1:45 PM. Makati.
Gunshots thundered through the enclosed firing range while the air hung thick with burnt gunpowder and raining brass casings, the muffled rhythmic thumping from the lanes pulsing through the drywall like a heartbeat.
The GT-R sat in the basement parking structure with her pearl white paint gleaming under fluorescent strips, Jae-min killing the engine as the twin-turbo rumble faded into the stale oil-scented silence of concrete and parked cars.
36°C outside.
March 21.
Twenty-five days left.
He sat behind the wheel and gripped it, the two red dots from this morning having vanished by the time he reached the parking garage with no one in the hallway and no sound, just empty carpet and the faint jasmine from the hallway diffusers.
Whatever they were, whoever they were, they had moved on, or they were waiting somewhere he couldn't see.
He hadn't slept and hadn't eaten, but his mind was a blade, clean and sharp and ready, and he stepped out and checked his reflection in the side mirror.
Black hair, black eyes, dark circles carved beneath them hollowing his cheeks into something gaunt and focused, the face of a man who knew exactly what he had to do.
The range was a cathedral of violence with fresh sweat and the metallic tang of cold steel cutting through the haze, the AC humming and barely keeping up with the Manila heat bleeding through the walls.
Rico was waiting by the front counter, and beside him stood a man Jae-min had never met.
Tall and broad with a shaved head and a thick jagged scar running from his left ear to his jawline, a canyon carved by violence.
A plain black shirt strained against massive arms with the fabric threatening to split at the seams, and a tactical leather holster peeked from under his unzipped jacket.
His eyes were sharp and assessing, the eyes of a man who measured everything in threats and solutions.
"Jae-min." Rico acknowledged, a measured warmth greeting family tempered by the gravity of the meeting as he placed a hand on Jae-min's shoulder.
"This is Victor Galvez." Rico continued, a careful, deliberate neutrality choosing words the way a man walks a line between legal and not. "Ex-Marine. Ran private security in Iraq for six years. Now he procures things."
"This the kid with sixteen million?" Victor drawled, a low, gravelly condescension carrying the lazy amusement of a man who had already decided the conversation wasn't worth his time.
"This is my nephew." Rico corrected, a quiet, immovable warning shifting the warmth into something harder, a silk-wrapped blade telling Victor to be careful how he spoke.
Victor extended a thick hand, and Jae-min shook it, the grip crushing and deliberately testing, a primate asserting dominance through force.
Jae-min didn't flinch and just stared back with black eyes meeting black eyes, still.
Victor's smirk widened, not because Jae-min had passed the test but because the test had just become interesting.
"Not bad." Victor admitted, a grudging respect cutting through the smugness as he released the handshake.
"Rico said you want hardware." Victor continued, the smirk fading into something harder as he crossed his arms. "Military grade. No paperwork."
"Yes." Jae-min confirmed, a flat absolute certainty carrying a single syllable with no more emotion than a loaded chamber clicking into place.
"What kind of trouble are you in?" Victor pressed, crossing his arms with the look of a man who had learned in Iraqi deserts that young men with too much money and no paper trail always came with a body count.
"The kind that doesn't exist yet." Jae-min answered, the words landing like a coin dropping into an open grave.
Victor raised an eyebrow and looked at Rico, who just shrugged with his weathered face an unreadable mask, and his black eyes holding that quiet, immovable stillness of a mountain that had seen worse and chosen not to comment.
"Okay." Victor exhaled, a slow surrender, deciding to stop asking questions and start counting money as he turned toward a heavy steel back door. "Come."
They followed him through a dimly lit storage area past towering stacks of green ammunition crates and weapon racks covered by dusty canvas tarps, into a cramped windowless back office where Victor closed the door and locked it with a heavy click and pulled a battered tablet from a desk drawer.
"Tell me what you need." Victor said, a professional efficiency sliding the ex-Marine into the skin of a quartermaster.
Jae-min pulled out his phone and opened his notes. "Nine millimeter pistols. Glock 19 Gen 5. Four of them." Jae-min listed, a flat monotone inventory reading a grocery list for the apocalypse.
Victor nodded and tapped the tablet. "Shotguns. Benelli M4. Two of them." Jae-min continued without looking up.
"Tactical or standard?" Victor asked, not looking up from the tablet.
"Tactical. Extended tubes." Jae-min specified, his voice flat.
"Done." Victor confirmed with a brief nod.
"Rifles. Remington 700. Long range. Two of them. Plus scopes." Jae-min continued down the list.
"What range?" Victor asked, tapping.
