“We’re in a lesson. Why do I have to go out?”

“What— why?”

Park Donggeun. PE teacher, second year head of year, responsible for student discipline.

Ha Tae-ung’s answer left him at a loss for a moment.

He’d been called into the principal’s office right before coming here and thoroughly taken apart.

There had already been a rumour that morning about a violent incident in one of the classrooms.

And then another one broke at lunch, in the canteen.

A girl beaten by two boys. And food waste tipped over her on top of it.

And the perpetrators were charity cases, of all people.

A thing that could not be allowed to happen had happened.

If it had occurred between ordinary students, the proper course would have been to follow procedure.

Charity cases are the exception to that procedure.

He’d heard the whole account of it in the principal’s office.

Being taken apart was one thing. This was something he could not permit.

He’d been given the instruction to fetch Ha Tae-ung and had come straight up.

“Sir, you’re currently infringing my right to learn.”

“Your— your right to learn?”

Park Donggeun’s mind went foggy and his jaw dropped open.

Ha Tae-ung is a student he knows perfectly well.

Unusually tall, and a face that stands out more than most.

And nothing more than a charity-case admission.

To Park Donggeun — short, unremarkable to look at, unmarried well past the age for it — the boy grated more than the others did.

On days when his mood was poor he would sometimes use a lesson as cover to work on him.

Setting up for PE was always left to Ha Tae-ung. Which never once translated into extra marks.

He’d find fault for no reason and kill off any expectation of credit.

However clever they are, a child from a house with nothing shows it.

And every time, the boy’s spirit would go out of him and his head would come down.

Today, something about the way Ha Tae-ung is carrying himself is different.

Shoulders that ought to be hunched are square and open.

Neck stiff and straight, and he’d looked Park Donggeun in the eye and asked with something like confidence.

“What right to learn does a thug have? Get outside. Now.”

Park Donggeun rode his usual momentum and roared it.

He’d just been dressed down in the principal’s office over failing to manage his students.

Unlike the teachers here who came out of the capital’s elite universities, Park Donggeun came out of a provincial PE department.

If he had a single weak point, that was all of it. Which was purely his own assessment, of course.

He’d joined Cheonghwa on a word from a relative who had been an executive at Cheonghwa Group.

He never had the academic record to become a teacher at a school like this. Being a PE teacher, the parents had been willing to half close their eyes.

Park Donggeun’s flattery, above all, had been honed to something like enlightenment.

He handled every single parents’ association officer the way a man handles a workplace superior.

He took charge, unasked, of every unpleasant business large and small that arose on the grounds.

He quietly took over night duties that had been assigned to others.

What mattered to Park Donggeun was the title. Teacher at Cheonghwa High School.

An honourable position, and one teachers at other schools envied.

In Gangnam the fact alone functioned as a calling card.

And how carefully he had managed that card. Managed until the palms wore thin, right up to this day, and now a hairline crack had run through it.

Charity cases had dared to disregard Park Donggeun and provoke him. Violence against ordinary Cheonghwa students is unforgivable.

And the daughter of a parent who occasionally pressed gifts on him, at that.

Word was going round that the woman would be a parents’ association officer before long.

“Are you able to take responsibility for this?”

“Responsibility? Yes, I’ll take responsibility. Stop talking and get out here.”

At the force in it Ha Tae-ung rose from his seat.

He moved toward the back door of the classroom with his phone still in his hand.

“Leave the phone.”

“No.”

“No?”

“It’s currently recording. I intend to submit it as evidence when I bring proceedings.”

“……”

Frost seemed to come down over the room and the silence took hold. At the word proceedings, Park Donggeun swallowed on a dry throat.

Looking at the situation as it stood, it was a teacher infringing a student’s right to learn.

But.

A charity case bringing proceedings.

Park Donggeun shook his head hard and opened his eyes wide. He reminded himself this wasn’t an ordinary school, and dismissed it.

Anybody can bring proceedings, can they.

Every charity-case admission has finances in the same wretched state. It’s written into the conditions of the intake.

Retaining a lawyer isn’t something those households could dream of.

Trudge, trudge.

Ha Tae-ung’s walk was confident.

