Click. Click.

The fifth-floor space in Cheonghwa High School’s new building.

A cultural space that only the third years get the whole use of.

The floor area runs to somewhere around a hundred and seventy square metres.

It is also the pupils’ rest area, done out to give off the air of one of the large bakery cafés on the edge of Seoul.

It was designed with a great window wall so that the school grounds can be looked over whenever anybody likes.

Unlike the old building, where the foundation chairman sits, this is the best view of the whole school there is.

Five pupils, boys and girls, were sitting round a table for ten.

“……”

The rest area was silent.

The boy sitting at the centre of the group has his eyes shut.

His eyebrows are thick, as though a caterpillar had settled on each one.

A hard obstinacy showed in lips pressed firmly closed.

It is not the sort of handsome face modern society prefers.

It is nearer the look men had in the past, and the impression it gives is of a special forces soldier.

Shoulders thrown wide and squared, and a heavy-boned body with it, put a weight on anybody looking at him, and he need do nothing to make it happen.

His name is Kang Junu.

Third year at Cheonghwa High School, nineteen this year.

Only son of Go Mihui, chief executive of Ilseong Hotel, an Ilseong Group affiliate.

Socially he is a minor. As a participant in running a group he is not a young man at all.

Not the direct line, and Ilseong Group blood right enough — and Ilseong stands first in the Korean corporate rankings.

Kang Junu is the president for this generation of the people gathered here. Of the society, rather.

This gathering is the Management Studies Society.

One of the societies inside Cheonghwa High School.

The name is old-fashioned and the society’s history is long, and the name has never been changed for it.

Outwardly it is a different thing altogether from the student council, which operates as Cheonghwa’s formal central body.

Only the children of groups within the top hundred are given the standing to join.

And of those admitted, only the children of top ten groups are eligible for the presidency.

The vice-presidency, to groups within the top twenty.

The officers are limited to groups within the top fifty.

The rest, the society’s ordinary members, are made up of the children of top hundred groups.

The board of officers is assembled in a thoroughgoing pyramid of rank.

They do not go through an election or a nomination when a head is chosen, the way other societies do.

The corporate ranking at the point a first year is admitted is the only thing looked at.

Only the sacred bone and the true bone of the qualifying groups join.

It is a society that has kept company with the history of Cheonghwa School from the day it opened.

At Cheonghwa nobody may touch the running of the society, the foundation chairman included.

The reason is that it is a thoroughly independent body, bound tight to the top hundred groups’ heirs who have graduated from Cheonghwa.

An iron fortress of their own, the Management Studies Society.

Even the pupils who count as successes at Cheonghwa bow their heads in front of its members.

They go to the same high school, and from university onwards they are the sort who walk entirely different roads.

Which means that the instant they are thrown into society, the members of the Management Studies Society become the masters those others must wait on.

Law, medicine, culture, administration, and the rest.

In every field in the country, ordinary pupils cannot take a position above a member of the Management Studies Society.

An invisible rule is at work.

And today something has gone wrong with the iron fortress.

An upset that cannot happen in the Management Studies Society has happened.

The belated appearance of a top hundred group who ought to have joined on the day he was admitted — and worse, of a top ten direct line, eligible for the presidency.

He came in as a charity case, was disregarded all that time, and hid what he was thoroughly throughout.

“Why do you suppose he did it?”

An emergency summons had gone out to the society’s officers.

A stain has been put on what little school life they have left.

One of the girls among the officers opened her mouth first.

Her hair was swept back neatly behind both ears.

The air about her was much like Kang Junu’s.

A slender face, and eyes that are deep at the very least.

Even in that group she had an aura of her own.

Sitting opposite the society president Kang Junu, she gives no ground at all in force of presence.

Her features are not heavy and her looks fall behind nobody’s.

She is one of Cheonghwa High School’s three great beauties, the queen of the third year.

Her name is Jang Jiyu.

Eldest daughter of Chairman Jang Yongguk of Sindo Group, eleventh in the 2022 corporate rankings and first in the distribution trade.

Neat and attractive eyes, nose, mouth.

Cool, deep pupils.

Jang Jiyu’s character is like a knife.

Touch her the wrong way and the look that goes into you like a blade stops your breath.

Against Kang Junu’s strong impression and strong character Jang Jiyu did not give ground.

She is a daughter, and she is the direct line of Sindo Group’s chairman.

“There’s no telling. Haryun people have always been peculiar.”

“Peculiar, nothing. Hard is what they are. That’s the Haryun tradition.”

One of the officers said it and Jang Jiyu gave her honest opinion of it.

You have to be at about her level to say a thing like that.

The children of houses further down the corporate rankings cannot lightly give their own view of Haryun Group.

The spirit goes out of them at the thought alone.

“They say he’s good-looking. I’d like to see the face~”

Jang Jiyu drew her long legs together to one side and crossed them, letting the curiosity show.

She is no different from anybody else in not treating a charity case as a person.

There are no charity cases among the third years at present.

The charity cases of that year all withdrew somewhere past the middle of the second year.

