Get hurt? Me?

For a moment the shock of it stopped Lee Jeongjun’s mind dead.

In all his life he has never heard anything like it.

His parents got on badly with each other, and even so, anything to do with him had their full backing.

Unlike his sister, who carries on like a rebel, Lee Jeongjun carried a large appetite in him.

The title of grandson on the maternal line to Hanguk Group, which stands a rank above Doa Ilbo.

His mother Ju Miju brings him benefits of several kinds, and none of it has ever been enough to fill him.

He wanted his ability recognised, without fail, and he wanted the strength of both houses made his own.

He remembers it clearly even now.

When he was small and went to his mother’s family, he was quietly left out of things.

His maternal grandfather, Ju Dongmyeong, chairman of Hanguk Group.

Every time they went for one of the holidays, he made a plain distinction between his sons’ grandchildren and his daughters’.

From the size of the pocket money to the seating at the table, the sons’ children came first in everything.

As time went on he worked out the favouritism and the unfair treatment for himself, and he ground his teeth on it.

His grievance against Ju Seojun, eldest grandson of the Ju house, went furthest of all.

Ju Seojun, who every time they met on one of those visits disregarded Lee Jeongjun to his face.

What happened when he was fourteen and starting on adolescence he can never forget.

Ju Seojun called him into his room that day.

And then.

You little beggar. Come for the scraps, have you? There’s nothing here for a little bastard like you. Keep out of our house from now on, as far as you can manage!

With nobody there to see it, Ju Seojun poured abuse over Lee Jeongjun.

Lee Jeongjun keeps the shock of that buried in his chest to this day, and he grows his venom on it.

It is the reason he grinds his teeth and throws himself at his studies.

The Ju house has no head for study.

After that he stopped going to his mother’s family even at the holidays, on the excuse of work.

He took the favouritism he met there and made it the driving force of his life, for the sake of the future.

And so Lee Jeongjun hates anybody who disregards him, to an extreme degree.

After he entered Cheonghwa High School, Lee Jangyong did exactly that to him.

On mathematical ability alone, which nobody could come near, he had laid every pupil in the school out beneath him.

His pride was injured, and he put up with it.

He could not get past Lee Jangyong at mathematics, so he granted him it.

But today was a different matter.

By setting questions beneath the standard, Lee Jangyong had gone and confirmed in front of the whole school that a charity case was the one with full marks.

He dragged Lee Jeongjun in and disgraced him along with it.

And then he runs, without so much as an apology?

Most people take Lee Jeongjun for a bookworm.

But he has been doing kickboxing a long time now, to keep his condition up.

There is a training room built in the basement at home, and a professional comes in to work with him.

The stress that piles up from his studies and from a number of other things, Lee Jeongjun has worked off by conditioning his body.

It is why a boy who had kept his strength hidden could put Lee Jangyong down at a stroke.

And a charity case, Ha Tae-ung, is warning a boy like that to keep out of it.

He does not seem to know what real fear is.

“You somebody?”

Lee Jeongjun asked it back, evenly.

Even if it were true that he is one of the Haryun Group family, there was nothing in it to make him back down.

Leave out the current student council president in the third year and he is number two at Cheonghwa.

“Yeah.”

Ha Tae-ung’s answer came back as though it went without saying.

“Whoa……”

“What is he?”

“Is he actually Haryun Group family or something?”

The murmuring among the pupils grew.

The teachers’ faces stiffened, every one of them.

A good number of them had disregarded the charity case Ha Tae-ung openly, in lessons.

“Heh heh heh.”

A rank smile hung at the corner of Lee Jeongjun’s mouth.

“What have you got, then?”

“Money.”

“What??”

Ha Tae-ung answered it squarely, and Lee Jeongjun could make nothing of it.

However well a chaebol house is doing, it does not hand a large fortune over to a child who is still a high school student.

A few billion won at the very most, and that is where it stops.

Only once they are of age does the gifting come, through various steps taken to save tax.

A few hundred million sits in Lee Jeongjun’s own account.

However much money Ha Tae-ung had, the figure was bound to be one you could guess at.

And here he is, boasting boldly that he has money.

“What money?”

“However much it is……”

Cheonghwa admits the children of the upper class before anybody else, and its pupils are especially clear about how things actually stand.

Most of them use a parent’s credit card and hold almost no cash at all.

Shares are about the largest asset any of them owns.

“Money……”

Of the exchange between the two of them on the platform, Kang Ari alone nodded.

Of everybody currently enrolled at Cheonghwa, the one holding the most cash is Kang Ari herself.

Her parents’ road accident brought the inheritance early.

On top of that her grandfather passes her bearer bonds whenever the chance comes.

The sums are on a scale an ordinary person could not imagine.

So she followed Ha Tae-ung’s answer well enough.

