What’s with these radish cubes? (TL Note: Kkakdugi, cubed radish kimchi, is Korean slang for a thug built square as a block.)
Three textbook specimens—the kind also known as mobsters or punks—stepped out from behind a pillar and a couple of parked cars.
One look tells you why they’re called radish cubes.
Square face, square shoulders, square build.
The underground garage had CCTV only at the entrance.
It didn’t take much to see they weren’t friendly visitors.
“Hey? Aren’t we a little short on manners?”
He calls me ‘hey,’ so I can’t exactly call him Boss.
“Short? Pwahahahaha. This little shit’s funny.”
The one coming at me from the front laughed like he couldn’t believe it.
These clearly weren’t a bunch of fat, sloppy gangster pigs.
The energy coming off them was like a sharp blade.
Hard, square radish cubes.
Their builds were lean, and their foreheads were full of shadow.
These were guys who’d beaten people up plenty.
Their matching black suits and coats said they belonged to some outfit.
“Go find your fun somewhere else. I’m a busy man, so just tell me what you want.”
The three of them casually boxed me into a triangle.
Time to move somewhere else.
It wasn’t me I was worried about; it was Yu Se-ra.
Men who come looking for you in the middle of the night don’t come with good intentions.
“You him?”
The middle radish cube just came out with it.
“What am I, a shaman? How am I supposed to know what you mean when you ask like that?”
I wasn’t about to be intimidated.
The radish cubes had pulled on leather gloves and were laying on the menace, but it was cute.
However busy I got, I never slacked off on my training, not for a single day.
I wanted to live this second life long and healthy.
“F***ing little shit. All mouth… heh heh.”
The middle radish cube laughed low.
The face of a killer. These guys are done living normal lives.
The killing aura between their brows was far too strong.
It meant they’d already stepped onto a killer’s path.
Their eyes were soaked in turbid energy too.
Red veins were lodged in the whites of their eyes.
The evil eyes you see in people who make others suffer.
Their karma was stamped on their faces, plain as day.
They were laughable—and pitiful.
I’d already died once. As a senior on the road to the afterlife, I felt sorry for these radish cubes, wasting a precious life.
Of all the jobs they could have picked to make a living, they’d picked one that piled up bad karma.
I could see the radish cubes’ past, present and future.
“Can’t you guys wash your hands of this and live clean? Hyung‘s seen something of the world, and let me tell you, doing bad things doesn’t pay.”
The radish cubes were in their early thirties or so.
To me they didn’t look like grown men; they looked like guys my age, or younger brothers.
“Hyung? Wowww… this crazy little psycho. He’s got a death wish.” (TL Note: The Korean is “his liver has come out of his belly”—he has the reckless nerve of a man with nothing inside to protect.)
“Whoa! He’s really making my head spin. A snot-nosed punk calling himself hyung?”
“What’s Manager Yu telling us to be careful about? One look and you can tell he’s a lunatic.”
Manager Yu?
One piece of information received.
Someone who went by the title manager wanted to see me.
I flipped through everyone I had bad blood with.
And one piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
The neighborhood gangsters I’d cleaned up were still doing time.
The only one who could command guys this polished was…
“Chairman Oh really has nothing better to do. What does he want with small fry like me? You guys think so too, right? A conglomerate owner shouldn’t act like that.”
“!!!”
Right, right on the money. Chairman Oh.
Confusion crossed the radish cubes’ faces.
Nobody had trained them to keep their heads in moments like this.
“Manager Yu’s got nothing better to do either, huh? He should rein in Chairman Oh. He always has to go and stir something up.”
“Wh-who the hell are you!”
Now the bastards were starting to get it.
Even you can tell I’m no ordinary college student, can’t you?
“You want to take a beating first, or leave right now?”
Life is always one fork in the road after another.
The radish cubes didn’t look too bright, so I kindly made it multiple choice—two options.
“Heh heh. Look at this little shit trying to be clever.”
Of course, those who don’t know the answer always pick the wrong one.
