“Sunbaes! You’ve arrived!”

We went up the hill out back through the gap where the wall had crumbled.

At lunch the school gate was left open on the honor system, so the teachers didn’t pay it any mind.

It was the city’s school for goody-goodies, more or less, so up to now there had never been any real trouble.

But the teachers didn’t know.

That a poisonous mushroom grows just fine anywhere, so long as it has spores.

And a line of young poison-mushroom bastards stood waiting.

Somebody must have called them — a good ten of them had swarmed up there.

One look and the play was obvious: push us over with numbers.

“Tae-san…”

“Haah.”

The guys who had come along out of that so-called loyalty (?) sighed.

Somewhere in a corner of their hearts they probably wanted to run for it more than anything in the world.

But what could they do. The bastard had already caught on and come up behind us to close the circle.

“Get a good shot.”

“O-okay.”

I wasn’t the me of the past anymore.

I handed the cell phone I’d bought to Do-jung.

I showed him how to shoot video with it.

“My beloved juniors, I’m sorry. Thanks to these rude little shits you’re missing lunch and having a rough time.”

“Not at all, sunbae!”

The bastard bared his teeth and showed off his numbers.

This wasn’t the eighties, and the junior bastards still bent their heads a full ninety degrees.

Straight out of the sticks.

“All right. Tonight your hyung‘s buying you a drink. All of you look forward to it. I’ll call some cute girls too.”

“Thank you!”

“We love you, sunbae!”

High schoolers, and it’s booze? Girls? What a fine starting line.

The video was already rolling.

The guys quietly closed in around Do-jung and helped him film.

My friends’ low cunning was alive and well even back then.

“Hong Seong-hyeon. I’m going to ask you straight out.”

“Ask? Heh heh heh. Look at this shit acting all cool. Fine, I’ll grant you one wish. Ask.”

“Why do you torment me and the others when we can’t fight back? We’re friends, aren’t we?”

I threw out the model question.

I acted the textbook goody-goody, for anyone watching.

The reason was obvious without hearing it.

But I had to hear it from him and get it on the recording.

“Ohhh, plenty of reasons. I hate that broke little shits go to the same school as me. I hate that broke little shits reek of the kimchi they shoveled down at breakfast. I hate watching dumb little shits grind their rock heads. I just hate looking at pathetic little shits, period.”

Okay! On-scene evidence, very nice!

That bastard’s character really was garbage, though.

A goddamn Siberian landfill of a bastard!

“But we’re still friends. Using violence on friends and taking their money isn’t right. Your father, Attorney Hong Jang-hyeok, may be a big-shot city councilman, but if he found out about this he wouldn’t just let it go, would he? For your father’s sake, if nothing else, you can’t do this!”

I leaned hard on the bastard’s father’s name and occupation.

At the same time, righteous speeches came pouring out of my mouth, string after string.

“My father? Pfahahaha. Look at you lying there worrying about garbage. Mind your own business, you shit. My father told me himself. Pathetic little shits have to be stepped on nice and steady or they’ll lift their heads up again.”

Ah! Look at that lowborn bastard’s family tradition.

A son of a bitch worthy of that daddy of his.

“So that’s how you beat up seniors and classmates and walked away clean? On your father’s pull?”

Evidence collection continued.

“Obviously. My father’s friend is the son of our school’s board chairman, and he’s the head of the administrative office. Toss a little pocket change at it and just about anything gets handled.”

Oh? Is that so? Now this is scoop material.

My friends’ faces rotted as they listened.

They had just seen one face of a filthy world.

Once you’re out in the working world it’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, but not yet.

There was nothing good in it for my friends to hear more.

Here I threw on one more pinch of seasoning.

“Let the others go. They haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Plenty wrong. Where do loser shits get off talking back! I’ll use this chance to wreck them properly and teach them. So they never mouth off again.”

A shame, Hong Seong-hyeon.

I’ll say an Amen and an Amitabha for you in advance too.

“I’ll apologize. Let them go.”

The performance continued.

