Make It Bigger

Chen Zhiyuan’s hands were shaking.

He stared at Lin Mo, his lips moving several times, but he couldn’t organize a single word of rebuttal.

The alcohol had burned away most of his rationality, leaving nothing but raw emotion.

That remark had stabbed deep into Chen Zhiyuan’s fragile pride, and the worst part was, he never expected Lin Mo to be so ruthless, to hit him straight with something like that.

He stood up.

The chair slid half a meter backward, thudding dully against the carpet.

Then he grabbed the whiskey bottle at hand and hurled it at Lin Mo’s head.

Someone in the lounge gasped.

Lin Mo tilted his head two inches to the right. The bottle grazed past his ear, landed on the carpet behind him, and rolled a couple of turns without even breaking.

Padding too thick, after all.

Chen Zhiyuan tried to lunge forward again.

But he never got the chance.

Dongfang Shuye had already circled around behind him without anyone noticing. One hand clamped down on the back of his neck, the other twisted his right arm back, and with a clean, efficient motion, pinned him flat on the ground.

Chen Zhiyuan’s cheek pressed against the carpet, his mouth still spewing curses, but his body was completely immobilized.

Dongfang Shuye’s knee pressed into his back, the force controlled with impressive precision.

Painful, but not injurious.

After all, in this setting, Dongfang Shuye’s official identity was that of a security escort for the Chinese team.

Taking down a man who had just attacked one of his own athletes: reasonable, justifiable, and completely legal.

“I can’t breathe!” Chen Zhiyuan gasped.

“Hey, you’re not an American cop,” Lin Mo reminded him.

“Oh, right, right. Though letting him sample some American-style law enforcement wouldn’t hurt either.”

“Then why didn’t you just empty the magazine?”

“I don’t have a gun!”

Lin Mo, meanwhile, got to his feet and said in English to the approaching waiter, “Notify the American team’s manager. Tell them to come over and apologize.”

The waiter nodded and ran off.

He even looked back after two steps, his gaze landing on Chen Zhiyuan, still pinned to the ground.

A Chinese-American, wearing the American team’s jersey, held down by the Chinese team and unable to get up.

That image, how to put it…

The waiter was Korean, and his emotions were complicated.

On one hand, seeing someone finally put the American team in their place, he felt a sense of satisfaction.

On the other hand, watching this Chinese-American get ground into the carpet, he couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity.

But satisfaction and pity, despite contradicting each other, somehow coexisted in the same heart.

Maybe that was the epitome of the younger generation in South Korea.

Before long, the American team’s manager arrived.

In most stories, villains tend to make an entrance with an air of arrogance.

The American team’s manager delivered exactly that.

“Let him go! You have no right to detain him!”

The manager stormed in, pointing at Dongfang Shuye and shouting in English, loud enough for the entire lounge to hear.

Lin Mo sat back down on the sofa and crossed his legs.

“Detain?” He repeated the word in English, then smirked. “Interesting choice of words.”

He pointed at Chen Zhiyuan on the floor, then at the whiskey bottle lying on the carpet behind him.

“Your team member just tried to smash this bottle into my head. If you call that normal social behavior, then I’m afraid I can’t respect your American customs.”

The manager’s stride faltered for half a beat.

“But according to the competition committee’s regulations,” Lin Mo raised a finger, “when a team member commits a physical assault against a member of another team, the protocol is…”

He dragged out his tone deliberately.

“…disqualification.”

The manager’s expression finally shifted.

If this had been a private quarrel, an apology might have sufficed. But if they followed the official procedure and escalated it to the competition committee, the rest of the American team’s individual results might be fine, but Chen Zhiyuan’s would be voided, and even the team’s total score would take a hit.

Back home, Chen Zhiyuan was done for, and he, as team manager, would have to take the fall too.

He opened his mouth, ready to say something, but before he could—

“Lin Mo!”

Teacher Bai’s voice came from down the hallway.

Lin Mo turned around. Teacher Bai came charging in wearing his pajamas, slippers on the wrong feet.

His hair was sticking up in every direction, clearly just having bolted out of bed.

But Teacher Bai was fast. Panting heavily, he burst into the lounge, first did a quick scan of Lin Mo to confirm he was unharmed, then spun a hundred and eighty degrees and went nose-to-nose with the American team manager.

“You Americans think you’re so tough, huh?” Teacher Bai spoke in Chinese, since the opposing manager was also of Chinese descent.

He jabbed his finger three centimeters from the manager’s nose.

“Your guy gets drunk and throws a bottle at my student, and you’re not going to do anything about it? Can’t handle it? Fine—then I’ll handle it!”

A waiter nearby tried to step in. One glare from Teacher Bai, and the waiter backed off.

“Now apologize. Immediately. You bananas. Don’t put on airs in front of me. You’re exactly the type I despise the most.”

The American manager was being chewed out with a finger in his face. His complexion cycled between pale and red, but he didn’t dare throw a punch or even talk back, because staff from the competition committee had already arrived on the scene.

Two hotel managers also briskly walked into the lounge. One was holding a walkie-talkie, the other had already pulled out a tablet and begun pulling up the lounge’s security footage.

Then, several team managers from other countries drifted in from their rooms.

Some wore bathrobes, some threw on jackets, some held drinks—each one wearing a classic look of someone here for the drama.

By this point, Chen Zhiyuan was thoroughly drunk. Pinned down, he was starting to haze over.

He couldn’t even process what was happening.

A loud argument was nothing, of course.

But hurling a bottle? That was a different story.

Lin Mo’s demand was an apology, otherwise he would file an official complaint.

The American delegation was led by a Chinese-American coach anyway, so the other national team managers weren’t exactly rallying behind them.

Facing this, the American manager had no choice but to drag Chen Zhiyuan over and force an apology out of him.

Lin Mo had Dongfang Shuye record the whole thing on video.

The competition committee was eager to keep the incident contained, since the Americans weren’t exactly a pushover either.

So it all got smoothed over in the end.

Once Teacher Bai had led the group back, he couldn’t help but scold Lin Mo.

“Lin Mo, you can’t take risks like that again. You’re a treasure too precious to gamble with. If that whiskey bottle had actually hit your head, then what? You think you’ve got a skull of iron and bronze?”

Dongfang Shuye smiled quietly nearby, thinking to himself, “That guy’s practically tougher than bronze.”

That said, if Lin Mo had been hit, Chen Zhiyuan would’ve been banned on the spot.

Teacher Bai repeated his warnings several more times before shaking his head and leaving Lin Mo’s room.

Dongfang Shuye dropped his smile.

“Not like your usual style, making such a scene.”

“Just manufacturing a little leverage. Gives me a natural excuse to cooperate with the Super Teen Squad. With this basis, everything else follows smoothly.”

Dongfang Shuye nodded with a knowing look.