“Kh……”

At the back of the crowd of pupils, a small laugh escaped Lee Hyorin.

Her brother Lee Jeongjun thrown badly off balance was a ridiculous sight.

He is her brother, and a look like that on him was a genuinely rare thing to see.

No — her own flesh and blood, and she is seeing it for the first time.

The two of them pass each other at home and do not acknowledge it.

Their parents are no different, and all of them have kept coldly to themselves.

Four in a household, each respecting the others’ lives.

Not touching, in any form at all.

She and her brother dealt with each other as competitors for an inheritance and nothing more.

And today her high-nosed brother has taken one properly from a charity case.

Stimulating.

Life came up sparkling in Lee Hyorin’s eyes.

It looks like something with life in it, in a dull school year.

I knew it!

Attorney Kim Gyeongmin looked quietly at Ha Tae-ung.

A client who pays a hundred million won a month in legal advisory fees.

His standing: direct line of Haryun Group’s chairman.

He does not doubt his client Ha Tae-ung any longer.

Humility fitted on and his bearing respectful, he waited for his client’s instructions.

“And your method’s wrong.”

“……??”

Ha Tae-ung went on, and Lee Jeongjun’s eyebrow twitched and he answered with silence.

Lee Jeongjun had punished a contemptible attitude in the surest form punishment comes in.

Nobody gets prosecuted for putting a few blows into a human being like Lee Jangyong.

It is how his mother taught him to live in the world.

The low ones who climb at you with disrespect — stamp on them!

If they watch for a gap to come up through, stamp them down harder!

Measured that way, Lee Jangyong had gone well over the line.

“You wouldn’t know the difference between raw and rude.”

“What bullshit is that!”

Ha Tae-ung’s tone was that of a man giving a lesson, and Lee Jeongjun flared.

“He did wrong, granted. He’s still a teacher.”

Ha Tae-ung looked at Lee Jangyong, on his knees and shaking.

He said it, and there was no respect in him at all for the man as a teacher.

His eyes, if anything, were cold as ice.

“Teacher Lee Jangyong.”

Ha Tae-ung called him in a low voice.

“Khhh……”

Rage and humiliation, pain and fear, all mixed together, and an animal groan leaked thinly out of Lee Jangyong.

He has not known helplessness like this since he became a grown man.

Only now does he feel in his body what sort of human beings these are in front of him.

Children of the Korean power class, who from outside the system can drop a whole house into ruin, root and branch, without much trouble.

He had forgotten it, in the years he spent employed as a teacher and reigning at Cheonghwa as its maths thug.

In fact they are at a level he could thrash about all he liked and never reach.

“You still can’t admit you were wrong, can you.”

“……”

Lee Jangyong did not answer.

He had ended up on his knees somehow, but his pride, at least, was as solid as a fortress wall.

“Let’s do it the way adults do.”

“……??”

Every eye in the hall went to Ha Tae-ung.

“Attorney.”

“Yes! Young master!”

Kim Gyeongmin answered with force in it, like a soldier.

“Start with the defamation against me, find every criminal charge that touches Teacher Lee Jangyong…… and see that he pays for it.”

“Understood! Jo and Jang will put everything it has into it.”

Kim Gyeongmin answered it full of certainty.

The way things stand in this country, an ordinary man of the middle class cannot avoid being reduced to a beggar once Jo and Jang starts to move.

An organisation with the legal profession held tight in its hand and its threads bound in with every arm of Korean power.

One mere schoolteacher is no work at all.

On the defamation alone they could have him serving a sentence.

Their speciality is criminal and civil suits together, years of it, harassment that dries the blood out of a man.

There is no large firm anywhere with the nerve to take Jo and Jang on.

Looking at the situation, a false statement of fact had been set out publicly, damaging the young master’s reputation.

Given who the injured party is, the maximum of five years for defamation looked entirely possible.

“P— please, spare me!!”

Thump!

Only then did Lee Jangyong grasp where he was, and he put his forehead to the boards of the platform and begged pardon.

Those who watched a man with nothing left but his pride come apart in front of them felt the cold go through them.

Punishment of a wholly different order from Lee Jeongjun, who used violence to work off his temper.

“Too late.”

The one cold line came out of Ha Tae-ung’s mouth.

Shff.

Standing on the platform, Ha Tae-ung turned his eyes on the crowd packed into the hall, all of them looking at him.

“……”

The pupils felt his eyes on them, and most of them looked away.

Every one of them had seen for themselves how frightening Ha Tae-ung is.

“Is there anybody else with a complaint about the one with full marks?”

A low voice, carrying quietly through a hall sunk in silence.

“……”

Not one of them could make a peep.

Cheonghwa’s newly arrived crown prince!

Every one of them who had looked away went down on their knees inwardly, and took the weight of his arrival.

(End of Chapter 61)