Screech.

A large imported car, black and smoothly polished, stopped.

The school gate stands wide open, and it is private ground that nobody enters carelessly.

The hour for arriving has more or less passed.

Not one late pupil in sight.

And inside the car stopped a moment in front of the empty gate——

“Attorney Ah.”

“Yes, Attorney.”

“Why do I feel I’ve been had?”

“Sorry?”

“…… Last week I was certain he was a mug who’d lay a floor under me. Opened an expensive bottle with the wife that evening and congratulated myself. And looking at it today…… I think I shat myself early.”

“……”

Ah Yura kept her mouth shut at it — Kim Gyeongmin, the senior attorney, and the man she is paired directly under.

Mug she could not say, but Ah Yura has never once thought Ha Tae-ung easy.

He is young, certainly, and the presence off him was very much not the ordinary thing.

No less than the upper-class people who are Jo and Jang’s main clients, and she had the feeling of something beyond them.

Unlike her, Attorney Kim Gyeongmin appears to have taken him for an easy mug.

“Go in there wrong and there’s no telling what becomes of our lives. Forget Seoul — we won’t get a foot down anywhere in the capital region. We could end up out in the provinces defending traffic accidents and petty criminals until we’re finished.”

In front of the gate, with Cheonghwa’s marker stone in view, Kim Gyeongmin let the fear show.

Take Jang Muyeol, the firm’s representative attorney: most of his own family came through Cheonghwa.

The groups that count, Supreme Court justices, Prosecutors General, ministers, sports stars, the children of chaebol — all of them passed through Cheonghwa.

Get marked by Cheonghwa and there is no dealing with the upper class, and no crossing their thresholds either.

Kim Gyeongmin grew up in a middle-class household and became a Jo and Jang attorney the hard way.

He looked through the gate at the space beyond it with a great many feelings crossing in him.

A man came over, in uniform, and by the look of him the gatekeeper.

He will have been watching them on the camera at the front gate and come out to establish who they are.

“Attorney.”

“Mm……”

“Don’t be downhearted. You never know.”

“Know what?”

“If we get thrown out, Customer Ha Tae-ung might rescue us.”

“What??”

Kim Gyeongmin looked at her flatly, saying a thing out of a dream.

“And right now you need to go and earn your keep. The client called for you.”

She looks the sturdier of the two of them.

There is more curiosity in her eyes than worry.

Cheonghwa High School, which until now she had only ever heard about by word of mouth.

Until she left university and went out into the world she knew it only as a well-known private school in Gangnam.

She had heard it was the upper class’s educational route, run from private kindergarten onward with a Cheonghwa place already in mind.

But a fellow student she came to know at law school showed her that what she had heard was not the whole of it.

Through him she learned something of the hidden truth.

He was not one of the hard workers at law school, and he passed the bar examination at the first attempt.

He got into Jo and Jang before she did, and his ability was recognised in no time.

Mostly he took the high-value matters.

She found out later that he had come through Cheonghwa High School and was the child of a former Supreme Court justice.

It is behind her now, and what she went through then was a dreadful thing.

Her parents ran a supermarket in a small provincial city and kept her going.

Between the hypermarkets and the online firms, covering the rent is more than they can manage now.

She knew she was a burden to them, and she swallowed it and drove herself at the work.

He was a diamond spoon, which exists above the gold and the silver.

Jo and Jang is, near enough, a firm organised to wait on them.

It runs a separate bespoke service for the highest holders of power, so there is nothing more to say about it.

There is a world of their own that ordinary people cannot begin to imagine, and it certainly exists.

Anywhere else, Attorney Kim Gyeongmin is in a position to put a bit of weight in his shoulders.

In front of Cheonghwa even he is shrinking.

In 2022 the power in this country begins at Cheonghwa and ends at Cheonghwa.

And the two of them have the duty of answering a client’s call directly in front of them.

Ping.

A message came into Kim Gyeongmin’s phone.

He checked it without much interest.

“Fuck…… ing hell.”

The colour went out of his face.

“What is it?”

“Attorney Ah! We’re going in!”

“Sorry?”

He had turned in an instant — weight driven into the shoulders, a hard light in the eyes.

Knock, knock.

The guard had come up to the car, and he knocked at the window.

Sliiide.

Kim Gyeongmin put the window down.

“Are you a parent?”

From a guard’s side it is exactly the picture to be mistaken about.

A middle-aged man and a young woman side by side in the front.

The picture of a remarried couple, common enough among the Gangnam upper class.

He took a card out of his case and passed it over.

“Kim Gyeongmin, senior attorney, Jo and Jang. I am here on a client’s instruction.”

“Ah, yes. Go in that way and park in the visitors’ car park.”

Jo and Jang, the number one body of lawyers in the country.

A level a Cheonghwa Foundation guard can read without being told.

“Good day to you.”

There was weight in the voice now, and the eyes were nothing like they had been a minute earlier.

“Attorney. What’s happen——”

“Work, of course. The young master is calling for us, and anxiously~”

“The young master??”

Friend?

Lee Jeongjun’s eyes came wide at a form of address he did not know.

This little bastard!!

A charity case, of all things, had met his eye squarely and let out nonsense.

