“……!!”

A girl with her lips clamped shut and her teeth set, thrown by the laugh that had got out of her anyway. Her eyes went round and her hand came up fast over her mouth.

Too late.

Every student in the silent canteen turned toward her.

Not an appropriate reaction to a charity case in revolt. The looks were all checking who had the nerve to laugh at a thing like this.

“Kang Ari?”

“Ari??”

She’s one of Cheonghwa’s famous names. A cellist who took the top performer’s prize at the Pablo Casals competition last year.

Outstanding at it, and born with the face as well.

More students know her as one of Cheonghwa’s three great beauties than for anything else.

A bob suits her, and unusually large eyes are the thing everyone notices.

With every eye in the room arriving on her at once, the colour came up in her face.

Kang Ari turns out to be easily embarrassed, and looked exactly like any ordinary schoolgirl.

I must be out of my mind.

She regretted it immediately. Out of everything the canteen offers she takes only the organic salad.

Letting the sudden battle take her attention had been the mistake. She got absorbed in it and stopped accounting for where she was.

It was the first act of violence she had ever witnessed.

She’d been raised as gold and jade from the day she was born.

She had never seen a savage argument between students either. The school forbids it thoroughly, which made it rarer still.

The kind of lurid drama she’d only ever heard described. And she’d watched it play out in front of her, in every detail.

The language they traded was extraordinary to her before anything else. Dog. Bite. Mug. Words like that.

Oh Seora, a vicious little colt even Kang Ari knew something about. One slap and she was bawling like an infant.

The truth is that sight was what set Kang Ari off.

Something in her felt satisfied by it. A catharsis, like watching someone land one on the villain.

The laugh came up and she held it down well. She meant to hold it all the way and it broke out of her regardless.

She couldn’t keep it in.

“What are you looking at?”

With Kang Ari flustered and unable to do anything about it, An Aram beside her shouted it for her. An Aram appointed herself Kang Ari’s bodyguard some time ago.

She glared around the room as though something was about to go off in it.

Her build is considerable. Powerful enough that nobody would come at her without thinking first.

An Aram sticks to Kang Ari and doesn’t come off. The two of them have carried the connection from kindergarten through to Cheonghwa.

The rumour is that An Aram is the daughter of the butler who runs the Kang household.

She’s in the judo club of Cheonghwa’s athletics faculty. A silver medallist in the high school division at the National Sports Festival, as well.

“Aram, don’t……. It was my fault.”

Kang Ari hurriedly checked An Aram, who was shouting as though she meant to get up.

The truth was that admitting it early was better. What she’d done had not been appropriate.

For the people involved it was plainly a serious situation.

“What fault? That rude little thing ran her mouth and got hit for it. It is funny.”

An Aram looked coldly across at Oh Seora, sitting on the canteen floor crying.

The arts and athletics faculty is in a different building, so they’d never crossed paths. She’d heard plenty about Oh Seora’s reputation regardless.

A girl with Gangnam new money for parents and no manners on top of it.

Even this business is trouble she brought down on herself.

“…….”

Nobody argued with An Aram.

“Hff……. You two! I am not leaving this.”

Wiping the tears off with the back of her hand, Oh Seora let the venom show. She couldn’t swallow it down and stood there breathing hard.

Reflection appears to be absent from her dictionary.

Shff.

Then Park Jiung stood up.

A step.

He walked over and stood beside the fallen Oh Seora. And then.

Pouring.

It happened in an instant. Park Jiung tipped what was left on his plate over her head.

“Hah!”

“That’s insane……”

“They’ve all lost their minds……”

Oh Seora had only just wiped her face clean of tears. A moment later it was a mess of food.

“You— you……”

Shocked by something she couldn’t believe, Oh Seora shook where she sat. She couldn’t accept that this had happened to her.

An ordinary morning arriving at school. An ordinary lunch hour. She’d gone over to Park Jiung to work off a bit of stress, the way she did every day.

And she is standing in the worst situation she has ever been in.

“Pull that once more……. and you could disappear off the face of the world. I’ll make it happen, and I won’t be choosy about method or means.”

Park Jiung delivered the warning in a voice with nothing in it at all.

“…….”

A look on Park Jiung’s face like a reaper’s, seen for the first time. Their eyes met, the strength went out of her knees, and she shut her mouth.

There is nothing empty about Park Jiung’s eyes.

It’s the look of a warning that says he really will kill her if she pushes it once more.

“S— Seora……”

“Let’s get to the classroom……”

The hangers-on brushed the food off her head with their hands, hurrying at it.

Then they got her up off the floor.

They dragged the shaking, unsettled Oh Seora out of the canteen fast.

“…….”

A genuinely quiet canteen, today of all days.

“Friend. Let’s eat. Properly.”

Ha Tae-ung behaved as though nothing whatsoever had occurred.

“Right. Let’s eat……. Properly.”

Park Jiung’s response was unexpected too. He gave a smile nobody had seen on him before.

Transformed inside barely ten minutes. A man’s life was turning over, exactly like that.

Turning point.

Something Ha Tae-ung said seems to have woken something in him. From here on, whoever treats him unfairly without cause, he looks ready to bite.

