When Kim Cheolsu saw me, his eyes shook hard.

"Hy-hyungnim?"

There was a wound on his throat where a blade had grazed it. Red blood was spreading across his white shirt too, where it had been slashed open.

He was bleeding at the corner of his mouth from a few hits, but luckily he wasn't badly hurt.

Three bastards had been attacking Cheolsu. Only one of them looked intact.

The tall one and the small one were in a sorry state; Cheolsu had clearly done a number on them.

The tall man's knee, in particular, was bent at a grotesque angle.

Cheolsu had given him a true education, by the look of it.

Even standing on one leg, the bastard still had plenty of fight left in his eyes.

They were giving off the killing intent peculiar to Weapons, ready to capture Cheolsu even at the cost of their own lives.

The only one still in one piece was a man of about Cheolsu's build.

The bastard held his knife with the blade reversed. His eyes flicked quickly between my hands and my planted feet. It brought back the first time I'd run into Cheolsu, at the Iseong Condo.

"Hyungnim, how did you find this……"

"Does a hyung need a reason to look for his little brother?"

"No one can find this place without knowing Room 214's lure signals!"

I already knew them. Cheolsu would never dream it, but on Seoraksan, during the raid on the Iseong Condo, I had acquired his abilities.

The small nicks in the bark, the branches snapped off in one direction, even the stones set upside down under the snow were all Room 214 lure signals.

Even if the blizzard had erased Cheolsu's footprints, tracking him was no problem.

"More importantly, Cheolsu-ya."

"Yes, hyungnim."

I looked the battered Cheolsu up and down.

"You've gotten pretty weak lately~"

"……" "This is what three guys did to you?"

Even knowing it was a joke, Cheolsu couldn't answer right away. Still, some warmth crept back into his cold, hard eyes.

Unusually for a man who'd lived his whole…