“What? Apologize? Has this psycho lost his mind. You’re apologizing? Here? Crazy bastard.”

Not knowing he was caught in the web, the bastard scowled.

A damn fool.

“I’ll give you money, like always.”

Time to add physical evidence.

The more airtight evidence there was, the more useful it would be.

“Money? Heh heh. Nice! Hand over a hundred thousand won and I’ll forgive you clean.”

“…This is my whole month’s allowance, bus fare included, that my parents sweated blood to earn and give me.”

Playing cowed, I pulled a hundred thousand won out of my pants.

I let the lines spill out, long and detailed, about how it was allowance my parents had given me.

Do-jung filmed the whole thing crisply.

The cell phone showed through a hole in his uniform pants.

If today wrapped up well, I figured I’d have to buy him a pair of pants.

“I’m sorry, again. Let them go.”

I stepped up to the bastard and handed over the money.

I put a tremble in my hand, too, the very peak of pitiful.

I set myself where the camera would catch it clean.

The angle was really good.

“Ohh! This shit. You’ve got money, huh? More than usual? Heh heh heh.”

The bastard smiled a rank little smile.

The stupid bastard had drunk from the poisoned chalice.

This right here is karma.

Whenever he was bored the bastard squeezed money out of the other kids.

He went around every classroom collecting from the easy marks.

It wasn’t a formal shakedown.

He’d picked something up somewhere, so he always attached the line about borrowing it and paying it back soon.

But he said he was borrowing and never paid back.

Even if you reported him, he’d say sorry and hand it back and that was that.

He’d probably gotten advice from his lawyer dad.

Today, though, he was caught properly.

Taking money under the threat of violence was solid evidence.

Anybody looking at this would call it a real shakedown.

“Now let them go.”

“Heh heh heh.”

The bastard took the money and his eyes went yellow.

A mean, low laugh came with it.

Smack!

My cheek burned.

“Aaagh!”

I let the scream burst out as if I’d been waiting for it.

Just as expected, the son of a bitch’s hand had smashed into my cheek.

Aw. Sonuva…

I’d taken it knowing it was coming, and it still felt like shit.

I bit my lip lightly and bled blood that hadn’t been there.

I was at the point of admiring my own acting.

I turned my head and looked at Do-jung.

I nodded.

It was the signal to cut the video.

Evidence footage like this was more than enough and then some.

There was no need to hold back anymore.

Crunch.

I rolled my neck loose.

I stroked my cheek and twisted my face up hard.

“Heeey, Hong Seong-hyeon.”

I called out to the bastard, who wore the satisfied look of a man who had just done violence.

I swiped the blood at the corner of my mouth.

I smeared it on my uniform.

More evidence secured.

At a crime scene nothing matters more than evidence.

“What? Hey?”

“You worm of a bastard. If the ancestors of the Hong clan saw you they’d beat the ground and weep. For the sin of producing the greatest son of a bitch under heaven as a descendant.”

I smirked and needled him.

“Has this shit gone insane trying to die! Shut your damn mouth!”

The bastard went blind with rage.

A bastard who’d lived his whole life like nobody else existed had probably never heard cursing like that.

“Eat it, you damn fool.”

Ah! Cursing was this satisfying.

After I started college I could never let curses like that out as freely.

I put up my middle finger and served it to him, nice and polite.

“You little fucker!”

Whip.

The fist I’d been waiting for came flying fast at my face.

A punch with no mercy in it.

And a cowardly one, aimed at the eye.

It was what he always did.

I drove my own fist straight into the bastard’s incoming punch.

Krrrack!

Somewhere in the traded fists came a violent sound of bone giving way.

Sorry.

I failed to control my internal energy.

“Guaaaaaaaaagh!”

The pain arrived late and the bastard screamed like a madman.

He hopped up and down on the ground.

Too bad, but eating with his right hand was going to be hard for a while.

As a bonus, cleaning up in the bathroom was going to be a left-handed job.

It was a perfect case of self-defense.

I’m not an idiot.

I’m a man who once studied for the bar exam.

I used my fists strictly inside the line where the law had no choice but to protect me.