Smiled unpleasantly, then picked him out in front of everyone.

And handed him the word friend, absurdly, in a warm tone.

“Friend? Lee Jeongjun?”

“Isn’t that Jeongjun sunbae?”

“The charity case has completely lost it. Doesn’t he know what house Jeongjun is from?”

The contest between Maths Thug and Ha Tae-ung was getting better and better.

Out of nowhere the charity case had drawn in Lee Jeongjun, who has never lost first place in the whole second year.

He stands across Doa Ilbo and Hanguk Group, and he is of the royal family.

Pupils watch his face, and so do the teachers.

Ju Miju, the current president of the parents’ association, is his mother.

The leading part in the Hanguk Airlines jerky business, which took the attention of an entire country onto one person.

Her temper is no joke.

She is still called the Nation’s Bitch.

Brought up and educated with a mother like that, Lee Jeongjun’s character could hardly be a fine one.

Not a soul beneath his eye.

The sort who lives believing that under heaven the only thing of any quality is himself.

Even among the children who count at Cheonghwa, the ones Lee Jeongjun considers level with himself can be counted on the fingers.

And today a charity case has picked that Lee Jeongjun out, fearlessly, as friend.

“Why me?”

He asked it with contempt in the look.

He wanted to know why the charity case had marked him.

“You suspect me of cheating as well, don’t you. Since there’s no possibility of a worthless charity case taking full marks in every subject.”

“……”

His mind had been read, and he shut his mouth.

The charity case is quick at reading a room.

Every person gathered here refuses the result.

What is this bastard?

Lee Jeongjun looked straight into his eyes.

Meeting them at all put him badly out.

He has not got the boy placed.

What he felt was the shrinking that comes on meeting somebody at a higher level, when you have no feel for how to handle them.

There is exactly one such person in this school.

Among the third years, who would not appear in the great hall.

Grrk.

The face overlapped, and Lee Jeongjun’s teeth ground.

The overwhelming powerlessness he felt facing that sunbae has stayed with him as a trauma to this day.

First in the whole school in the third year, and family of the house that stands first in the country’s chaebol order.

Officially he is the current president of the student council, and Cheonghwa’s pride.

Because of him, Lee Jeongjun has been treated as the second man from private kindergarten through primary and middle school and into this one.

Until that one graduates and leaves, Lee Jeongjun is a shadow and nothing more.

The one comfort is that the school presidency, decided in the second semester of the second year, has already been settled on him.

The Cheonghwa system is more thoroughly stratified than the society outside it.

He is not somebody a charity case may go about calling friend.

And on top of it, a request that will not stand.

“I’ll do it.”

A quiet voice rang through a hall made of murmuring and silence mixed together.

“Miss Jeonghye?”

Oh Jeonghye, one of the second year’s mathematics teachers.

“I’m curious too.”

Clack. Clack.

Silver frames, which suit the bob, caught the light.

A polo neck, with neat checked trousers under it.

She is behind Maths Thug in reputation, and she took her degree in mathematics at Seoguk, and she is able.

She has always disliked Lee Jangyong and the pervert in him, intensely.

He handles mathematics as an instrument for satisfying a crooked appetite of his own, rather than for teaching children.

And for all his pretence otherwise, a bad history with women besides.

That is what Lee Jangyong is to Oh Jeonghye.

This is a small, timid revenge on a man who has made advances at her again and again, with mathematics teaching for an excuse.

And with the head of academic affairs behind him, he has thrown himself about with even less regard for anybody.

Oh Jeonghye did not come through Cheonghwa, and what unfolds inside the school sets her teeth shaking.

Cheonghwa people, and most of the pupils, are educated from childhood into a way of thinking that treats ordinary people as servants.

Moral education means nothing to them.

The place is only a training ground for people looking for the way to the top of a pyramid of appetite before anybody else.

And in a place like that, today at last, a revolt.

Ha Tae-ung, the charity case she has kept an eye on.

At any ordinary high school he would have been recognised as outstanding in several ways.

Results and looks — both would have carried.

But this is Cheonghwa High School.

With a charity case label stuck on him, Ha Tae-ung has been nothing here but a bin for the pupils’ feelings.

She has pitied him without limit, and could not put out a hand rashly.

Most charity cases cannot hold out through the second year and withdraw.

And Oh Jeonghye’s own position is not a squarely planted one — not enough to take all of them in out of pity.

Even so, she wanted to step into this.

She is very sorry to Ha Tae-ung.

And decisively, she wanted somebody to land one on Teacher Lee Jangyong, badly.

Lee Jangyong, who looks down on the world on the strength of being a little better at mathematical reasoning.

And the Cheonghwa pupils, who live gripped by a sense of their own superiority.

“Haha. If Teacher Oh Jeonghye steps in, that is fair.”

Lee Jangyong looked at her, satisfied.

She did not answer him.

Her eyes went to Lee Jeongjun, standing below the platform.

A pupil who has openly disregarded her, his teacher, in every lesson.

“Lee Jeongjun. Would you like to solve them too?”

The line came out of her mouth without warning.

Bait thrown with no notice given.

Both Lee Jeongjun’s fists closed.

And then——

(End of Chapter 55)