Chapter Text
Alan looked up from his phone as the car came to a stop in front of a yellow safety barrier. The driver lowered the window and exchanged a few words with someone standing just inside the gate. Alan didn't speak Thai; the only thing he caught was the driver repeating the words Khun Paichit and muay sakon. The conversation didn't last long. At a gesture from the guard, several men came out of the darkness and lifted the barrier aside.
They drove slowly through the abandoned construction site. What little light there was glittered in the rainwater covering the concrete courtyard. It had started raining when Alan left the hotel, and it had continued for the better part of an hour while they were stuck in traffic, but now these puddles were the only sign of the earlier downpour.
Further in, a makeshift parking lot overflowed with cars jammed in at odd angles. They circled around to what looked like a back door, and Alan stepped out while the engine was still running. He wasn't prepared for the wave of humid heat that slammed into him. He hardly ever left his hotel room, where he could hide with the AC cranked up, order room service with Paichit Chaichana's money, and run pentests on the side if he got bored.
The driver led him inside through a long corridor that stopped at a tall metal door. Alan stepped through it and ran into a wall of sound. Shouts, cheers, and boos reverberated around him until they blurred into one pulsing roar. He couldn't make out any individual words.
A tap on the shoulder made him scramble away from the door. He hurried after the driver towards his seat, not paying much attention to the steel cage in the middle where the fights took place. He had to be careful not to trip.
Incredibly, the noise swelled even louder. Alan twisted around, trying to see what had set off this latest frenzy, but there was nobody in the cage.
Someone was coming, though.
"That's the Hunter," Mr Chaichana shouted in his ear.
Alan startled. He'd been so focused on the man approaching the steel enclosure that he hadn't even noticed when Mr Chaichana sat down beside him. He managed a jerky nod, before his attention was drawn back to the front. He frowned. The man—the Hunter—looked to be roughly Alan's height, though it was hard to tell from this distance. He was well-built and walked with a swagger that suggested he knew exactly how the crowd saw him, but Alan really couldn't see what the whole commotion was about. What was so special about this guy? He glanced around. There was an anticipatory tension in the crowd that did nothing for the noise level. Next to him, Mr Chaichana leaned back with a small smile on his face. Apparently, being late meant that Alan had come just in time for the main event.
He settled down to watch the match.
He hadn't thought he would find the fights interesting. Though interesting was the wrong word. Alan didn't know the right word, but he knew he was riveted. His stomach tightened, something twisting deep inside his belly, as he watched the Hunter move. The other guy couldn't touch him. Alan watched him try anyway, pressing close and leaving himself open. Blood spurted from his cheek when the Hunter hit him.
Alan licked his lips. This place was too hot. He really wanted a Dr Pepper right now.
The other guy was finished—blows landing wide and slow—but the fight didn't end until he fell down unconscious.
"Having fun?" Mr Chaichana clapped him on the back.
Alan blinked. His eyes felt dry, like he hadn't blinked in a while.
Mr Chaichana smiled—he did that a lot. "So, would you like to meet him now?"
He followed Mr Chaichana through another corridor, excitement bubbling under his skin. They went into a bare concrete room that contained a table, a short stool, and the man he'd seen fighting earlier. A dim lightbulb with a wire cover was the only source of light.
Alan's eyes went to the blood-soaked hand wraps covering the man's knuckles. Sweat beaded on his forearms, which flexed as he grabbed a glass from the table. Alan still didn't know his real name, but seeing him like this, it wasn't difficult to think of him as the Hunter.
"This is the person I told you about," Mr Chaichana said, gesturing back at Alan. "He can help set up—"
Alan didn't wait for him to finish. He was too hyped by the thought of what they could build. "You'll need servers. The origin cluster can stay compact, but you'll want distributed edge nodes with NVMe drives, 40 GbE, and multi‑queue NICs. And the ingest servers need low‑latency termination, jitter—" He broke off. He wasn't sure what his own face was doing, but the Hunter was staring at him like—well, like Alan had just launched into a full technical rundown before Mr Chaichana could even introduce him.
"How much?" the Hunter asked after a beat of silence.
Alan stared back. "I don't know? A lot?" Did this guy think he was an accountant or something?
That was the wrong answer. A muscle jumped in the Hunter's jaw. There was another beat of tense silence where he watched Alan with a expression that said he'd dealt with one idiot too many.
Alan knew he should probably be intimidated, but his brain was still racing ahead. He was buzzing with possibility, and the vicarious thrill of watching this guy fight. Maybe they could skip the ingest servers for now. Did they even need multi-location uploads yet? Probably not, right?
"Let's not talk business tonight," Mr Chaichana intervened before the silence could stretch any further.