"Eight hundred meters minimum." Jae-min replied before pausing, the tone sharpening as he shifted from inventory to specification. "But I need something custom."
Victor paused with his finger hovering over the glass.
"Custom?" Victor asked, a genuine curiosity surfacing, the kind a weapons dealer feels when a client asks for something that doesn't exist off the shelf.
"A sniper rifle. Built from scratch." Jae-min detailed, a quiet precision ordering a tool rather than a weapon. "Surgeon Scalpel action. Heavy barrel. Adjustable stock. Suppressed. Calibrated for extreme cold weather."
Victor stared at him.
"Extreme cold?" Victor questioned, his brow furrowing.
"Minus seventy. Celsius." Jae-min said softly, the number dropping into the room like a stone into deep water.
The room went dead quiet with the muffled gunshots from the range seeming to fade entirely, swallowed by the weight of the number.
"Kid, you know we're in the Philippines, right?" Victor blurted, the smirk completely gone and replaced by confusion and the dawning suspicion that he was talking to a madman.
"I know what I need." Jae-min reaffirmed, an unwavering certainty forming a wall of ice refusing to crack.
Victor looked at Rico, whose face was an unreadable mask but whose silver-white head tilted slightly with the ghost of something sad and knowing passing through his black eyes, his silence louder than any words.
"Surgeon Scalpel builds take time." Victor measured, setting the tablet down as the bravado drained and the honest voice of a craftsman took over. "Three weeks minimum. Maybe four."
"You have two." Jae-min countered, flat and immovable.
"Two weeks? That's impossible." Victor scoffed, a sharp, incredulous laugh escaping before he realized the other person wasn't joking.
Jae-min reached into his jacket, pulled out a thick, heavy envelope, and dropped it on the desk where it hit the wood with a dense, satisfying thud, the sound of compressed paper and bound bills.
"One million pesos. Upfront. Cash." Jae-min stated, a flat delivery with no negotiation and no leverage, just fact. "You deliver in fourteen days, there's another million in it."
Victor stared at the envelope with his jaw working silently.
"Who the hell are you?" Victor demanded, his voice dropping as the question ripped out raw and involuntary, the sound of a man realizing he was no longer the most dangerous person in the room.
"A customer." Jae-min replied, stripping away everything except the transaction.
Victor reached for the envelope and thumbed through the tight stacks with his eyes flickering between greed and caution, the two forces that had kept him alive in Iraq and out of prison.
"Custom suppressor adds another two hundred thousand." Victor tested, feeling the ground.
"Done." Jae-min accepted, flat.
"I'll need to source the steel from a specialist in Pampanga." Victor calculated, his mind already racing through logistics as the soldier in him proved unable to resist the puzzle. "Cold-forged barrel. Cryo-treated."
"Whatever it takes." Jae-min confirmed, a grinding certainty leaving no room for alternatives.
Victor picked the tablet back up.
"Anything else?" Victor asked, professional.
"Ammunition. Nine millimeter. Twelve-gauge slugs and buckshot. Three hundred Winchester Magnum for the Remingtons." Jae-min listed, his voice flattening further. "Ten thousand rounds of each."
Victor's hand froze over the tablet. "Ten thousand." Victor repeated, slow, as if saying it aloud might make it smaller.
"Yes." Jae-min confirmed, flat.
"That's a small armory." Victor observed, the words carrying new weight, not judgment and not shock but the quiet recalibration of a man realizing the scale.
"It's a start." Jae-min declared, a grinding certainty carrying the voice of a man who had already counted every bullet and found it wanting.
Victor looked up and studied Jae-min's face, the black eyes and the hollow cheeks and the absolute lack of fear, not bravado and not psychosis but the profound grounding calm of a man who had already seen the worst thing in the world and decided it wasn't worth being afraid of anymore.
"Rico." Victor called, low and almost conspiratorial as he turned to the older man. "What is this kid planning?"
"A war." Rico answered, a devastating certainty delivering a single word with the gentle, unshakeable authority of a man who had already accepted it as truth.
Not a joke, not an exaggeration, just truth.
Victor stared at Jae-min; something shifted as the last traces of smugness evaporated and were replaced by hard, focused respect, the look a veteran gives another veteran when he recognizes the same ghosts behind their eyes.
He went back to the tablet and tapped rapidly.
"Body armor?" Victor asked, professional.
"Level IV plates. Six sets. With carriers." Jae-min specified, flat.
"Knives?" Victor continued.
"Combat knives. Four. Plus two tomahawks." Jae-min listed, flat.
"Optics?" Victor pressed.