“As punishment for wasting my precious time, I’ll give you a present: four weeks of prescribed recovery, exactly.”
We both knew talking wasn’t going to settle this.
Chairman Oh had sniffed something out, or he wouldn’t have sent these radish cubes.
Oh Dong-seong must have remembered how Seo-ryeon, drugged as she was, reacted when she saw me at the end.
A top-ten conglomerate like the Ana Group ran its own intelligence team.
They’d had more than enough time to piece it together and figure it out.
I wasn’t worried.
Chairman Oh knew too that this wasn’t something the law could settle.
With no evidence, he wanted to haul me in and check for himself.
When it came to foul tempers, he ranked number one among Korea’s group owners.
“A punch is the only medicine for a lunatic.”
Agreed.
“Drag him in.”
“Yessir! Team Leader. Heh heh heh.”
Being on a conglomerate’s payroll, even the radish cubes had job titles, pathetic as that was.
Chairman Oh Seung-hyeok really went all out.
I’d heard the rumors that he kept his own private gang, but I never thought it actually existed.
That’s why his kids were all such a mess.
What else would they learn growing up under a father like that?
“C’mere, shorty. Let’s take your beating nice and easy and go.”
The ones behind me closed in.
At the same moment, I felt the air of murder and violence.
Whoosh.
The guy on the right grabbed for my shoulder.
Fast and light, like he’d learned judo.
He was trying to get me by the throat in one move.
Thwack!
My left hand snatched his wrist first.
“Huh!”
He was thrown by how fast my hand moved.
“I told you—four weeks eating warm meals in the hospital and thinking about what you’ve done.”
The instant I had his wrist, I grabbed his chest with my right hand and swung him around.
Kwoooong!
He flipped once through the air and hit the floor.
He’d eaten so well that I felt the floor shake like an earthquake.
“Kekh!”
The breath knocked out of him, he lay sprawled on the floor, shaking.
“Y-you little shit!”
Another one threw a fast punch.
Whoosh.
He wasn’t some neighborhood gangster; he’d clearly learned to box properly, and his punches were sharp.
But against me, it was nothing.
I threw my right fist straight at his incoming fist.
Kraaaack!
A crisp(?) sound of bones shattering rang out.
“Kaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
The second radish cube screamed loud enough to shake the whole garage.
“Sorry. Hyung couldn’t control his strength.”
I’m only human; sometimes, in moments like this, I get worked up.
Too bad—this one was looking at eight weeks of prescribed recovery.
Like that Hong boy back in the day, he wasn’t going to be eating with his right hand for a while.
“You… what the hell are you!”
A little late for the team leader radish cube to be asking.
“Don’t you know my name? It’s Jang Tae-san.”
With the tables turned, the team leader’s face went pale.
His trusted men had been disarmed in an instant, and he was rattled.
“I’ll kill you. F***ing little shit!”
Clack.
He pulled a three-section collapsible baton from inside his coat.
Oddly, sharp studs stuck out all along the outside of it.
That looked like it would hurt like hell.
“You need a little more of a beating.”
I grinned and walked toward him.
“Shut up, f***er!!!”
Fired up by the provocation, he swung the baton full force right at my head.
Whoa! Look at this son of a bitch!
You’re dead!
“What’s taking so long?”
In the Ana Group’s general secretariat, Manager Yu Byeong-seok waited for word.
This wasn’t the first time, or the second.
Oh Seung-hyeok, chairman of the Ana Group, reacted violently to the slightest discourtesy or threat against himself or his family.
He’d inherited the group young and had little patience.
The blood of his father, the former chairman, played a part too.
Others didn’t know, but Manager Yu knew the Oh family well.
The former chairman had been a provincial gang boss.
He’d built today’s Ana Group through the construction business.
It was a family steeped in booze, women and violence.
Business savvy and luck had lined up, and the group made it into Korea’s top ten.
Ever since joining the company, Yu Byeong-seok had cleaned up after Oh Seung-hyeok.
