[Option found.]
"What option, what are you showing me right now?" Si-Woo said inside his head without moving his lips as the three men closed in and the candlelight caught the edges of their blades.
[Assets equal power. Liquid assets only. Land not appraised equals zero. Inventory items held in hand equal active capital.]
"So the coins count as weapons."
[Coins count as deployable assets. Expenditure of all three current copper coins will generate a three-second disorientation window in the target before full combat power drops to zero.]
"Three seconds."
[Correct.]
"That's not a lot of time."
[It is sufficient for one action if the Shareholder commits without hesitation.]
Si-Woo's eyes moved to the small wooden table beside the cot. A single funeral candle sat burned halfway down, its base thick and heavy while the wax had hardened into a blunt solid point at the bottom of the brass holder.
"And the candle."
[Not a listed asset. The Shareholder may interact with environmental objects outside the system's ledger at personal discretion.]
"So it won't count toward anything."
[It is simply a candle.]
"That's fine," Si-Woo said, reaching over and closing his fingers around the brass holder as the scarred man slowed his walk noticing the movement, not yet sure what to make of it.
"What are you going to do with that," the scarred man said, less like a question and more like something he was asking himself.
"I'm thinking," Si-Woo said.
"You should be praying."
"I'll pray when I've run out of options. Right now I still have a few left so give me a moment."
The man on the left made a short sound through his nose, not quite a laugh, before glancing at the scarred man and back at Si-Woo standing on his bad leg and holding a funeral candle like it was going to save his life.
"Just finish it," the man on the left said. "We've got four more rooms to clear before sunrise."
The scarred man nodded and raised his blade as he closed the final steps between them. Si-Woo glanced at the three copper coins resting in his left palm, feeling their faint weight, light, small, almost nothing before curling his fingers tightly around them.
One action, he thought. Don't hesitate.
[Asset Expenditure confirmed on release. Timer begins on impact.]
The scarred man's blade came up and Si-Woo threw the coins directly into his eyes before the arm finished its arc.
Three small copper discs hit at close range. The scarred man's head snapped back as both hands flew up to his face and a sharp ugly sound tore out of his throat while the blade swung wide and missed by a full foot, the man staggering sideways and crashing into the one on his left.
[Asset Expenditure: -3 Copper Coins.][Target Combat Power: 0.][Timer: 3 seconds.]
Si-Woo was already moving.
He crossed the distance on his bad leg without thinking about it and drove the base of the brass holder forward with both hands behind it, the hardened wax point connecting at the soft center of the scarred man's throat before his hands had even finished reaching for his face.
A sound came out of the man that Si-Woo had never heard anything make before. He dropped straight down like something had been cut loose inside him and the blade clattered away across the wooden boards while neither of the two remaining men moved for one full second, because neither of them had been paid enough to expect this.
[Timer: 0.]
"What," the man on the left said.
Si-Woo picked up the blade.
The two men looked at their leader on the floor, then at the blade in Si-Woo's hand, then at each other. The man on the right took one step back before the man on the left grabbed his arm and stopped him.
"There are two of us," the man on the left said, though it came out like he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else in the room.
"There were three of you thirty seconds ago," Si-Woo said, adjusting his grip on the hilt until he found the balance point. "The math is moving in the wrong direction for your side, so think carefully about what comes next."
"You got lucky with the coins."
"I got lucky with the coins," Si-Woo agreed without arguing it. "What I'm holding now has nothing to do with luck, so let's have a conversation before someone else ends up on the floor."
The man on the left studied the blade, then the body, then Si-Woo before saying the thing that Si-Woo had been waiting for him to say since the moment the door came off the frame.
"Who are you."
"Right now I'm the person asking who hired you, and I'm in a much better position to ask than I was a minute ago."
The man on the right had stopped trying to step back and was watching Si-Woo with an expression that had quietly shifted from contempt into something more careful. The man on the left kept his blade up but hadn't moved forward since the floor changed.
"We don't know who hired us," the man on the left said. "Payment came through a broker before the job details arrived in writing, no name attached."
"Which broker."
"We don't give out that information."
"You just told me payment came through a broker before the job details arrived in writing," Si-Woo said as the man's jaw tightened slightly because he already knew it was true. "Give me the broker's name and both of you walk out of here tonight."
The two men exchanged a long look while the candle on the floor beside the body continued burning quietly.
"Kang Paek-Rim," the man on the left said finally. "He runs out of the east market near the grain storage and handles this kind of work for people who don't want their names attached to it."
"Was this job for the Jin Clan specifically or the entire household?"
"Everyone carrying Jin blood before morning."
Si-Woo looked at the floor and let that settle for a moment before raising his eyes again.
"Leave the manor now and don't go back to Kang Paek-Rim before I've spoken with him first," Si-Woo said. "Do that and we don't have a problem."
The man on the left held his gaze for a moment longer before sheathing his blade. The man on the right was already at the door and they were both gone before Si-Woo had fully lowered the sword.
The room went quiet except for the candle.
[Hostile Takeover Complete.][Assets Acquired: 1 Iron Sword, 12 Copper Coins.][Combat Power: 13.]
Thirteen from three.
Si-Woo looked at his right hand where the blood had dried between his fingers and along the lines of his palm as the candlelight moved slowly across it. He thought about the first company he had ever acquired, a failing textile business drowning in debt while every banker in the city laughed when he walked through the door, and how he had stood alone in an empty office on that first night and felt exactly this same thing sitting quietly behind his ribs.
Not guilt and not fear but something quieter and more permanent than either.
The first one always feels like this, he thought. Then it stops feeling like anything and you just get better at it.
He looked at the blood on his hand, then at the text still floating patiently in front of him, and something pulled at the corner of his mouth before he let it.
"So that's how this works," he said quietly.
[Correct, Shareholder. Assets equal power and power compounds.]
Through the cracked paper window the night was still dark, but not as dark as it had been a moment ago. Si-Woo turned toward it and his stomach dropped slowly and deliberately as his eyes adjusted to what was moving through the gap in the frame.
"Torches", not one or two but a long broken line of them cutting through the dark toward the manor from the direction of the main road, the shapes behind them too many to count quickly but not too many to understand.
Twenty at least and still coming.
"System," he said.
[Yes, Shareholder.]
"How much does a combat power of thirteen buy me against twenty armed men in an open courtyard?"
The system held its answer for one full second.
[Approximately one good decision.]
Si-Woo looked at the iron sword in his hand, the twelve copper coins on the dead man's belt, and the single burning candle still alive in the room then nodded once, the same way he always had at the start of a deal that everyone else had already decided was going to go badly for him.
"Then let's make it a good one."