“Maths Thug’s been thrown out, they say.”

“Why?”

“Has he been on the take or something?”

The new building, where Cheonghwa’s third years mostly stay.

Like any other school, Cheonghwa puts the comfort of the third years, who are preparing for the entrance examinations, above everything else.

A space fitted out with systems of the very latest kind, providing the third years with a perfect environment for study.

The other buildings are impressive too, and the new building is run by an artificial intelligence smart-care system.

Temperature, humidity, air purification, down to the smallest thing.

The rest areas alone are kept to a standard on a level with a five-star hotel.

The corridor and classroom windows are triple-glazed, and no ordinary noise gets through to interfere.

A space optimised so that nothing can be attended to but study.

There is a separate canteen for the third years.

The only thing any of them need concern themselves with is concentrating on their work.

And just now a small commotion had got up in the third year, class one.

The lunch hour, where a little slack is permitted inside the pulled-tight tension.

The pupils who had finished eating early and come back were passing light talk among themselves.

A different sort of air was circling a classroom that stays silent even in the breaks.

It is quiet enough that the low whispering carried in every direction.

Tap.

Somebody’s hand, moving busily over a problem book, stopped.

“That’s not it. There was a perfect score in the second year at these midterms.”

“A perfect score? Really? Who? Lee Jeongjun, the second-year top?”

Cheonghwa is where the ones who count themselves prodigies gather.

And there has not been a single perfect score until now.

The difficulty of the papers is the highest in the country.

However clever a genius may be, nobody can be perfect across every subject.

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“A charity case.”

“Whaaat?? A charity case?”

“A charity case, really?”

“The school’s finished.”

“Second year? There was still one of the bastards holding on?”

The pupils who caught that conversation, murmuring away like a side broadcast, reacted from all round the room.

Every one of the voices was thrown.

Had it been a child from a house that could account for it, they could have taken it in.

But a charity case is another matter.

An untouchable!

The first perfect score in Cheonghwa’s history had been carried off by a standing that had no business with it.

It is nothing to do with the third year, and the anger came up all the same.

“Maths Thug wouldn’t have it, so he squared off with the charity case in the great hall——”

“And?”

“You’re joking……”

“Got taken apart, they say.”

“Eh?”

“Wow……”

“Maths Thug did? That maths pervert?”

Lee Jangyong, the maths pervert, as every pupil at Cheonghwa acknowledges.

He stands like the last hurdle before a perfect score, and any number of pupils have broken themselves on him.

And that man has lost to a charity case!

Shocking news, in the plain sense of the word.

“There’s a bigger one.”

The boy who had brought the rumour in could not keep the excitement down, and the spit flew.

It got to where even the few in class one who had held to their indifference put their ears up.

The dull, grinding school life of a third year.

News of something to set a heart going, and for the first time in a long while there was life in the room.

“What is it!”

“Get on and tell us!”

School news reaches the third years late.

Part of the reason is that first and second years cannot enter the new building.

The third years, equally, have no occasion to go outside it.

The new building has a café run by the foundation.

Coffee from the bean, teas of every kind, and a range of snacks supplied by the department stores.

Which is why it took until the lunch hour for the morning’s business at Cheonghwa to reach the new building.

“That charity case, his surname is Ha.”

“Ha?”

“And?”

“Nothing coming to you?”

“You’re not saying that charity case is Haryun Group blood, or something like that?”

“Ding-dong-dang! Bingo!”

“What??”

“That’s mad……”

“Is that even possible?”

“Oh my……”

The boys and girls alike went blank.

A charity case had turned, all at once, into Haryun Group royal family.

Something you could hear and still not believe.

“Is it true?”

“The first and second years watched it live, and the principal and the other teachers with them. And the more astonishing thing is that Jo and Jang attorneys came and called him young master.”

“Jo and Jang attorneys?”

“Then that means he really is Haryun Group direct line?”

“……”

For a moment a silence came down over the classroom like a cold frost.

Young master is a form of address you have to be direct line of a top ten group to hear.

And on top of that, the other formal name is——

Crown prince!

A title permitted only to a member of the royal family of a top ten group with history behind it.

At Cheonghwa, at present, exactly one person is called crown prince.

“……”

The presence sitting in the very front seat of class one.

A back that stays bent over its work, the pen never leaving his hand.

The class looked carefully at a presence that had scarcely moved.

“The name.”

He asks it without moving and without turning round.

A heavy strength rides on the voice and spreads through a classroom soaked in silence.

“H— Ha Tae-ung, is what I heard.”

The boy who had been carrying the rumour answered in a shaking voice.

Share a room with him all day and you seldom hear the solitary crown prince’s voice.

And that man had opened his mouth of his own accord to ask a question.

Shff. Shff-shff.

Cheonghwa’s crown prince took the answer and began working through the problems again.

