“Hah!”

“Uh……”

“Insane.”

My voice came out low and even, and it threw every one of them.

A natural enough reaction from classmates who know exactly what Oh Gwangjun is.

Which is to say they all accept he’s a piece of garbage.

So a response like that, aimed at him, could only bewilder them.

“‘Little bastard’? Puhahahahahaha!”

The reaction comes instantly, as befits a lunatic. His voice climbs high and there’s something thick and murderous in his eyes.

It isn’t only Oh Gwangjun. There isn’t one easy student in this school.

Charity cases like me excepted.

To them, a man in my position is a tool for working off whatever’s built up in them. Oh Gwangjun used me as his dedicated stress tool.

And today the tool produced a reaction he hadn’t accounted for.

He must feel like something hit him out of nowhere.

And be angry enough to blow the lid off.

The easy meat that had never once talked back has talked back.

“Hey. Charity case.”

“Oh Gwangjun. You know that word’s banned on school grounds, don’t you?”

“Banned? Fuck off, you little bastard. I don’t know anything about that.”

“Friend. ‘Fuck off.’ That one counts as verbal violence too.”

“Friend? You…… dare?”

“Your father’s a division chief at the Eastern District Prosecutors’ Office…… you shouldn’t be doing this. Discrimination between people is wrongful conduct, prohibited under the constitution and under various statutes.”

I talked him through it gently and pleasantly. With a light smile on, of course.

An angler scattering bait on the water. That’s precisely what I am at this moment.

“Wrongful conduct? You want to die? All that rest swell your liver up?”

A proper bite.

“Threats aren’t allowed either. My liver’s fine. I don’t drink or smoke the way you do.”

“Shut up! You mad little bastard!”

Craaack!

The curse came with a slap out of nowhere, and it landed meaty on my cheek. The sound of it went off properly.

Yes. He bit.

“…….”

The classroom went silent in an instant. I took it sitting down, undefended.

He hit hard and the cheek stings. There’s no real pain in it.

Nothing at all next to torture-resistance training in the special forces.

Winter survival in the mountains at twenty below. That on its own was hell.

Roots that wouldn’t kill you. A snake found by chance in the ground, torn into raw.

Set against that, this is charming. And this one is part of the reason I got through that period at all.

Humiliation?

At university, in the army, at the company — I’ve been through far worse than this, and plenty of it.

Including the day I got cut by a company I’d been loyal to, handled like surplus stock.

And the moment my girlfriend ended it on her own terms.

“In a sacred school…… did you just commit an act of violence?”

I asked it with one corner of my mouth up, where only he could see it. Even to my own ear the voice is cold.

I stroked the cheek as if it hurt a great deal, and looked at him.

A flinch.

Where his eyes meet mine, they waver. A high schooler already giving off a dark aura.

He’s still a brat underneath it.

Time to move on to the punishment.

I put a hand under the desk and stopped the recording. That’s evidence enough.

Shff.

And I stood up. I’m a hundred and eighty-seven centimetres.

Oh Gwangjun is a hundred and seventy, and no more than that.

A full head above him. In the old life I was frightened of something like this.

Coming back and standing in front of him now——

“You’d have been raised on premium formula. If you came out this short, shouldn’t you be filing a complaint? Or is it the genes?”

“Wh— what did you say?”

“Going deaf at your age? Ah — so that’s why the manners never turned up.”

“This son of a bitch has lost his mind!”

Whip.

The jab is very fast, as you’d expect from a boy who’s boxed. But against me——

Craaack!

I slipped the punch and landed one in the same motion.

With a large palm, and no hesitation in it.

Crash.

The slap took him, he staggered, and he went down onto the classroom floor.

The body isn’t conditioned yet, but it’s young. And the striking technique I picked up in the special forces still works.

I can pick out five weak openings on Oh Gwangjun without trying.

I could kill him instantly from any one of them. A child throwing his weight about who understands none of it.

“Heh……”

A cold laugh got out of me. All those years taken one-sidedly from me by a little shit who isn’t worth anything.

That kind of history is finished. I’m not letting it repeat in my life again.

“…… Gwangjun got hit?”

“Didn’t they say Gwangjun boxes?”

“Ha Tae-ung……. He really has lost his mind.”

The children were murmuring across the classroom.

Cheonghwa is a school with savage rules. And most of its students are children of comfortable houses.

Conscious of social standing, they don’t cross lines.

Charity cases are the exception, naturally.

They don’t take part in the bullying directly. But when a charity case is in trouble they look away, and looking away is its own kind of taking part.

To all of them, charity cases can be nothing more than stress relief.

Their everyday stress runs at a level that is no joke.