"Night vision. Four PVS-14s. Thermal scope for the Remingtons." Jae-min answered, flat.
"Comms?" Victor finished.
"Eight handheld radios. Encrypted. Long range." Jae-min concluded, flat.
Victor added everything, and the total on the screen climbed rapidly.
"Four point eight million." Victor announced, leaning back. "Plus the two million for the custom build. Six point eight total."
"Transfer the money today." Jae-min ordered, a quiet, focused authority applying a logistics manager's skill to something far more lethal. "Deliver the standard gear in three days. The custom rifle in fourteen."
Victor closed the tablet and leaned back with the leather groaning under his bulk.
"Delivery location?" Victor asked, professionally.
Jae-min slid a piece of paper across the table with an address in Pasay, a warehouse near the port and one of his old logistics hubs.
"There. Back entrance. Midnight." Jae-min specified, flat.
"Alone?" Victor asked, a sharp concern furrowing his brow.
"I'll have someone with me." Jae-min answered, flatly.
Victor nodded and stood up and extended his hand again.
"Pleasure doing business, kid." Victor grinned, a rough, begrudging smile splitting his scarred face. "You're either a genius or completely insane."
"Can't it be both?" Jae-min replied, and for the briefest fraction of a second something flickered behind the tired black eyes, not warmth but the ghost of something that might have been a joke in another life.
Victor laughed, a real rough chest-deep laugh that shook his massive shoulders and echoed off the cinderblock walls.
"Rico, keep an eye on this one." Victor roared, still laughing but with an edge wrapped in exaggeration. "He's going to either save the world or burn it down."
Rico didn't smile, his silver-white head tilting slightly while his weathered face settled in that quiet ancient warmth.
"I'm betting on the first one." Rico murmured, a quiet certainty that could anchor a ship in a hurricane.
— • • • —
They left the office and walked back through the dim storage area past the towering weapon racks with the air smelling of gun oil and cold metal.
Jae-min paused.
One of the dusty canvas tarps had shifted, and he could see the sharp edge of a metal crate underneath; stenciled on the side in faded white paint was a symbol.
A serpent eating its own tail. An ouroboros.
Underneath it, a single word: TAIWAN.
— FLASHBACK —
Blood-red paint on a concrete wall.
A military camp in the frozen wastes, the ouroboros sprayed in a perfect looping circle with the serpent's jaws locked on its own tail.
Right before everyone inside the camp vanished without a single trace.
Not killed, not taken, just gone, as if the earth had opened up and swallowed them whole.
Nothing left behind but empty beds and cold coffee cups and that horrible looping serpent painted on the wall like a signature.
— FLASHBACK END —
"Victor." Jae-min called, every pretense of calm stripped from the single word barely leaving his throat.
"Yeah?" Victor turned, his expression open.
"What's in that crate?" Jae-min demanded, his voice going flat and hard as he pointed at the tarp.
Victor glanced at the tarp, and his expression flickered for a fraction of a second, something like genuine fear crossing his scarred face, quick and raw and immediately buried under a mask of casual indifference that didn't quite fit.
"Nothing you need to worry about, kid." Victor deflected, the words tumbling out too fast and too smooth, the verbal equivalent of a man locking a door behind him. "Classified shipment. Passing through. I'm just storing it for a friend."
"Who?" Jae-min pressed, demanding rather than asking.
"Someone you don't want to meet." Victor cut, hard and final, the warmth vanishing and replaced by cold closure, a locked door.
Victor walked toward the exit fast, ending the conversation with the deliberate efficiency of a man who knew when to stop talking before the talking got him killed.
Jae-min watched him go with the ouroboros symbol burning in his mind like a brand pressed into the inside of his skull.
'That symbol. The same ouroboros. The same serpent eating its tail.' Jae-min burned, a cold calculating fury igniting beneath his exhaustion as his fists clenched at his sides. 'Someone is moving weapons through the Philippines, stolen from Taiwan, stamped with a symbol I don't understand.'
Rico touched his shoulder, gentle and warm.
"Jae-min. Let's go." Rico urged, an unhurried patience carrying the voice of a man who understood that some doors needed to be opened slowly and not kicked in.
Jae-min didn't move.
Not yet.
But he would.
He turned and followed Rico out of the range; the afternoon sun hit them like a furnace, 36°C with the parking lot shimmering and Manila breathing its heavy humid breath, indifferent to the two men walking toward a pearl white GT-R with a weapons contract in the glovebox and a mind full of serpents.
Twenty-five days.
₱6.8M committed.
₱4.6M remaining.
Tomorrow, the fortress.