The pain was a fire in his jaw, but it was nothing compared to the inner chaos. Kim-Do stood up, his body responding with foreign agility, his reflexes mixing the imposter's survival instinct with the muscular memory of the original fighter. It was like being both the driver and the passenger of a car rushing towards a wall.
Park Jin-Ho, surprised by the sudden transformation, paused. The triumphant smile on his face froze, then cracked in front of the man's expression in front of him. It was not the cold, calculating look of the recent Kim-Do, nor the raw rage of the old. It was something more... double. A destabilizing overlay.
"What is..." Jin-Ho began.
He didn't have time to finish. Kim-Do's body moved. It was not a charge, but a feint, a fast lateral displacement that used the structure of a conveyor as a fulcrum. A low, precise kick aimed at Jin-Ho's knee. The attack was not of overwhelming brute force, but of surgical efficiency, inherited from countless street fights. Jin-Ho narrowly dodged, but lost his balance.
In Kim-Do's mind, it was a storm.
On the left! thought a voice - his voice, that of the imposter, full of the immediate fear of attack.
No, it's going to block. Pushing him against the vat, echoed another thought, more serious, imbued with a bitter experience. The voice of the real Kim-Do.
The body followed the second impulse. Instead of continuing the frontal attack, Kim-Do pivoted and pushed Jin-Ho out of his shoulder, taking advantage of his imbalance. The giant stumbled and hit a huge metal tank in a thud.
The battle around them seemed to have stopped, with the men of both factions watching, stunned, this transformed duel. Choi Yu-Ra looked wide-eyed, no longer recognizing his boss in these hybrid movements.
Jin-Ho, mad with rage and humiliation, rushed in again. This time, there was no strategy, only blind force. The real Kim-Do, in a shared spirit, perceived the opening immediately.
Now! The plexus!
The imposter wanted to back off, to protect himself. A conflict of wills erupted, paralyzing the body for a microsecond. Jin-Ho's fist brushed against Kim-Do's temple.
Pain and fear galvanized the imposter. Let me go! he yelled inwardly, not at Jin-Ho, but at the other presence within him.
There was a floating, a tacit and furious concession. Kim-Do's body, which had become fluid again, suddenly lowered its guard, drawing a second hook. At the last moment, he slipped under the blow and, using Jin-Ho's momentum, elbowed him violently at the base of his neck.
Jin-Ho collapsed, suffocating, his eyes repulsed.
Silence fell on the factory. The White Tigers, seeing their leader on the ground, retreating, hesitated and then backed away, their morale broken. Kim-Do's faction remained standing, panting, victorious, but deeply disturbed.
Kim-Do gasped with his hands on his lap. The victory was bitter. It belonged to no one and to two people at the same time. In his skull, inner dialogue was a ravaged battlefield.
You hesitated. You could have finished it faster, scolded the voice of the real Kim-Do, reproachful.
I am not a killer! retorted the imposter, still reeling from violence.
Here, if you're not a killer, you're a corpse. You're wearing my face. You live in my world. Act accordingly.
The return to the Convent was a nightmare. Physically exhausted, mentally torn, Kim-Do walked in an automaton. Yu-Ra was trying to talk to him, to understand what had happened, but he was responding with monosyllables. His mind was too busy containing the inner storm.
Lyra, Joon and the others were waiting for them, anxious. They had followed the battle through remote sensors and fluctuating system data. They knew that the grace code had worked. They didn't know what the cost was.
When Kim-Do walked through the door of the Convent, Lyra immediately saw the difference. It was not in his posture or his wounds, but in his informational aura, perceptible to a regulator. A double, dissonant frequency.
"Is it successful?" she asked, directly.
Kim-Do looked up at her. For a moment, her pupils seemed to dilate, as if two people were trying to focus her. "Yes," replied a voice struggling to find her unity. "He's there."
He pointed to his own temple. The gesture was fraught with madness and truth.
Joon approached, suspicious. "Now what?"
Now we need to make rules, thought the imposter, desperate.
Now we must regain control, thought the real Kim-Do, determined.
The first night was an ordeal of absolute horror. Kim-Do did not sleep. He could not. As soon as he closed his eyes, memories that were not his own passed: the shame of poverty, the taste of blood in his mouth after a first fight won, his mother's face on his deathbed, the cold resolution that followed. In return, blurry, distant images of his old life - a computer screen, a different loneliness - seemed to irritate the other presence, like an insignificant background noise.
They spoke not with words, but with raw thoughts, projected emotions, fragments of memory. It was exhausting, invasive.
The real Kim-Do - who had to be well named to distinguish them, even mentally - was a force of psychic nature. His will was a rock, forged in adversity. But he was also confused. He now understood the truth about the system, about his own imprisonment, about the imposter who had replaced him. His rage was immense, but it ran into an inescapable fact: this imposter had saved him. And he was now his only connection to reality.
The imposter was overwhelmed. He struggled to preserve his identity, his fear, his doubts, in the face of this overwhelming personality that shared his skull. He was like a swimmer trying not to drown in the tumultuous waters of another's consciousness.
In the early morning, exhausted beyond measure, the imposter managed to formulate a clear thought, a desperate prayer to his involuntary host.
We need... we need an agreement. Otherwise, we're both going to go crazy. We're going to destroy ourselves.
A heavy silence answered him. Then, the presence of the real Kim-Do became more compact, less diffuse. Focused attention.
What agreement? The thought was heavy with mistrust.
We have a common enemy. The system. We have common allies. Lyra, Joon. Do you want to go back to life? I want to... survive. Find my place. Maybe we can cooperate. Not merging. Cooperate.
How to cooperate? The question was a trap. An assessment of the tactical value of the imposter.
You know this world. You know the struggle, the force. I know the system inside, its quirks, its flaws. I have connections you don't have. Together... we could be more than the sum of our parts.
It was an argument for survival, but also the first seed of a strategy. The real Kim-Do, the tactician, couldn't ignore it. His hatred of the situation was visceral, but his thirst for victory, for revenge against the system, was stronger.
Okay, finally came the thought, cold as steel. A temporary agreement. You keep the main control of the body. For now. You're used to it. But in combat, in strategic decisions, you listen to me. And we find a way to separate. A real body for me. Not this... cohabitation.
It was more than the imposter would have dared to hope for. A respite. A chance.
Okay, he nodded, an immense relief tempered by the terror of what was yet to come.
That morning, when he got up and faced his reflection in a polished piece of metal, Kim-Do saw his own eyes, but he felt the other man's gaze behind them. It was no longer a possession, but a forced partnership. A special alliance between two castaways from the same shipwreck.
He came out of his corner and found Lyra and Joon waiting for him, their anxiety palpable.
"We must speak," he said, and his voice, though still his, carried a new assurance, a borrowed gravity. "He is with me. We established a modus vivendi. We now need to discuss what comes next. The rebellion continues. But now she has... two brains."
Lyra studied her face, then exchanged a glance with Joon. The landscape had just changed again. The rebellion had saved one victim, but it may also have created a weapon of dangerous complexity. And at the center of it all, a divided man had to learn to walk without tearing himself apart.