The Strategist's Hand
Back at the warehouse, Jae-wook laid out the East Crew plan. "The East Crew is the weakest, focused entirely on money laundering through a chain of small clubs. Their King, Kang Hyuk, is a coward, but he has one secret weapon: his older brother, a professional debt collector who taught him to fight dirty."
"I can handle a dirty fighter," Jinwoo stated.
"No, you can't. Not this one," Jae-wook corrected. "He's a master of environmental fighting—using chairs, tables, bottles, and confusing terrain to his advantage. Your clean, synthesized movements will be useless in a chaotic bar brawl. You need a blueprint for chaos."
The New Echo: Chaos
Jinwoo realized he had been copying controlled movements. He needed a style that embraced disorder.
He found his next source in the deepest, seediest underground fighting ring he could locate—a place where rules were nonexistent and the environment was part of the weapon. He observed a nameless, grizzled brawler known only as "The Cleaner" who specialized in weaponizing everything around him.
Jinwoo focused his Reflective Mimicry on the brawler's improvisational use of props—the perfect leverage to swing a chair, the precise angle needed to shatter a bottle on a skull, the seamless transition from a fistfight to a grapple using a crowded wall.
The resulting Echo wasn't a technique; it was a blueprint for Improvisational Adaptation. It gave Jinwoo the intuitive knowledge of how to calculate the weight, leverage, and potential use of any nearby object in a fight.
The Bar Brawl
The fight with the East Crew was set in one of their dilapidated nightclubs. It was a chaotic, crowded ambush.
Kang Hyuk, the King, predictably used his older brother, who immediately lunged, grabbing a broken stool.
The older brother charged, using the unpredictable angles of the crowded room to confuse Jinwoo.
Jinwoo activated his new Echo. His body moved on instinct, seeing the crowded tables, the loose bottles, and the dim lighting not as obstacles, but as tools. The older brother swung the stool—a motion Jinwoo hadn't copied. But the Improvisational Adaptation Echo told him: The stool's heaviest point is here; dodge this way; the resulting momentum will be here.
Jinwoo ducked the swing and, using the perfect Aikido Pivot, redirected the stool's momentum back into the crowd, clearing space. He then grabbed a nearby bottle, not to hit, but to use its weight to extend the reach of his Minjun Cross just enough to connect with the brother's head.
The fight dissolved into a blur of controlled chaos. Jinwoo was a storm of improvised violence, using the environment against the enemy, never fighting cleanly, but always fighting perfectly based on the terrain. He beat the brother down using a mix of pure skill and environmental disruption.
Kang Hyuk, seeing his shield shattered, immediately offered Jinwoo control of the East Crew's financial assets, begging for his life. Jinwoo had unified three of the four major crews.