“Teacher Oh, my apologies. Please continue.”

Park Donggeun watched Ha Tae-ung come out through the back door.

He drew the classroom door quietly closed as he said it.

“Yes……”

Oh Jeonghye, who teaches the maths class, answered with her lip between her teeth.

Charity case or not, Ha Tae-ung’s conduct in her lessons had been exemplary.

She was worried in a way she hadn’t been on other occasions.

“Where are we going?”

“The principal’s office, boy.”

She had never seen a situation like this. From the atmosphere it looked as though the thing would grow.

Including the atmosphere in a classroom that still had a lesson to get through.

“He’s getting expelled. Heh heh heh.”

“Whoa……. He’s confident right to the end.”

“Ha Tae-ung’s on something today.”

“That’s enough. No talk without any basis to it.”

Oh Jeonghye quieted the children saying whatever came into their heads.

Friday afternoon, the sixth of May, 2022. A lesson in progress.

Cheonghwa High School was being drawn quietly into a storm.

“Filthy little bastard. You hear a teacher speak and it’s dog slop to you?”

Trailing a few steps behind and pouring abuse into the back of my head. Teacher Park. No — the pathetic little man.

He may be a PE teacher who parachuted in, and there isn’t a scrap of breeding in his mouth.

Park Donggeun. No ability and no character to go with it. He got lucky and ended up holding a Cheonghwa teaching card.

Back in that time.

The man who set out deliberately to find fault and work on me every PE lesson there was.

Setting out the shared equipment for each class and putting it away again all fell to me alone.

It was plainly unjust treatment even then, and I bore it in silence. That was how you survived.

All I wanted back then was to be allowed to graduate. From today, that’s finished.

“I told you it’s recording.”

One of the good things about Cheonghwa is that carrying a phone is unrestricted.

The rules are strict, so phones aren’t permitted during lessons. And no student uses one on the quiet either.

“Recording? And what exactly can somebody like you do with that?”

“Wait and you’ll find out.”

“Where does a charity case get the nerve to bluff?”

“Heh.”

There’s no hurry on my side. I told him it was recording and dismissed the rest with a small laugh.

“Did you just laugh at me?”

“It isn’t something to cry about.”

“You little bastard!”

Whip.

A fist came in at the back of my head.

This one really is going all the way.

A man for whom the word teacher is too generous. The violence from back then, about to repeat itself.

My body remembers Teacher Park’s habits. It moved out of the way on instinct.

I’m a man who came through special forces training and served. That time wasn’t spent playing.

The mind reacts faster than the body does, and it remembers what it learned.

Whish.

“What— you! You dodged?”

Park Donggeun had swung at nothing and it threw him badly.

“I’m warning you. Throw another one and I will strike back, as self-defence.”

Short, with a belly out in front of him, bald, middle-aged, unmarried and unlovely with it.

Built like that and his eye is set remarkably high.

The way he sometimes looks at the girls during lessons is as furtive as anything you’ll see.

A few years on from this point, Teacher Park’s hobby comes out. He’s caught filming girls without their knowledge and forced out of the profession.

Trudge, trudge.

I went on toward the principal’s office with a silenced Teacher Park in tow behind me.

We arrived at the door soon enough. The top job in the school, and you sell your soul to the Cheonghwa board to be appointed to it.

Knock, knock.

Click.

Two knocks, and I opened the door before anyone said to come in. I had a rough picture of the situation already.

Oh Gwangjun has too much pride. He hasn’t talked yet.

Oh Seora went out of the canteen dripping tears and worse. That was the likelier source.

University, the army, working life. I started from the bottom, so I have a fair command of how the world turns.

Stepping into the office, the first thing in view was a pot-bellied principal in the centre of the room.

And two middle-aged women sitting side by side in chairs to the right.

Decked in luxury with the labels showing, performing elegance.

“Who is this?”

The principal looked at me and asked it.

Of course. A principal has no need to remember a charity case’s face.

“I heard you were looking for me.”

“Ha Tae-ung?”

“Yes.”

“Hey! You’re Ha Tae-ung?”

The moment my name came out of the principal’s mouth, one of the women shot up from her chair as though something had seized her.