Park Jiung had made that promise to himself. His heart hammered as though it were telling him it was alive.

The heart that had been stifled and heavy in him felt light beyond measure.

School life that had been suffocating him before he even walked through the gates.

It had pressed down on every one of his days like a stone. And today the stone shattered.

And the result of it——

“You two.”

A boy and a girl rose from one corner of the canteen and called them.

“Those are student council officers.”

“That’s Han Yubin, from discipline……”

“Those two…… are finished.”

The quiet students all started whispering at once.

Unlike an ordinary school’s, Cheonghwa’s student council is granted considerable authority. And these were two of its senior officers.

Headed by a council president, with two vice presidents beneath, and departments running to discipline, budget and planning, culture and arts, sport and health, information, community service, careers, welfare, and more besides.

The structure and the responsibilities go well past what any ordinary student council carries.

It looks as though the whole student body elects the president.

In fact the work of becoming a council member starts long before that, underwater, among the parents.

As most students know perfectly well, it’s all settled in advance and elected afterward.

Graduated officers pull from the front and the baton changes hands that way.

The title of Cheonghwa council officer has considerable use in it.

That one line on a record earns a man a qualification to eat for the rest of his life once he enters the world.

Cheonghwa parents understand this, and they start moving before their children are even enrolled.

Eyes alight, they run every lobby there is to get a child onto the council.

It takes the form of a student vote, and in the end you serve only with the parents’ association’s approval.

If your family isn’t a name in politics or business, don’t so much as dream of it.

You need at least a chaebol-level house behind you to become president.

Vice president goes to students whose parents are near-chaebol, or a prime minister, a multi-term legislator, a Supreme Court justice.

Which means the department head line can hardly be modest either.

Those seats go to the children of chief prosecutors, presiding judges of the high court, government ministers, directors of general hospitals.

Becoming a council officer is itself a guarantee of social standing.

It amounts to a rehearsal for adult life, run before anyone has to enter it.

A system that teaches the management and command of people from school onward.

And the outfit carrying the most weight anywhere in that structure is the discipline department.

Even allowing that Cheonghwa’s students come from formidable houses themselves, most of them have to tuck their tails in front of discipline.

In practice they exercise a sharper authority than the teaching staff do.

The moment that department marks a student, walking out with a diploma intact becomes difficult.

And if violence occurs on school grounds, it’s over.

Han Yubin, second year, currently heads that formidable department.

Her grandfather was Prosecutor General. Her father is currently a presiding judge at Seoul High Court.

In a word, a house with weight in the legal world.

Han Yubin’s expression is cold.

Han Yubin, who goes by the cold-blooded witch, looks at the pair of them hard.

Waved hair down past her chest, glossy with it.

Large eyes and fine features from a mother who used to be a broadcaster. Standing still, she gives off breeding.

A stubborn set to the mouth, the kind you could stab without drawing a drop. That one is her father’s.

The two eyes glaring out are past colder than ice and into something with an edge on it.

Violence by charity cases, witnessed directly, right in front of her.

A serious incident, and not one had broken in her entire tenure as head of discipline.

“Come to the council room after class.”

The summons landed as expected. Not an incident anybody could simply let go.

Ordinary Cheonghwa students might have had it smoothed over.

But these two came in on the charity-case intake.

With no patron of any kind standing behind them, the problem could grow considerably larger.

Han Yubin knows about Oh Seora, and knows well enough.

To peel the property-nouveau-riche label off herself, Oh Seora’s mother had been pouring her energy into the parents’ association.

Whenever there was an association day, she featured in whatever Han Yubin’s mother unloaded at home about it.

Turns up wrapped in designer from head to foot and still manages to look cheap.

Below standard enough that the parents who attended talked behind her back without ever saying it to her face.

Nothing good comes of today’s canteen business getting out beyond the school. The place gets noisy for nothing. That much is obvious.

She had a duty to establish what had happened before it spread any further.

A workable story has to be built and the next step prepared for. There were a great many eyes on that scene.

Before the students go home, most of the parents will know about this.

Above all, Han Yubin did not want a stain on her record as a council officer.

“Don’t want to.”

Han Yubin doubted her own hearing. An answer of such insolence that it drove into her mind and broke her judgement apart.

One of the two. Ha Tae-ung, second year, charity case. Even Han Yubin knew who he was — he has height and a face well beyond any other boy in the school.

And that Ha Tae-ung——

“What? You don’t want to?”

Han Yubin checked it a second time. A situation in which ordinary students would have dropped their tails on the spot.

This is the authority of the council’s discipline department, which even the teaching staff concede a step to.

“Yeah. Don’t want to.”

Ha Tae-ung expressed his refusal a second time.

A tremble.

Han Yubin felt a hot ball of fire climb out of her chest and into her throat.

An anger she had never felt in her life took hold of her entire body.

What angered her further was the insolence of him.

He had dared to refuse a summons from the head of discipline, and provoked her head-on doing it.

Defiance, with a great many students watching.

And from a charity case, of all things.

“Hey! Ha Tae-ung!”

Han Yubin’s roar rang the length of the canteen.

(End of Chapter 12)