the man's centre of gravity, spinning into an osoto-gari that slammed the assailant's back into a toppled chair. The pipe clattered away, slipping into a pool of amber.
The boxer tried to exploit any gap; he charged low, shoulder in. Saitō stepped inside the charge, closed to clinch range and drove a closed hand into the man's diaphragm, not a showy blow, but one that expelled breath and will. He then trapped a wrist and used a short hip turn to pull the man into a knee to the thigh, taking him down clean.
Each motion had the texture of practice: hip pivot, shoulder frame, grip tight where it mattered. He thought in pressure gradients: where to push, where to yield. He thought of exits: the courier's line, the service door at twelve o'clock, the side alcove at three, through which the courier might slip. Every opponent's breath, every micro-shuffle was a sentence in the map of the moment.
A wiry attacker with a chain tried to circle, the chain arcing like a scorpion's tail. Saitō caught that chain hand, twisted, and sent it over his shoulder, executing a classic osoto-gari that dropped the attacker into scattered chairs. The chain bound and wrapped once around the table legs, snagging like a net. A spinning kick aimed at his head got caught mid-air: Saitō reached, trapped the man's leg at the knee, and pivoted the man's momentum against him, turning the kick into a ground technique. The man hit a pile of cushions and never rose cleanly.
The club became a choreography of jarring micro-wins: a knee pressed into a throat here, a shoulder harnessed there, tables used as fulcrums. He used a knee-on-belly when he needed to slow motion: knee to sternum, forearms locked across an attacker's shoulders, using breath as a timer. He could tell when someone was about to pass out by the slackening around their eyes. He loosened the pressure accordingly. Not to be humane, just efficient. The department had rules; the street didn't.
Voices floated above the batter of noise: curses, shouts, the lieutenant's clipped orders. "Get the briefcase! Move!" The messages were short, efficient, and without poetry. Saitō watched the courier slip the briefcase toward the larger lieutenant's shoulder. The smaller lieutenant, a needle of a man, moved like an extractor, sliding under cover to intercept late threats.
The fourth rival charged like a ram. Saitō expected the contact, dropped a shoulder, turned the ram into a rolling tomoe nage brief, violent, the man's momentum flipped him through the air and into the bar's metal frame. Bottles crashed, spray arced like blood and neon colored light. The floor grew slicker. Each spill multiplied the club's hazards: glass became teeth, puddles became ice. Saitō adjusted, planting his feet where suction was less likely, leaning into each move so that burden poured through his centre, not his ankles.
A man with a knife feinted low, then tried to hook upward toward Saitō's jaw. Saitō's shoulder check opened, then closed like a trap; he pinned the wrist to the ground, shifted his weight back, and finished the sequence with a hip pivot that turned wrist control into a short-armbar. Nothing elaborate: pressure on the elbow, thigh control to block escape. The attacker spat blood and gave a choked curse. He did not move again. Their eyes met Saitō's across the chaos, and for a heartbeat, amid shattered glass and flying liquids, understanding passed silently between them.
The larger lieutenant's jaw tightened slightly, a nod almost imperceptible. The smaller one's grip on his knife relaxed just enough, and the courier's hands tightened on the crate, exhaling with a mixture of relief and acknowledgment.
The fight's tempo followed the music's beats: surge, hush, surge, like a tide that kept revealing new teeth. Saitō felt the burn creep into muscle: lactic acid pricking in quads, a thin heat behind one knee. But when the courier's route opened a narrow corridor where two bodies could not stand, he moved to make a channel.
He let menace look like choice. He staggered forward, banged a shoulder into someone feigning a stumble, and allowed the accidental contact to look like chaos. The lieutenants seized the briefcase and shoved it into a sprint. The taller one's calves pulsed; the courier's breath came forced. The smaller lieutenant slipped like a phantom under the rail, knife at hip, eyes unblinking.
Not everyone who rushed followed the pattern. A desperate man lunged and tried to tackle Saitō around the legs. The world reduced to kinetic grammar: his knee took the contact, he rotated, and that man's tackle became an opportunity for a sumi-gaeshi roll, a controlled throw, turning tackle into projection. The man collapsed under a fallen table, the legs buckling and scattering patrons like flotsam.
Saitō's ears rang with the bass and with his own blood. He could taste copper. He tasted his own adrenaline, bitter underneath the sour of spilled beer. He was not immune to fear; fear was a current he navigated. When one rival tried to strike while Saitō disengaged a late pivot and a sickening snap of bone, Saitō's movement snapped back into place: a knee rose, connecting to the chin, the man's head wobbling like a puppet with frayed strings. That man did not rise for a long time.
A pattern emerged: the lieutenants moved like a machine, the courier an anxious hand that would not drop the box. Saitō's job was to be the machine's teeth, efficient, dangerous, and disposable if necessary. He had to look like a wild card; he had to be the kind of man who would "save" them in the eyes of observers. He had to leave marks that the right people would read.