A woman in a two-piece suit of an eye-watering gold.

Strange, how the extravagant jewellery only made her look poorer.

“That’s correct…… and you would be?”

“And you would be?“

“…….”

“Where does a mongrel like you get off putting a hand on somebody’s daughter?”

She raised her voice to a shriek and came at me in long strides until she was right in my face. And then.

Crack.

I’d expected it, and I didn’t avoid it. I took it knowing.

Why?

Because from this moment on, this kind of rotten situation——

I am not going to allow another one.

A school that offers no protection whatsoever to a student who happens to be a charity case.

A principal whose first duty is to protect and shield his students, and a bald PE teacher standing there watching, reading the room and doing nothing.

I wanted some small revenge for the violence I took back then. And for that, a clear justification is needed.

A useful, well-chosen piece of bait is essential.

“Who are you…… to be slapping my face?”

It was a fairly solid one. I bore it for the sake of what will be coming back to them afterward.

“I’m Oh Seora’s mother!”

A woman with quite a pretty face on her.

What can’t be helped is how cheap she comes across.

She looked a long way from any breeding she’d been born with. The wife of new money holding buildings in Gangnam, exactly as described.

“Heh.”

I laughed, and it came out cold.

“You— you’re laughing? Is there something wrong with this one’s head?”

That I’d taken a slap across the face and hadn’t shrunk from it threw her badly.

“Would you like…… to do this side as well?”

I turned my face steadily. And offered her the right cheek.

“Wh— what?”

I closed both eyes for her, too.

“Seora’s mother, please calm yourself. He’s a boy with no grounding at all. Nothing in the world frightens him.”

Park Donggeun came forward out of his half-crouch and inserted himself.

“Yes. Madam Jo. Let the excitement settle.”

“I’m so sorry, Madam Treasurer. I got carried away. Raised in a house with nothing, taught nothing — I only meant to correct him sharply……. Hohoho.”

The woman still sitting down was the treasurer.

As though none of it had happened, Oh Seora’s mother returned to her seat and resumed being elegant.

A cross-section of a rotten world, repeating itself without end. In front of these people I was not even a student.

Only a charity case. Not one person here steps forward on my behalf.

I looked at the principal. He avoids my eyes, openly.

Park Donggeun is busy rubbing his palms together beside the two women.

“What in God’s name do you all think you’re doing!”

A roar, and barking with it.

A large voice suddenly rang the length of the office.

The homeroom teacher of second year, class three had arrived. Kim Changyong, mid-forties, hair thinning out in patches.

The Chinese characters teacher the students call the tin robot.

A non-examined subject, so the children disregard him, and he is the one man in this building I respect.

“Teacher Kim, what do you think you’re doing? With the principal present, and officers of the parents’ association!”

Park Donggeun shouted it at my homeroom teacher.

“That is a student who is supposed to be in a lesson. Is it normal to summon a student without his homeroom teacher’s knowledge? Without permission, no less——”

Mid-sentence, Teacher Kim found the red swelling on my cheek.

The thick eyebrows and the square, upright jaw began to tremble.

“Oh my. I do apologise. I heard he’d struck Seora across the face and my hand went up before I knew it. Hohoho.”

Oh Seora’s mother waved a hand from her seat, making a great performance of it. A sly little smile, and she called it a mistake to get herself clear of the situation.

You’re laughing about it now?

“This is a school. Have you established the circumstances?”

“I heard it from Seora directly.”

“So an adult may commit violence against a student by proxy? And you find it funny?”

“That’s……”

Even Oh Seora’s mother trailed off in front of a teacher and appeared to give ground a step.

“Teacher Kim. That’s enough.”

The principal, who had been watching, spoke.

Reputed to be the finest private school in the country, and the actual state of the place is a shambles.

“Puhahahahahahahaha!”

Going through the way this school works for a second time, the laugh finally broke out of me.

I didn’t bother holding it.

I let it go, all the way, and it felt clean.

The office froze where it stood. Every one of them turned to look at me as though I’d lost my mind.

A slow smile.

I gave them the cold one, the mad one.

And then.

“Now then……. Do any of you here happen to know…… who I am?”

“……??”

(End of Chapter 15)