Charity case graduates at Cheonghwa can be counted on the fingers, so it is nothing to be surprised at.

Even having graduated, a charity case cannot attend the alumni gatherings.

Nor may he state, publicly or privately, that he is a Cheonghwa graduate.

And a charity case like that has turned overnight into Haryun Group blood.

“He’s been summoned, so he’ll be along.”

Another officer, opening his mouth in a leisurely way.

“You don’t consider the opposite?”

“The opposite? Surely not……. You mean he won’t come??”

Jang Jiyu asked it back and the officer who had spoken looked thrown.

“Hn……. That’s what my instinct says. Turn a school over the way he has today……. Would he come here quietly?”

Jang Jiyu held a smile at her mouth and looked at Kang Junu, who had ordered the officers assembled.

“……”

Kang Junu, eyes still shut, showing nothing whatever.

The face looked calm past all measure, and the two fists lowered under the table had force gathered hard in them.

“……”

Ha Tae-ung, not answering at once, having been called by name.

This fucking bastard!

Irritation surged up in Lee Jeongho.

Ha Tae-ung, who had put him in a bad mood from the first sight of him at the golf course.

He came in to school, checked, and found he was a charity case.

He had learned what the boy was and was about to tell his parents straight away, and then the contest with Maths Thug broke out.

Too much confirmed in a single morning, and Lee Jeongho was confused.

The board turned right over inside a few hours.

He could not bring himself to go near a Ha Tae-ung he had thought easy.

A charity case who had gone from an easy mark to a standing nobody can get near, all at once.

He had had his orders from a third-year officer of the Management Studies Society.

—Find Ha Tae-ung at once and bring him to the Management Studies Society.

An instruction he had no wish whatever to carry out, and one he cannot refuse.

An instruction from the student council president or from the Management Studies Society side is, in itself, an absolute command.

Nothing changes about that when school is over.

Groups of a similar size, perhaps. Against the children of the groups at the levels above, the head goes down every time.

And Lee Jeongho still wanted to keep his pride in front of Ha Tae-ung.

“What do you want?”

His cousin Lee Hyoju reacted first.

Snap!

Lee Hyoju, whose temper had already been put out by Kang Ari’s arrival.

The spark she had been holding in jumped onto Lee Jeongho.

“Keep out of it.”

“Keep out??”

Lee Jeongho pulled a face and threw it back coldly, on the irritation he had been pressing down.

“Ha Tae-ung!”

And in that moment Ha Tae-ung is looking straight at him, no expression on his face.

He shouted the charity case’s name again, harder.

The low ones are watching from every side.

Lee Jeongho cannot hide the heat coming up into his face.

If it had not been an order from a senior in the Management Studies Society he would never have done anything this humiliating.

“Mind your manners.”

“Whaat? My— my manners??”

At Ha Tae-ung’s one short line Lee Jeongho’s face went blank.

Has this bastard lost his mind!

At Cheonghwa, not just anybody has the liver for a provocation like that against Lee Jeongho, of Oyang Group’s direct line.

Leave out a bare handful and they all watch his face.

And here was Ha Tae-ung lecturing him as though he were somebody.

“He’s right. Manners are the thing you need to learn first.”

Lee Hyoju weighed in behind Ha Tae-ung.

The pair of them are out of their minds!

Lee Jeongho pressed down an anger fit to go off.

He must not let the temper out here.

What is certain is that Ha Tae-ung is not a charity case.

And there are far too many eyes watching.

“Ha Tae-ung! The president is calling for you.”

Holding the anger down once more, Lee Jeongho stated what he had come for.

“The president?”

“……!!”

Ha Tae-ung asked it back with the honorific left off.

“Are you mad! Who talks about the president like that?”

Lee Jeongho shouted it in real alarm.

Kang Junu, the society president, is precisely the man every pupil at Cheonghwa must bow the head to wherever they meet him.

Ilseong is on his mother’s side, and being the only son of the house he is a man who will inherit Ilseong Group shares.

“I’m his hyung, though?”

“Wh— what did you say?”

“Kh……”

Kang Ari, watching it happen, could not hold it in and laughed.

“You……”

Lee Jeongho shot a look at Kang Ari, put force into both eyes, and ground his teeth.

Anybody looking at the board as it stood could see Lee Jeongho had lost it.

And.

Tap.

Ha Tae-ung sets his spoon down on the table.

And wipes his mouth with a napkin.

The movement of a man with room to spare, neither slow nor quick.

Ha Tae-ung moved, and every eye in the place went to the table for six.

Everybody knew that the man who had summoned Ha Tae-ung was Kang Junu, the real crown prince of the third year.

And now the crown prince of the second year, only just risen, is moving.

A war has broken out, and you do not have to watch to know it.

He sent a proxy in and started a contest of force.

Ha Tae-ung got up from his seat and looked Lee Jeongho straight in the eye.

This bastard…… those eyes……

Ha Tae-ung’s indifferent eyes, like standing over a deep well, were——

“Tell the president.”

“……??”

“If he’s got something to say, come himself.”

“Whaaat??”

(End of Chapter 66)