Harem Quest: From Trash to King-Chapter 98: Daniel and Aiden.

They moved like a single machine that had been taught to think in parts. The room still smelled like sweat and dust from the earlier fights, but the adrenaline had shifted, settling into a steady heat.

Daniel and Aiden split off, shoulders squared, throwing themselves into the next wave like it was the only thing that mattered. Ryan and Maya took the flank, eyes sharp, muscles wound tight. No speeches. No long plans. Just the pull of the fight and the quiet promise to come back to each other.

Daniel was ridiculous in the best way. He fought like he was at a party and everyone else had forgotten to bring snacks. His grin never left his face. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

He moved with that strange, half-joke posture of his hands tucked into his pants—something he always did, a quirky habit that somehow made his legs do the talking louder. With his feet he spoke loud and fast. Taekwondo wasn’t just technique for him. It was the language of motion he loved most.

Ten men rolled toward him like a pack of stray dogs. They thought numbers would bully him. They did not know how to read Daniel’s body. He was all spring and reach, a dancer who had learned to break things. He kicked like someone who had memorized the sound of broken rhythm. The first man lunged and Daniel flicked a heel that clipped his jaw and sent him stumbling.

"Nice try, mate," Daniel sang, voice bright even as he spun a high kick that made another man hug his ribs as if to keep them from falling. He toyed with them.

He baited. He let one guy get close on purpose and then turned a light front snap into a knee that dropped the man like a sack of grain.

He was playful, but precise. The men Daniel fought kept thinking they could catch a joke and ride it to victory. Daniel let them chase the punchline and then took the punch.

He did not rush. He timed. His legs were a metronome: stomp, flick, pivot, sweep. Every time someone thought they had a pattern, he altered the rhythm. They fell one by one, sometimes with a thud, sometimes with a confused groan as if they could not believe a man who smiled would beat them so clean.

When he finished with the last of his ten, he flicked his foot to straighten his shoe and puckered his mouth like a man disappointed a party trick had ended too soon.

"Aww man," he said, voice loud enough to reach the others, "they got defeated too easily. That’s not fair. Ugh." The words were a tease and a statement all in one. Daniel’s laughter followed, high and proud. It was the laugh of a man who knew his body and hated wasted potential.

Next to him, Aiden was a different machine. Where Daniel laughed, Aiden was a low, focused weight. He did not smile. He did not play. His face was the plain stone of someone who had folded his life into discipline.

Muay Thai lived in his shoulders and his hips. He struck with elbows and knees that landed with the unvarnished bluntness of a hammer. When he threw a clinch it felt like a contract being signed.

Aiden took ten others, and for a while it seemed like the ten could match him at random. They hit and blocked and forced him to feel for openings. But experience is a tide that pulls everything under if you wait long enough.

Aiden’s footwork was slow and terrible and precise. He let a man launch, leaned into the strike as if it were a language he could translate, then turned weight and sent the man into a knee that knocked wind from him.

He moved through them with the same cold calculation as a surgeon. When you watched him, you saw the blueprint of a man used to controlling space.

He twined elbows into ribs and hammered fists into chins with a rhythm that grew less forgiving with each breath he took. By the time he finished, the ten bodies were down, and Aiden’s chest heaved like someone who had just finished a long race.

He looked at Daniel, nodded once like a man acknowledging a well-played hand, then tucked his gloves back into place. "Good show," he said without the laughter, a line of respect without color.

Daniel winked. "Told you. Party trick." He hopped onto one foot like someone who could not help moving.

Then Ryan and Maya. The remaining ten men split between them: seven on Ryan, three on Maya. For a moment the scene froze like an old photograph—the way the men squared, the way Maya’s knuckles whitened around her makeshift guards, the way Ryan’s breath hitched then settled into a steady tempo.

Ryan had the system’s upgrades humming through his veins now. He felt the A+ strength like a silent engine. But still, these men were not pushovers. A few of them had A ranks themselves, and Ryan knew rank only mattered if you could listen to pain and keep moving.

Maya’s fight was compact and fierce. Three men circled her like predators unsure what to do with something that didn’t look like prey anymore. She held her own, sometimes barely. She ducked and twisted and used the space she had, working elbows and quick low strikes to keep them guessing.

Her movements were not graceful, not practiced for show. They were practical: get the hit, make the distance, breathe. She bit down on discomfort and kept moving. When one of her attackers lunged with a wild swing, she ducked, pivoted, and snapped a jab into his jaw that made his knees betray him.

Halfway through, one of the three went for a clumsy tackle. Maya met him with a palm and a knee that hit with bone-certain impact and the man crumpled.

She breathed, hard and shallow, and wiped a smear of blood from her lip with the back of her hand like it was nothing she’d never done before. Her eyes shone with the light of someone who never intended to be a victim.

Ryan’s seven were heavier. They came from different corners, elbows bent, trying to overwhelm him with numbers. He darted through them with the rhythm he had trained for. Jab, jab, hook.

The cross had come up to A and he felt it like a new tool in his hand. Each punch had purpose. Each step had meaning. He wasn’t cocky. He was the guy who had been forced to learn more than he wanted to, and now the learning paid.

A man with a scarred eyebrow lunged with a low shoulder. Ryan slipped, let his weight slide away, and came back with a short uppercut that cracked the man’s jaw. Another came in with a heavy swing that would have floored a weaker fighter.

Ryan met it with a compact hook and then a step that opened the other man’s ribs to a straight right. He felt his strength in a new, calm way. It was not raw power only. It was timing and the knowledge of where to put his body to make the hard things break.