“N— nonsense? Harvest?”

The words drove into her ear and Oh Seora looked over, at a loss. The boy who came into her view was——

Ha Tae-ung?

Oh Seora’s only purpose in coming to the canteen is Park Jiung. It’s free time in which she can work on him.

Midterms are coming. The stress has been piling up already.

If she can’t let some of it off here and there she’ll lose her mind.

Park Jiung at least made a serviceable bin to pour it into.

So today she’d been carrying on the routine as usual.

She hadn’t needed to check the room first.

There isn’t a soul in the school as easy as Park Jiung.

Only the charity cases served as the outlet, the ones you could void your feelings into.

The boys in particular could take it. The girls usually withdrew before the first term of first year was out, and indifference alone was enough to do it.

Park Jiung was easy and could take a great deal, which made him better suited than most as an emotional bin.

The urge to break the ones who endure only worked on her harder.

And Park Jiung’s marks are respectable on top of it.

No private tutoring behind him, and he never drops out of the top band.

Oh Seora’s father is a Gangnam property millionaire.

To a girl who lacked nothing material, Park Jiung was an object of reflexive contempt.

The school treated her as new money and never discussed it. Nobody said it to her face and she could feel it anyway.

Park Jiung’s eyes behind his glasses are always indifferent.

The stubbornness that let him swallow every insult wasn’t impressive to her. It was contemptible.

Like a weed that lifts its head again after being trodden flat.

Lately the steady work had begun to show results.

She could see the cracks running through him.

A little more pressure and he’d put both hands up and withdraw.

And with a moment that important right in front of her, Ha Tae-ung had cut in.

She’d been so focused on Park Jiung that Ha Tae-ung had slipped past her. She’d forgotten he existed at all.

“The three ugly musketeers. Good to see you all like this.”

“……!!”

“U— ugly?”

“Hey! Ha Tae-ung!”

Yang Mijin and Kim Minji, Oh Seora’s hangers-on, raised their eyes and shouted it.

“Don’t you own mirrors? You can plough the faces over and do what you like with them, but those big heads and short legs aren’t going anywhere.”

Ha Tae-ung answers from his seat with an unpleasant smile on.

A shudder.

The colour came up hot in all three faces. Everybody knew it and nobody had ever put it into words.

The three of them had a thing in common. They’d nagged their parents early and been admitted to the ranks of surgical beauty.

None of them could have equipped beauty on their parents’ genes alone.

Fortunately modern surgical technique delivered beyond anything they’d hoped for.

Even the impossible areas could be made beautiful now.

The problem was exactly what Ha Tae-ung said. Large heads and short legs.

They’d badly wanted limb lengthening as well.

The risk was too high and their parents wouldn’t have it. Somehow Ha Tae-ung had found precisely that and pressed salt into it.

“Hey! Fucking Ha Tae-ung!”

“Where does this son of a bitch get off talking nonsense?”

“You half-witted charity case bastard. You want to die?”

Without anyone going first, all three of them poured it out.

Their eyes alone looked ready to tear him into strips.

“I don’t suppose surgery does anything for that raving temper either? Shame. Tsk.”

And there Ha Tae-ung crossed a line. He hadn’t blinked once through the whole collective barrage.

“You……. Don’t you know who we are?”

Oh Seora, who leads the three, dropped her voice. Something like cold frost settled into her eyes.

“I know exactly. Oh Seora, second year, class one. And her two hangers-on.”

“Who do you think you are? Why are you stepping in? Am I an easy mark?”

“Yeah. Bloody easy.”

“What?”

Steam came off the top of Oh Seora’s head.

This mad bastard.

Ha Tae-ung had definitely taken something today. She’d noticed him a few times herself.

Not that she’d been interested. The height and the face that beat a model’s had simply caught her eye.

Being a charity case was something of a waste. With any other background he’d have been more than the most popular boy in the school.

The odd part was that his air was slightly different from the other charity cases’.

From where Oh Seora stood, there was a sense of a species on a level above her own.

She couldn’t place him and it made her uneasy, so she’d settled on Park Jiung instead. Oh Gwangjun had marked Ha Tae-ung.

And today it had blown up.

Ha Tae-ung, who had been taking it from Oh Gwangjun no less than Park Jiung did. He’d put that same Oh Gwangjun on the floor.

The rumour was true. And he’d stepped into Park Jiung’s business.

However she read it, the current in the room was running differently.

Why are the peasants acting up? Have they been eating rat poison?

Oh Seora’s anger climbed higher.

Park Jiung on his own is easy. With Ha Tae-ung cutting in, the whole thing had gone strange.

“Is Oh Seora getting torn into right now?”

“Ha Tae-ung’s going way too far today.”

Murmuring.

A canteen with no third years in it. The mixed gazes of every first and second year in the room converged on one point.

“Don’t tell me you think Jiung and I are lower forms of life? That thought of yours is very wrong.”

“……!!”

“It’s vulgar.”

Ha Tae-ung had gone straight through her.

Thud, thud.

Her heart bolted.

I can’t back down here.

Oh Seora looked straight at him and bit down on her lip.

