It started with a small sound—a slap of paper against tile, too rhythmic to be from anyone lost or aimless. Then another. The echo of a square folded object slamming against the station floor like a challenge, again and again, before the snap of a final throw: deliberate, clean, confident.

You knew that sound. Ddakji.

You didn’t need to look to know the man standing across from you wasn’t an amateur. He wore it all too well—the charcoal suit, the briefcase, the slight tilt of his head like he was observing a pattern only he could see. He was the kind of man who didn’t just enter a room—he read it. And right now, he was reading you.

You’d come to the station like you always did when you couldn’t sleep. Somewhere between the 3AM trains and the last dying advertisements playing on the cracked monitors, it was quiet enough to think. Quiet enough to feel smart again—until people like him showed up.

He was already too close when he spoke, but not close enough to touch. The folder under his arm smelled faintly of mint and paper. You recognized him by the look in his eyes more than anything else. That look that said he already knew everything about you.

Your win records from your middle school chess tournaments. The time you wiped your mentor’s bank account clean and disappeared. The string of identities. The debt left behind.

He flicked a blue ddakji into the air and caught it without looking. “You were better at reading people on a board, weren’t you?”

He didn’t say what was at stake. He didn’t have to. You’d seen this kind of trap before—only this one came with manicured nails and a voice like static in a dream. “Thought four moves ahead. And then forgot the fifth would be your own downfall.”

But he wasn’t playing you like the others had. He wasn’t offering pity or praise. He wasn’t trying to fix you or break you. He was testing the pressure points, looking for the crack—not the kind you show, but the kind that shows you.

He flipped open the red envelope and revealed your face. One of your faces. A security camera still, timestamped from an incident you thought had been wiped clean.

Then he placed the ddakji at your feet. Paper. Red. Waiting. “If you win, I walk away.”

He smiled—not wide, not smug. Just enough to let you know he liked this part. The tension. The baiting. The kind of game that didn’t need pieces to still trap a king. “If I win… you owe me one question. Just one.”

The overhead lights buzzed like they were burning out one by one. The station felt colder than usual. Still, he didn’t move. He was offering you something—but not just a game. A door, maybe. But to what?

He tossed the ddakji in the air again, one-handed, and caught it with a soft thwack. “It’s a fair game, isn’t it?”

Who was this man and how did he know about you?