An abrupt question, out of nowhere. Every face in the room went blank.
Who indeed.
The charity case Ha Tae-ung.
A student admitted under special provision as a socially considered case, because his household couldn’t manage.
His entrance marks had been decent, and among Cheonghwa students they were nothing outstanding.
A problem pupil, summoned to the principal’s office today for committing violence in the canteen.
That is the entire sum of what the people gathered here know about him.
Has this bastard lost his mind?
Park Donggeun’s thick eyebrows twitched at the insolence of it.
A brat who used to keep his head buried had eaten something disagreeable, issued a warning, taken a hit off a parent, and laughed on top of all of it.
There are occasionally children who flip under the pressure of study.
Has this one made up his mind about something today?
Jo Huijeong, Oh Seora’s mother, felt a jolt of fear.
Cheonghwa is famous for charity cases who can’t endure the place and give it up partway through.
Which meant rumours went round about them detonating all the bravado they’d swallowed before they withdrew, or turning the school into a wreck on the way out.
Ha Tae-ung might have snapped and be about to do somebody harm.
The charity case Ha Tae-ung, struck hard across the face, offering the other side of it with a smile on.
With teachers shouting at each other around him, not the smallest trace of being flustered.
“Why is nobody answering? I asked whether you know who I am.”
He’s mad.
Nobody had ever seen that kind of madness in Ha Tae-ung’s eyes.
The glitter in them was nothing like what had been there a moment before.
“Tae-ung……”
Kim Changyong, his homeroom teacher, called to him with distress in his voice.
He’d come in on the charity-case intake, and Kim had never once treated him differently for it.
At Cheonghwa, teachers of non-examined subjects don’t stand in a very different position from charity-case students.
They carry less say than the teachers of Korean, English, maths, science and social studies.
Kim Changyong teaches Chinese characters, classed together with arts and PE as non-examined.
So other teachers disregarded him quietly, and so did the students.
At Cheonghwa, even a Seoguk University graduate like Kim Changyong takes as much slighting as Ha Tae-ung does.
There were too many eyes on him to look after the boy openly.
He treated him the same as everyone else in the class.
Today’s business was the same. He’d heard the boy had been pulled out of a lesson by Park Donggeun, unilaterally.
And taken to the principal’s office.
He’d run without stopping to weigh any of the circumstances.
Student discipline is supposed to go to the homeroom teacher first. That’s the rule and it’s ordinary common sense.
Whatever else was true, for one year this was a child in his keeping.
And arriving, he found something happening that he couldn’t believe with his own eyes on it.
Slapped by a parent. One-sidedly.
His vision went red on the instant. There was no room to think about anything and the anger came out of him.
Whatever anybody says, inside this school that is my child.
But the limit was clear enough. At Cheonghwa a homeroom teacher’s role is confined to the absolute minimum.
The students come from houses successful enough that no occasion ever arises to go looking for one.
Honestly, a homeroom teacher has neither the standing nor the power to step into anything.
To Kim Changyong, Ha Tae-ung reads as a child with powerless parents behind him.
And the child in his keeping is showing every sign of being about to run wild.
There’s no justification for stopping him. No — he doesn’t want to stop him.
The principal is sitting here. So are officers of the parents’ association.
Barring some major variable, Tae-ung’s expulsion is a settled sequence.
Trudge, trudge.
Ha Tae-ung walked toward the principal.
“…….”
He dropped into a chair.
He sat down directly opposite the association officers. Without asking anybody’s permission for it.
“You— you! Stand up! Where do you get the nerve!”
Park Donggeun had been watching, and flared, and shouted it.
There is nowhere he behaves more demurely than the principal’s office.
In a room where he himself reads every face before moving, Ha Tae-ung behaving as though nobody in it existed displeased him considerably.
Shff.
Ha Tae-ung didn’t react to Teacher Park’s words at all. He lifted his phone instead.
He worked it briskly for a moment and played a recording.
“Even if it is one meal a day, isn’t he shovelling in rather a lot for something free?”
“Seora, let it go. My dad says kids like this have holes in their stomachs.”
“The food isn’t even good. Better it gets used up somehow.”
“Even so, our bear cub is stuffing himself far too much. If it’s left over it goes out as animal feed, and then there’s less for them, and if they go hungry, what then?”
“Still, the bear cub the school keeps comes first.”
“Well then. Shall we let it go?”
“Kind Seora, be patient. Animal welfare. They’ve a right to survive on their own.”
“Fine. I’m feeling generous today. Eat up, charity case. Oink oink. Hohoho.”
Oh Seora and her group’s voices, ringing through the principal’s office with everything intact.
Hearing it a second time, it isn’t the speech of human beings.
“Give— give that here! Now!”
Jo Huijeong went urgent. Her eyes lit and she went to snatch the phone out of his hand.
If the contents of that recording get outside the school it’s fatal in several directions at once.
Fortunately this is still the principal’s office.
“No.”
Ha Tae-ung refused flatly, with a snort.
“Are you going to threaten me with that? Do as you like. Who exactly do you imagine is going to listen to a bastard like you?”
“Does filing a complaint over school violence count as a threat?”
Ha Tae-ung murmurs it as though to himself.
“Tae-ung. Friends don’t do this to one another. Delete it right now.”
Lee Gyeongja, the association treasurer, who had watched the whole thing from the beginning, stepped in.