She could not have it said that a charity case had pushed her back.

If the rumour ran the way Oh Gwangjun’s had, her position got worse.

It might even become difficult to keep attending this school.

“Ha Tae-ung……. I’m warning you. If you want a diploma out of this at least, don’t interfere from this moment on.”

Oh Seora delivered the warning as calmly as she was able. But——

“Oh Seora. Now, now. Give over.”

“……!!”

A phrase Oh Seora despises above all others. And it came out of Ha Tae-ung’s mouth.

“Son of a bitch!”

Her eyes turned over in an instant.

Crack!

In the blink of an eye she struck him hard across the face.

“Hah!”

“Did she— did she just hit him?”

A powerful slap out of Oh Seora that nobody had seen coming. The canteen was swept up in shock at once.

Violence in broad daylight, inside a canteen with classmates watching. The first such incident since Cheonghwa opened its doors.

“Jiung.”

Struck across the face, Ha Tae-ung called him. His eyes are smiling and cold and there’s a chill running under them.

“Wh— what?”

Caught off guard, Park Jiung answered.

“Are you going to endure it?”

“……??”

“I’m not.”

Shff.

Having said it, Ha Tae-ung stood quietly up.

Oh Seora, who had slapped a seated Ha Tae-ung, stands somewhere around a hundred and sixty.

On his feet, Ha Tae-ung looked down at her and faced her.

“I don’t hit women. But……. Animals are the exception.”

The words were barely out of him.

Craaaack!

Crash!

“Aaaaagh!”

“S— Seora!”

The instant his palm reached her cheek. She staggered, was driven back several steps, and hit the next table hard.

Exactly one blow.

“…….”

The canteen sank into silence. Then Ha Tae-ung swept the room with an indifferent look.

Most of them avoided his eyes and turned their heads away.

“Jiung.”

“……. Yeah.”

“Do you want to spend your whole life as a mug?”

“……. No.”

“Then bite.”

“……??”

“If they come at you like a dog, you bite. Don’t swallow it — get your teeth into the throat.”

Ha Tae-ung’s voice was a voice declaring open battle. Neither loud nor quiet, it rang heavy through Park Jiung’s chest.

“Hff……. Waaaaaaah!”

Struck and fallen, Oh Seora burst into tears like a small child. Part of a clear handprint showed on the cheek she had covered.

“And the ill-mannered dogs especially. Bite those ones properly.”

Ha Tae-ung glared at Oh Seora while he said it to Park Jiung.

“…….”

The canteen was still dead silent.

The only movement came from the kitchen, where they were still cooking. The noise in there had kept them from noticing anything outside it.

Students watching it all without a word.

His warning drove into their ears, savage with intent.

“Friend.”

Ha Tae-ung looked straight at Park Jiung and called to him. And then.

“This life, be a proper prosecutor.”

A statement with nothing whatsoever to do with the situation in front of them.

“Carry on like this and what are you going to be but a thug?”

“…….”

And in that moment.

“Kh!”

Laughter broke out among the watching crowd. A noise that split the quiet open.

Every eye in the room turned toward the source.

Against everything I intended, this has got far too big. A brief incident over lunch has grown beyond any handling.

All I’d meant to do was apply myself honestly to a school dinner.

The environment didn’t permit it.

I watched Park Jiung taking it and I cut in. It was the danger level of the colour coming off him.

A dark red that stands for death, mixed with a bright indigo. Split half and half across his whole body.

The two kept blending and shifting, and I couldn’t sit and watch that.

The one charity-case classmate left in the school. That wasn’t the only reason.

Something came back to me from about a year before I was returned to this point. An enormous case that put the whole country in an uproar.

It turned the country upside down.

The grotesque murders, and the murders ordered, by an MZ-generation gang boss.

A gang boss who set up coin and stock tip rooms and pocketed a colossal criminal income.

Once arrested, the MZ boss was found to have brutally killed a provincial deputy chief prosecutor, a senior police officer, and the head of a rival organisation working out of Seoul.

And the larger issue became the run of disappearances and deaths among Cheonghwa alumni who had been at school in the same years as him.

There were far too many for coincidence. It hadn’t stopped at one or two. It reached a dozen or more.

The MZ boss was named as a subject of the investigation and there was no evidence.

He ran a large scrapyard, and the circumstances left plenty of room for suspicion, and in the end nothing was ever found.

There were tips about how the organisation disposed of things, and not a trace of any of it turned up.

The thread that finally unravelled the case was the betrayal of a subordinate the boss had favoured.

Without the man who went to the prosecutors for protection and turned on him, none of it would ever have come out.

That is how completely the killings and every piece of physical evidence had been handled.

And the man at the centre of that case, the MZ gang boss——

is Park Jiung. The boy who was sitting in front of me taking it from Oh Seora and her lackeys.

“Kh!”

I am, right now, salvaging a man who is going to become a murderer.

And at a moment that important, laughter cutting straight through it.

From the sound of it I can tell they tried to hold it in.

But the quiet in the canteen made it far too clear.

I turned my head and looked toward it.

One person, sitting over by the wide window.

“Kang Ari……”

(End of Chapter 11)