The pupils looked at his calm back and thought that this was a crown prince, right enough.

But they did not, as it happened, see the crown prince’s face.

His heavy eyebrows twitched hard, once, and settled straight again.

“Am I not allowed to come?”

“No. You’re not.”

“Hey! Lee Hyorin!”

“An Aram. Keep out of it!”

“……”

An Aram, who is not frightened of much of anybody at Cheonghwa.

And in front of Lee Hyorin alone she loses her nerve.

Put the two of them against each other and Lee Hyorin would not last one punch. It is the force she gives off that pushes An Aram back.

The venom she gives off makes nothing of her years, and it is savage.

The straight look of her eyes puts a person down first.

Kang Ari, who looks delicate enough on the outside, was another matter.

She squared off with Lee Hyorin without giving an inch.

That fox.

A fiery anger came up in Lee Hyorin.

Kang Ari, one of Cheonghwa’s three great beauties.

One representative beauty is chosen in each year.

Lee Hyorin has always reckoned that without Kang Ari the part would obviously have been hers.

Every one of the children who know nothing of her house is wrong about Kang Ari.

A musical girl who handles a cello the size of her own body as she pleases.

Most of first year, class ten, are fond of Kang Ari.

It is because of the smile that is always on her face.

But Lee Hyorin knows perfectly well what Kang Ari is.

She belongs to a house that is not one step behind Hanguk Group.

“Tch.”

Lee Hyorin took a small step back.

Like a lioness that has lost the prey in front of her, she put her tail down.

“Let’s go to the canteen.”

Kang Ari went ahead.

Her eyes had an unusual shine on them.

That first meeting with Ha Tae-ung sunbae, stamped into her memory.

She felt the colour of a connection deepening as one coincidence laid itself over another.

“Ari……”

An Aram, following behind, shook her head.

Her hopeless friend has that look in her eyes of somebody who has fallen deep into something, and there is no telling where the course she is setting ends.

Her head began to throb at the thought of all the situations that might land on them, and no telling when.

“Eat.”

“Can you actually get food down right now?”

“Why?”

“The things you did today. Do you really not know what they’re going to set off?”

“No. I don’t.”

“You— you don’t?”

“Am I supposed to care?”

“I can’t stand this……. Were you always this cool-nerved?”

The canteen.

Come late and the canteen is easier still.

Today’s main dishes are Korean beef ribs, mushroom soup, salad and grilled tilefish.

And on top of the standard side dishes, a range of desserts and fruit laid on buffet-style.

We put the food on plates in an unhurried way and ate.

In the past I couldn’t come in at this hour at all, since I’d have stood out and had to watch everybody’s face.

The humiliation Park Jiung took in this canteen not long ago was no distant matter to me.

But now heaven and earth have been turned over new.

“……”

The first and second years scattered about eating are all slowly watching my face.

“Isn’t that Hyoju sunbae?”

“Unbelievaaable……”

“He really must be Haryun Group direct line. Look who he’s sitting with.”

“I’ve told my mum, so I’ll find out when I get home.”

Whisper, whisper.

My ears itch enough to make me want to stir a finger round in them.

That is how much talk about me was going out on air, live, in every direction.

“Tae-ung! I’m your fan for life!”

Park Jiung, who has his confidence perfectly mounted now, throws me a thumbs up from beside me.

Across the table Lee Hyoju keeps chattering at me with worry in her eyes.

Was this girl always this talkative?

I go back through the memory and there’s no data on it.

A smile came onto my face for no reason.

“You’re smiling?”

“Not allowed?”

“Tae-ung……. Right about now the upper-class people who count in Gangnam will be stirring. Your story has got right out.”

That much I can do nothing about.

It could not have been kept secret any longer in any case.

If it hadn’t been settled in one blow, they’d have kept picking at it for years.

At this level the school is put down comprehensively.

“Hyoju.”

“What……”

I called Hyoju quietly.

Only then did she seem to take in where she was, and her face coloured slightly.

By the look of it she hadn’t been conscious of how much she was chattering.

“If you’re too afraid of a choice…… your life doesn’t change either.”

“……??”

This is a truth about living that I worked out by living it.

Something I learned to the bone through university, the army, and then working life.

The dark history of the adolescence I spent at Cheonghwa, which time never once wiped out.

Get a second run at a life and make the same choices, and you’ve forfeited the right to it.

“Tae-ung’s right. For the future of a man with courage in him…… you have to choose boldly.”

Park Jiung looks as though he has worked something out properly himself lately.

“……”

Lee Hyoju closed her mouth, as though chewing over what I had said.

The wisdom a person gets into himself by living it is not for sale at any price.

And so the air over the table where the three of us sat settled.

“Oppa~ can I sit next to you?”

“……??”

(End of Chapter 64)