Quick to read a room, she understood instinctively that this was going to grow past handling.
And she had picked up something else in the air besides.
That boy…… what is he?
She watched Ha Tae-ung closely.
He is unmistakably a second-year high school student, and he does not look that age. Not remotely.
Summoned to the principal’s office, where the most senior adult in the school sits.
Slapped without warning by a woman as formidable as Jo Huijeong, and unbelievably calm through it.
He’d smiled like a child who isn’t right, and the eyes above the smile are entirely rational.
None of the marks of a child raised in a household under strain are on him.
Most of them show eyes full of venom and a manner soaked through with servility.
What came off Ha Tae-ung was an unaccountable seasoning, the kind you see in a man who has worked out in the world.
It could be a misreading, of course.
What troubled her most was the question he keeps returning to.
Something in it caught, instinctively, and she couldn’t say what. An ominous thought kept arriving and wouldn’t leave.
Do you know who I am……
“Friends? Ma’am, do you follow your friends about and torment them while they’re eating?”
“…….”
“It’s a home upbringing with no grounding under it, obviously. Which is exactly why I can’t simply let it pass.”
“Hey! Do you really want to die? Do you know who I am?”
Jo Huijeong’s eyes turned over at the answer.
She had meant to swallow it and let the thing go here, and her patience had shown its floor.
Her husband’s connections run out in every direction like an octopus, and some of them reach men who work with their fists.
Shake the whole thing out and there is nothing in the world for Jo Huijeong to fear.
“Why? Is your husband a gang boss or something?”
“……Heeeeeeey! You little——”
The last thread of reason she’d been holding came unsealed.
The woman’s out.
Oh Seora’s mother’s high-pitched obscenity tore the air of the office open.
The principal, the treasurer and both teachers had their faces distort, nicely.
However angry a person gets, this is a room where you keep hold of the thread.
The limit of a new-money woman, as expected. Whites of the eyes rolled up and the temper went off.
And the colour that came out of her with it was black all the way through. Dark aura.
The densest of anything I’ve seen today.
No comparison at all to the dark coming off the principal, or Teacher Park, or the treasurer sitting across from me.
Out of all of them, only Kim Changyong’s is clear and clean.
The ability my grandmother gave me — at moments like this I’d like a button to switch it off.
Facing the aura an inhuman person carries around brings everything up in me.
Pat.
Hm?
The instant I thought about a button, the auras stopped being there.
People looking the way people normally look.
What? It’s off now? Then how do I get it back when I want it?
Pat.
Exactly as thought. Everyone’s own colour back in front of my eyes immediately.
Insane. There’s an on and an off.
“Heh.”
The laugh got out of me before I could stop it. An absolute gift of a buff.
“You thug. You’re laughing? You’ve gone out of your mind wanting to die. You really do want to die, don’t you?”
Oh Seora’s mother’s rampage kept going. Once that temper detonates it’s no joke.
“Ma’am. Do you actually know who I am, doing this?”
“…….”
The same question. The third time now.
Thrown by a question repeating itself identically, they all shut their mouths.
“Hah! Is somebody like you trying to tell me you’re some chaebol house’s hidden bloodline?”
Oh Seora’s mother snorts it.
Oh. How did she work that out?
“……How did you know? Haha. It’s meant to be a secret. I’m the youngest grandson of a chaebol house.”
The truth came out far too easily, and I confirmed it for them on the spot.
“What……. The youngest grandson of a chaebol house? You? Hohohohoho hohohohoho.”
Oh Seora’s mother finally starts shaking with laughter.
Right. Laugh plenty, while you still can.
“This one’s mad. Principal! Expel him this minute — he’s an accomplished liar on top of everything else. In all my years in this profession I have never met a vicious little mongrel like him.”
A vicious little mongrel?
Park Donggeun joined in without reading the room at all.
But.
“That statement. Are you able to take responsibility for it?”
The treasurer asks it, and she asks it gravely. Unlike the rest of them her eyes carry something thinking behind them.
“Madam Treasurer. There is no need to hear another word out of him. I’ll have him dragged out immediately.”
Park Donggeun, garbage who doesn’t rank as a teacher, stood up breathing hard.
“Tae-ung……”
Kim Changyong’s expression is equally at a loss.
Every one of them is writing it off as nonsense.
“My father’s name is Ha Donghwi.”
“……??”
I gave my father’s name clearly, one syllable at a time. They shut their mouths with expressions asking what that was supposed to mean.
They haven’t caught it yet.
“Search it on Naiview.”
I kept my posture straight and went on calmly.
“Ha, as a surname……. Surely not……”
The treasurer caught it first.
She got her mouth open before anyone else and trailed off at the end of it.
Something in her eyes had detected it.
A grin.
I smiled back at that look.
“Are there a great many chaebol in this country with the surname Ha?”
I asked it back with the smile of a boy who knows he’s being wicked. A grandfather who was worth precisely nothing to me when I was living on my own strength.
Everything about the situation has changed now.
Haryun Group, which lands properly among the upper class of this country.
I intend to make proper use of it.
“……. You’re— you’re the Haryun Group grandson?”
Jo Huijeong asks it with the shake coming through her voice.
The woman who was showing pure venom and had lost hold of her reason looks like the strength is running out of her.
“Yes. I am Ha Tae-ung, youngest grandson of Chairman Ha Cheolgon of Haryun Group.”
(End of Chapter 16)