More than a hundred women had passed through the chairman’s whoring.
A few who’d clung too tight had learned how hot things could get.
Oh Seung-hyeok had had a vasectomy after his three sons were born.
One woman, not knowing that, had tried a pregnancy stunt and been sold off to an island.
Another had turned down the money and tried to squeeze out more. She ended up buried in the mountains—a memory he’d rather forget.
The violence the press had heard about was just the tip of the iceberg. (TL Note: The Korean says “a drop of blood from a bird’s foot”—an amount too small to count.)
And at the center of it all was Security Team Two, made up of gang members whose ties went back to the previous generation.
Security Team Two, around ten men strong.
Their salaries came from the company, but they were the chairman’s private bodyguards.
Because of them, nobody in the Ana Group dared stand up to the chairman.
Expose company corruption, and your family’s lives were in danger.
Even now, out of sight in Korean society, fists still came before the law.
“Something’s off… I don’t like it.”
Jang Tae-san had handled Oh Dong-seong far too cleverly.
He was brilliant enough to get into law at Hanguk University.
He was a kid with something behind him—enough to wipe out a whole region’s mobsters.
His family’s assets were considerable.
They owned an apartment in Seoul worth more than ten billion won.
They had a lot of real estate in the provinces and ties to Samu Law.
He hadn’t found out everything yet, but the kid definitely had big backing.
And in a situation like this, Chairman Oh Seung-hyeok was pushing things too hard.
A sense of foreboding he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Yu Byeong-seok waited for the call.
The leader of Security Team Two had gone to handle it himself.
Tap-tap-tap.
Yu Byeong-seok laced his fingers and drummed them.
He’d come through countless crises on his way to becoming the Ana Group’s number two.
Every time, his instincts and judgment had come through.
Today they were sending out alarm after alarm.
It was a trivial matter, but it bothered him a lot.
Ttirirririri ttiririririri.
“Phew.”
When his phone rang and the caller’s name came up, Yu Byeong-seok let out a sigh.
For once, it was a relief that his instincts had been wrong.
“Team Leader Hwang. What took you so long! Is one kid that hard to handle? The chairman’s waiting!”
Relaxing, Yu Byeong-seok barked at him.
Security Team Two was full of loose cannons.
In the past, he’d kept discipline by burying a few who’d schemed to get out.
“Ah. You’ve been waiting for my call. Manager Yu.”
“!!!”
A strange voice came through the phone.
A voice that was playful and taunting through and through.
“Wh-who is this!”
Yu Byeong-seok jumped to his feet.
It felt like his heart dropped into his stomach.
Something had gone wrong.
Things were already noisy inside and outside the company; another incident wouldn’t end well.
“Jang Tae-san.”
“J-Jang Tae-san!”
“Manager Yu, we’ve never even met—why are you so eager to find me? I’m not the one who stuffed Dong-seong full of drugs. You didn’t know that little shit was using? The chairman should’ve kept an eye on that himself. I may not be good at much, but I’m an expert at blowing things up into big scandals… want me to do that for you?”
The voice was sly.
He knew it was the Ana Group, and he wasn’t the least bit intimidated.
“Where’s Team Leader Hwang! Put him on right now!”
“You’re slow, aren’t you. Team Leader Hwang’s out cold—that’s why I’m calling you myself.”
“You, you… you son of a bitch.”
“Shut your mouth and open your ears wide.”
Jang Tae-san’s voice dropped, cold.
“Pull one more stunt and I put these bastards’ pictures out there. They’ve told me everything, and I recorded it, so think carefully. However good your connections, if you’ve got a head on your shoulders, you should know when to lie low. Right, Manager Yu?”
This guy knew how to toy with people.
Yu Byeong-seok swallowed hard.
“And you think you’re the only group? My mother comes from that world too.”
“Huh!”
Manager Yu let out a sound without meaning to.
“The Ju family… my mother’s side. So watch yourself, Manager Yu.”
The Ju family… it can’t be—Dongnyong!
(End of Chapter 109)