Expensive private tutoring from before they could hold a spoon, the high school syllabus mastered in middle school.

Excluding the ones building a university application out of records and internal grades, most of them are preparing for the entrance exam.

They enjoy an educational environment like a concrete wall, one no charity case could presume to dream of.

But Ha Tae-ung was different.

He has a head for study, fundamentally. His sheer stubbornness played its part as well.

Frozen out, sneered at, quietly excluded — he held on through all of it.

Not the very top band, but always settled inside the top five in the class.

His looks don’t fall short either. A good face, and the height girls prefer.

At an ordinary school rather than Cheonghwa he’d have flown. He might have been enormously popular across every year group.

But Cheonghwa is an officers’ academy for the children of the country’s upper class.

And Ha Tae-ung, a charity case whose lot was a lifetime at the bottom doing menial work, had struck Oh Gwangjun across the face.

A provocation on the level of treason, which was never to be allowed to happen.

It happened in front of the students of second year, class three. The children who saw it froze where they stood.

“What is going on?”

“Oh Gwangjun actually got hit?”

“That’s insane.”

Students from the next classroom crowded in as well. The screams that went up all at once and the shock of the news brought them in a mass.

Everyone was equally thrown by something so far outside precedent.

“You dare……”

Fallen on the floor, Oh Gwangjun glared up at Ha Tae-ung. He was thrown himself, and blank with it.

A charity case, no better than a dog or a pig, had raised a hand to him.

An unexpected blow he could never have imagined.

The defiance in him this morning had been unpleasant, unlike any other day. He’d only meant to deliver a light bit of correction.

And the resistance had come back far too hard. Being caught by a counterattack was deeply humiliating.

The boxing he’d honed had been no use at all.

The blow was too fast, and he went down the moment it landed. There had been power in Ha Tae-ung’s palm.

It had looked like an ordinary slap across the face and it was formidable technique.

He looked at Ha Tae-ung again. Something had changed since before the holiday. Every morning until now he’d been serviceable as stress relief.

He had never seen this attitude out of him. A timid little thing who buried his head in worksheets without a squeak.

But not today. Not remotely. Even the way he’d been sitting, shoulders straight, had been different.

He’d shown open hostility, and there had been arrogance in the look.

The feeling that things had gone badly wrong. Word that he’d been floored by a charity case would be round the school in no time.

Coming in with his head up after this would be hard.

“Son of a bitch……. I’ll kill you.”

Grind.

He ground his teeth, made a fist, and started to get up off the classroom floor.

Thud!

A heavy, powerful strike into his abdomen.

“Kyaaaah!”

“Aagh!”

The girls’ screams broke out. Violence of this kind was not tolerated inside the school.

The first school-violence scene any of them had witnessed since enrolling.

Children raised and cared for preciously, like flowers under glass.

Upper-class children, comfortable in the role of perpetrator, who had never once been the victim.

And they were watching one of their own kind get beaten by a worthless charity case.

By the wretched bear who had never provoked anybody and had kept his head down the entire time.

“Ughh……. Urk……”

Oh Gwangjun clutched his stomach and twisted on the floor.

Everything inside him turned over at once.

Splatter.

The toast and fruit he’d had for breakfast came up onto the classroom floor.

“……!”

“That’s— that’s disgusting……”

The girls who’d been screaming grimaced and turned their faces away.

A moment of humiliation that makes a man want to crawl into a mousehole.

Oh Gwangjun could not believe the position he was in.

He wanted something in his hand. If he could just beat Ha Tae-ung to death and end the whole thing——

But——

Crunch.

Having brought all of it up, Oh Gwangjun collapsed onto his side. And then he smelled a cheap rubber slipper against the side of his face.

Nnh.

He can’t move his head. Fear driving straight into his mind.

Ha Tae-ung……. This one is a thug.

With his face pinned he can’t see Ha Tae-ung’s expression. But the killing intent came through the sole of that slipper, unmistakably.

The dread came over him that his skull was about to be crushed underfoot.

“Your father’s a division chief prosecutor, isn’t he? Guardian of justice. So how does it work, you killing people?”

Ha Tae-ung’s voice dug into his ear with a sneer running through it.

Everything he’d routinely done to Ha Tae-ung overlapped itself in his head.

Pinned under the slipper, Oh Gwangjun screwed his eyes shut.

Ha Tae-ung, the pathetic outcast. Comprehensively beaten by him.

He shuddered at the shame that was coming.

A place where you survive by being strong. Cheonghwa High School, where the rule of the weak as meat and the strong as eaters is observed to the letter.

The rumour was obviously spreading fast already. And at exactly that moment——

“What do you think you’re doing? In a sacred classroom?”

(End of Chapter 8)