“Wh-what the hell is that bastard!”

“Hey! What are you all doing! Wreck those sons of bitches!!!”

“Seniors or not, stomp them!”

At the shout of a punk named Mun-cheol, a friend of the Hong bastard, the first-years came running like a pack of dogs.

Fine. Let’s finish fast and have Choco Pies for a snack.

They trusted in numbers and came charging at me in a wave, and I ran to meet them.

Fwoooosh.

Fists and feet came flying, whip, whip.

And each time, lightly, with my fist…

Thwack! Crackle-crack.

One hit per bastard, exactly placed.

Bastards who put their faith in nothing but the textbook of the group beatdown have no way of handling a man who has actually trained in martial arts.

I was a beginner at the Taegeuk Five Elements Dual Intent Fist, but it was more than these raw wannabe punks deserved.

“Aaaaaagh!”

The sound of bones breaking and the screams burst out all at once.

“Agh! Aaaaagh!”

Screams danced in every direction.

The beaten bastards grabbed their legs or clutched their fists.

These damn fools have been playing the tough guy all this time with cotton-batting fists like that?

Smaaack. Smack!

A chance like today would be hard to catch again.

I laid slaps across the flinching bastards to my heart’s content.

It cleared out everything inside me.

“Waaaaaah! Sunbae! P-please stop hitting us!”

“I-it huuuuuuurts!”

“Waaaaaaaah!”

Beating other people was fine, but the pain in their own bodies had them making a scene.

“…”

In an instant the charging background extras were gone.

The first-year high schoolers left standing, punks in training, panicked.

Their instincts were downright uncanny.

With Hong Seong-hyeon crawling on the ground and his friends screaming, every one of them shrank.

Haah. My last life, made miserable by gutless bastards like these, was such a waste.

“What are you looking at. Bastards. On your knees!!!”

The remaining bastards dropped to their knees in a hurry.

Suddenly acting like gentle lambs, the little hypocrites.

“J-Jang Tae-san, you shit. You think you’ll walk away from this…”

I turned my head to the side.

SMAAACK!

And I laid a clean one across the cheek of Mun-cheol, whose mouth was still flapping.

“Aaaaaagh!”

That scream was in a class of its own.

The Mun-cheol bastard took the slap and went sliding and rolling across the ground.

Corn kernels came pattering out. (TL Note: 옥수수, “corn,” is Korean slang for teeth knocked loose in a fight.)

That bastard wasn’t going to be eating like a normal person for a while either.

“Don’t make me say it twice. Before you get beaten worse.”

I threw out a line Hong Seong-hyeon liked to use.

I’d really wanted to try that one.

The second my words were out, the little shits knelt on the ground and bowed their heads.

Fear rippled in their eyes.

Right — like the bastard said, when you wreck someone you have to stomp them properly.

“Khh… you son of a bitch… I’ll kill you! You think my dad’s going to let this go!!!”

Wow. He hadn’t been beaten enough yet, so he was calling for his dad.

Hong Seong-hyeon was a sight.

He clutched his broken hand and leaked tears and snot.

Getting beaten by a bastard like that in the past was humiliating.

“Right? It’d be a shame to end it here, wouldn’t it? When there’s still a final boss called Dad. Do-jung. Hand me the phone.”

“Huh? Uh.”

Do-jung and the rest of my friends looked at me like I was a monster.

Don’t worry, bastards.

I don’t beat up friends.

The me they used to hang around with, with no strength and nobody behind him, must have looked alien to them now.

Beep beep beep.

I took the phone and pressed the number every citizen of the Republic of Korea knows.

And then…

I put a very urgent voice on.

“I-is this 112? A large-scale school violence incident has occurred here! The location is the hill behind Jangju High School! About twenty people are hurt, including me! Send 119 too, and c-c-come quickly!!!” (TL Note: 112 is the Korean police emergency line and 119 is the fire and ambulance line — the two numbers every Korean knows.)

I poured gasoline all over the incident, for real this time, and let it gush.

(End of Chapter 14)