"Again," Lãnh Phong said.
Minh hated that word in every language.
The first time, it meant try harder.
The tenth time, it meant you are not seeing what is wrong.
By the thirtieth, it meant Lãnh Phong had already seen the shape of Minh's failure and was waiting for Minh to catch up.
He moved.
Lãnh Phong caught him before the second step.
"Readable."
Again.
Minh feinted left, stepped right.
Lãnh Phong tapped his ribs.
"Readable."
Again.
This time Minh paused half a beat.
Lãnh Phong swept his leg.
"Now you are readable and slow."
Minh hit the mat and stared at the ceiling.
His body wanted to be angry because anger gave pain a direction. That was exactly the trap.
Gomboc laughed.
"Let me move. I am not readable."
Thiên Phú arrived as a separate correction:
"You are the most readable part of us."
Minh felt the two impulses collide inside him without touching.
Lãnh Phong crouched beside Minh.
"Huyền Tinh reads clean lines. Anger is clean. Fear is clean. Mercy can be clean too."
"So I become fake?"
"No. You become layered."
Minh pushed himself up.
"Sounds like lying."
"Strategy often does to people who confuse sincerity with announcing every thought."
Minh sat up, breathing hard.
"Lâm said not to use him as an excuse."
"Good."
"That doesn't make me less angry."
"It gives your anger a border."
The next drill was worse.
False opening.
Real guard.
Broken breath.
Half-step.
No rhythm long enough to be owned.
At first, Minh felt dirty. Gomboc enjoyed the deception too much, filling each fake weakness with cruel possibilities.
"Good. Let them come close."
Phú's logic surfaced apart from the hunger:
"Purpose defines method. Deception without purpose becomes cruelty."
Minh held to that.
He repeated it silently until it became a rail under his feet.
Not trick to hurt.
Trick to protect.
Not bait to dominate.
Bait to survive.
Lãnh Phong attacked.
Minh looked at the shoulder and let his breath suggest retreat.
Lãnh Phong stepped in.
Minh did not retreat.
He shifted on the half-beat Lãnh Phong had not been given, slid inside, and stopped two fingers one inch from Lãnh Phong's ribs.
Silence.
Lãnh Phong looked down.
Then he smiled.
"Barely passable."
Minh collapsed backward, exhausted.
"That means good from you."
"It means barely passable."
But Lãnh Phong did not attack again.
Instead, he stepped back and tapped two fingers against his own chest.
"Remember that feeling. You did not become calm. You became harder to purchase."
Minh frowned. "Purchase?"
"With fear. With guilt. With a photo of Lâm. With a bleeding boy arranged under bad lights."
Minh looked at his hands.
They were shaking, but not from loss of control.
Outside, the city moved in ordinary rhythms.
For once, Minh had broken one.
Minh reconstructed the fight with chalk.
On Dạ Nam's floor he marked where his lead foot had landed, where the attack had interrupted his breath, and where the coin near his knee had drawn his eye. Lãnh Phong watched from the wall without correcting him.
"He did not break my rhythm," Minh said after the fourth sequence. "He gave me one I wanted."
"Which one?"
Minh stepped toward the chalk mark representing the insult. His weight moved forward before his guard. "The fast answer."
Lãnh Phong tossed a tennis ball at his face. Minh blocked it and lost his stance.
"Again."
The ball came from different angles. Sometimes Lãnh Phong spoke Lâm's name first. Sometimes he mentioned the clinic. Each word pulled a different error from Minh's body. By the twentieth throw, the floor looked less like a training diagram than the record of an argument.
Minh stopped erasing the failed marks. He circled them.
"What are you doing?"
"Keeping the parts he already knows."
He built a new sequence around the errors instead of pretending they could vanish. When the name Lâm came, Minh shifted backward rather than forward. When the clinic was mentioned, he checked the exit before the imagined threat. The rhythm felt ugly because it belonged to a person who had been read.
Lãnh Phong threw the final ball. Minh let it pass and heard it strike the wall behind him.
"Passable," Lãnh Phong said.
Minh looked at the chalk field. Huyền Kha's chart could predict the boy who hid his failures. It would have more trouble with one who trained on top of them.
Huyền Kha tested the new rhythm through a stranger.
On Minh's ride home, a man stumbled from a side street and grabbed his handlebar. The movement looked drunk until the second hand reached for Minh's throat with exact alignment. Minh recognized the setup and shifted backward as trained.
The man released immediately.
No fight followed. A phone across the intersection had captured the response it needed.
Minh could chase the cameraman or check the stranger. He chose the stranger and found a cheap-pill packet in his pocket. The man's pupils were wide; he seemed confused by his own position.
"They said you would attack," he whispered.
Minh moved the packet away and called Hạ Yên. The cameraman escaped while they waited for help.
At the clinic, the man admitted he had taken the capsule in exchange for a debt payment. He remembered instructions delivered through an audio file but no face. Huyền Kha had built a test from someone else's desperation and left Minh responsible for the damage.
Minh added a new chalk mark at Dạ Nam the next day: after the interruption, check who else has lost control.
Lãnh Phong did not praise the addition. He moved the tennis-ball drill closer to the exit and made Minh practice while protecting a second body. Recognition had changed the lesson again.
The stranger recovered enough to give a false name. Hạ Yên let him. Medical care did not require confession, and forcing one would only teach desperate users to avoid the clinic. Minh watched the man leave with the packet sealed as evidence and no promise that he would refuse the next offer.