More threats streamed in two men from the service stair, faces masked in shadow, coming with the odd desperation of those who fight for next week's rent. One had a kitchen cleaver; the other tried a low tackle. The man with the cleaver swung with uncontrolled fury. Saitō avoided extension, tilted in close, trapped the blade hand between forearm and chest, and used a short, violent hip twist to disarm. The cleaver clattered and skidded, embedding in the rubber mat behind the bar. The other man went down under a well-timed leg reap.
He did not want people dead. Dead meant paperwork, stories, and attention on the wrong things. He wanted them incapacitated, remembered, and grateful.
Then the service door split open, and the lieutenants moved, briefcase high. The taller one sprinted, knees churning, whole body arranged toward escape. The courier ducked and followed, heaving the briefcase like a man carrying a second heartbeat. The smaller lieutenant ghosted after, knife flashing if only in glimpses.
Saitō covered the egress like a last lock. He slid between a pursuer and the exit at the same time a streaked bartender hurled a bottle, glass, cracking across the tile as it hit the pipe of an approaching man. He used the broken bottle to force the last rival to step wide; a planted toe at the small of the rival's back unbalanced him, and the man tumbled into a stack of chairs, yelping.
By the time the trio reached the loading corridor, Saitō had turned three assaults into four immobilisations. He watched them go with the satisfaction of an engineer watching a mechanism operate. The lieutenants ducked through, the courier shoulder to shoulder with the tall man, briefcase tucked up tight like contraband in a coffin.
Saitō didn't follow instantly. He had to close the perimeter, make sure no one would slip in and pluck the briefcase from the back. Two men tried one with brass knuckles, the other with a broken bottle, and both found themselves folded into armlocks, choked into submission, left to pant on the floor with the stench of their own breathing.
Only then did Saitō move. He slid along the wall like an eavesdropper, using puddle reflections and overturned tables as blinders. The club's lights flickered from strobe to haze in the loading corridor; the music thudded, but the sound rebounded oddly in the concrete throat. Outside, rain hit the tarmac in sheets, the city squeaking like a wet animal.
Every step away was measured. He passed a woman with mascara bleeding down her face, eyes huge. A man cursing and clutching a wrist where bone might be tender. He felt the small engine of his heart slow from sprint to a methodic beat. The muscles still jittered, but the motion settled into memory.
At the delivery door, he paused. The city had become rain and neon, market stalls closed for the night and the whine of a passing truck. He waited long enough for the lieutenants' van to pull away a dark vehicle slipping into the splashed street then he burned his route: across a low wall, through a service alley, across a chain link he could climb in seconds, down a short flight of stairs that led to a narrow lane where the smells of the club gave way to diesel and wet cardboard.
Pain woke in small places: his wrist was tender where he'd torqued the first gunman; a line of heat traced a shoulder where someone had collided with him; his knuckles were rough, the skin split. Nothing that would stop him. He flexed fingers as if testing instruments.
He slid into a doorway and let the rain take the sweat from his neck. Cold sank into his ribs. He breathed deliberately, listening not to the distant music but to his own intake, one, two, and release. One, two, and release. He tried to count his heartbeats until numbers blurred into rhythm.
His mind catalogued the scene like a post-mortem ledger. Who hit hard enough to be a problem later? Which of the fighters carried scars he could read as signatures? A cluster of men at table five likely a half-formed crew; a wiry one with a tattooed knuckle who'd moved with a snake's indifference; a big one who had missed a strike and thus would remember pain. Names never spoken cleanly became marks on memory: the wire, the piston, the knife thumb. Takeda would like this pattern. Takeda would file it away in a ledger of men and debts.
Saitō wanted to hate that thought. He wanted to hate the part of him that felt a hollow bloom of satisfaction at having been efficient, precise, necessary. He had been a man who knew what to do when violence arrived; now the violence had a face that might prefer him to live under its wing—the idea lodged like a splinter.
He turned the corner and kept moving. The rain spattered his hood, tiny needles of cold. He exhaled and tasted iron again — the residue of other people's blood, of his own past. Down three streets and a block, he stopped beneath a flickering lamp and let his body cool. His hand checked the edge of his thumb where glove leather had torn; there was a thin line of dried blood. He wiped it on the inside of his sleeve, smearing the red into the fabric like a secret.
Somewhere, the city rolled on, indifferent. Patrons would heal. Some would learn the exact pattern of his hands if they ever met him again. Someone would tell someone about the stranger who fought like a man who'd been taught to be a blade. And somewhere else, a room lit by a single bulb, where men like Takeda listened to rumours the way clerics listen for the weather, a piece of paper would be folded, and a name circled.
Saitō drew his shoulders up against the rain, memory slotted into muscle, palate still clear with adrenaline. The night had sharpened the world; his edges felt easier to slip through.
He walked into the rain-slick darkness, a shadow among many, carrying the minor, precise wounds of the evening and the knowledge that the ledger would now demand more. He at least made sure he face was known to the other party