"But you'd make a lot of money, too," Alan interrupted. "A lot of money."
The Hunter's real name was Im Baekjeong. Alan had looked him up. Even though this name also sounded like an alias, it didn't seem to be one. At least as far as Alan could tell, but "as far as Alan could tell" was usually far enough.
The first meeting had been a bust. He could admit that. He'd gotten ahead of himself and came across as an oblivious loser. He sighed. That was why Alan didn't like to explain what he did. People didn't get it. Didn't appreciate it. They didn't want the tedious ELI5 version or any of the technical details.
This time he'd come prepared. Im Baekjeong and one of his men were waiting for him in the hotel bar. Alan could do a sales pitch if he had to, and he wasn't above putting a bit of "hacking into the mainframe" spin on things, but he had a different strategy in mind for this.
So he did his boring little presentation, pulled some numbers out of his ass, and then waited.
He was met with a pair of unimpressed looks. Okay, that was a little disappointing, but never mind that. Time for the zinger.
"You can find all kinds of stuff online," he said.
Im Baekjeong's gaze sharpened.
"There was a lot of stuff about the Hunter," Alan added, trying not to sound too pleased with himself.
"So what?" Im Baekjeong asked, words flat.
Alan leaned back. "Now there isn't."
"You removed it."
Alan grinned. "It didn't remove itself."
Alan missed the start of the conversation because he had his headphones on. He was unaware that everyone had stopped to look at him until Baekjeong grabbed one of the ear cups, leaned down, and said, jaw tight, "Yah, I'm talking to you."
Alan took off his headphones.
"What the fuck is this?" Baekjeong waved a tablet in his face.
"I already explained all of that to Mr Chaichana," Alan said. "We need to hire more devs."
Baekjeong just looked at him. That was all he ever needed to do. One look and everyone knew to pay attention.
But Alan was Alan. "What's the problem?" he asked. Anyone would think he hadn't noticed Baekjeong's mood, even though he stopped short of putting his headphones back on. "Not like we're offering equity."
Baekjeong rubbed his forehead, his mouth twisting. "Fine," he bit out, "get it done."
It didn't look like Baekjeong did anything other than train and fight. No women. No men. Nobody except the people he paid to handle his boxing league expansion. No other vices. He said he liked money, but what was money good for if you were bad at spending it? There was so much more that money could buy than a nice watch.
Whatever. None of that was any of Alan's business. All that mattered was that Baekjeong's fights were brutal and cinematic and they were all going to make a ton of money. Alan was going to get paid. He'd made sure to get equity.
There was just one small, teensy-tiny, totally unforeseen issue.
It first happened after he'd gone to see another one of the Hunter's fights. He came back to his hotel, showered, and brushed his teeth. Some weird restless energy under his skin made him put aside his laptop and lay back in bed. He shifted around, got a hand around his dick, and tried to get a good rhythm going. His dick was just getting hard when his mind conjured up an image of Baekjeong's expression when he had no choice but to put up with Alan. That was good expression. Baekjeong didn't wear it as much as Alan would have liked.
Alan imagined him lounging in his fighting gear, pants swung low. What would he look with his head thrown back? Moaning? Desperate to come? Alan panted into his fist, dick swelling in his other hand. Except that was that. The imaginary Baekjeong just up and left to do something else.
Probably train for his next fight.
Alan groaned. This was his fantasy, damn it. It didn't need to be realistic. He didn't want it to be realistic. So what if he couldn't imagine the real Im Baekjeong doing any of the things Alan would like him to do? That didn't matter here. He didn't want the real Baekjeong. What would he even do with the real Baekjeong? This wasn't about the real Baekjeong, he thought, increasingly frantic. The only problem was that his dick seemed to disagree.
He jerked himself off to an unsatisfactory finish that left him even more on edge than when he started.
He had more success if he kept Baekjeong in his element. One early morning, settling down to sleep after working all night, Alan remembered how Baekjeong looked in the cage. Just the other night, he'd gone up against some guy who wouldn't stop running his mouth. The man had swallowed his words when the fight started. A few hits and he'd collapsed against the fence, blood running from the nose and brow. It hadn't been enough for Baekjeong. He'd hauled him up by the hair and hit him again.
Maybe Baekjeong did know how to spend his money, Alan realized, pushing his pants down to get at his dick. Maybe what he liked buying was the power to do that without consequences. Impunity. Coming into his fist just as the Baekjeong in his mind landed another punch that bloodied his opponent's face, Alan thought he could relate to that.
So now he had to worry about sporting a hard-on while he watched Baekjeong's fights, which was bad enough. But it still wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was that he couldn't stop thinking about how Baekjeong would look if he lost the fight.