“Teacher Lee!”

“Yes! Head of Department.”

Monday morning, the teachers’ rest room at Cheonghwa High School.

Wang Jindeok, head of academic affairs, called Lee Jangyong of mathematics over.

“Have it finished before noon. I’ll back you from behind.”

Wang Jindeok cannot go against what Ju Miju, president of the parents’ association, wants.

The business had to be closed off fast so he could collect the pocket money he has not yet had in full.

Clearing away one charity case, a weak member of society, does not count as work at all.

To a man who has handled the children of illustrious houses, this is one pupil with no backing behind him, and nothing else.

It makes no difference whether the exam result was genuine ability.

Once it is pressed down from above there is no trick by which a charity case can hold it, and that is the fate of them.

It has happened before.

Now and then, of course, a conspicuous genius is mixed in among the charity cases.

There was one who took first in the whole school.

And in the end that one did not graduate either.

The children of houses that count, and the teachers who had been pushed to do it — the pressure could not be borne.

In the Cheonghwa empire, a charity case who takes first in the school is still only a charity case.

However good an ordinary side dish tastes, it cannot take the place of the main course.

Even the one who digs in and holds will go down in the end if you keep shouting at him to die.

Wang Jindeok has made this same choice over and over, for years.

A choice he makes without the smallest scruple in it.

By now he takes a positive pleasure in it.

The nerve of it…… does he know what Cheonghwa is?

A charity case has only to do what the plan called for from the start — stand at the side for the school’s honour, or serve as a prop.

This is a world where the leading part has already been cast.

“Heh heh heh.”

Wang Jindeok let the sly laugh out, looking forward to a thicker pocket.

“Why hasn’t it gone up?”

“Has that ever happened?”

“Never. And it’s Monday……”

Second year, class three.

The room is unsettled today in a way it usually isn’t.

The first Monday morning after the exams.

The day every pupil’s results go up on the board in the central corridor.

It is a Cheonghwa tradition.

At any other state school there would be uproar about privacy and pupils’ rights, but Cheonghwa is the exception.

As an autonomous private high school, Cheonghwa has ignored the education office’s recommendations thoroughly.

And the education office issues its recommendations as a formality and cannot touch the place in any real way.

Parents and pupils take this way of running a school as a matter of course.

The Korean upper class regards competition of this kind as a requirement of survival.

And today something has happened that never has before.

The results that ought as a matter of course to be up on a Monday morning are nowhere to be seen.

“Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”

“Like what?”

“Maybe somebody cheated——”

“No!”

“Really?”

A story was being manufactured among the few of them standing together.

Has something happened?

Lee Hyoju was looking at the empty board and minding it too.

She has never once let go of first in the class.

But across the whole school she has always stayed at about third or fourth.

However hard she works, there is a band of concrete she cannot get up through.

She has worked until the blood came, and the gap will not close.

She had been hoping, this time.

Her mother had put a tutor with real ability on her.

Tutoring at star-tutor level costs what it costs, and it does improve you.

Apart from mathematics, which at Cheonghwa is called impregnable, she got through it all smoothly.

And now the posting has been put off.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

Somebody came in at the front door of the room.

A boy whose style, and whose whole force about him, have changed completely.

The faces of second year, class three changed, and every eye went one way.

The eyes of people born gold spoons, with an upper-class life worked into the body.

Eyes like that react sensitively to the smallest change.

Ha Tae-ung, who until very recently gave off the particular smell of the lower orders.

The one who had come in at the front door was Ha Tae-ung, arrived at school perfectly transformed.

The watch that shows at the wrist is designer.

A piece that would sit heavily on the wrist of a schoolboy even out of a house that can afford it.

The indoor slippers!

The brand’s special release this season.

The very ones Hyundo Department Store was said to have supplied to its VIPs.

Even the cloth of the uniform looks different.

The hair has been cut open and clean, like a Cheonghwa person’s.

The frame that used to be sickly and thin looks oddly solid.

The height and the good face stand out more, and anybody looking now would like him.

A command, and an air over everything, that a popular idol could not put a card in front of.

“What……”

“……”

It showed first among the girls in the class.

Girls who could not help being sensitive to a transformation, and this one Ha Tae-ung’s of all people’s.

They had disregarded him for coming up a charity case, and the looks and the height had always pulled their eyes anyway.

Where before he was always cowed, the look of him now is one you could believe belonged to the upper class.

And more than that, an aura of another order came thickly off him.

A force about him not far below Lee Hyoju’s, who is the absolute authority in the room.

A slow grin.

Ha Tae-ung lifted his eyes and smiled at the ones his look ran into.

There was no waver in it, and it met theirs straight on.

“……”

It was the ones he met who jumped and looked away.

The aftermath of the Oh Gwangjun assault had something to do with it.

“Adorable, the lot of you……. Hn.”

He let a short laugh out at the ones avoiding him, and dropped the line on them.

And then his eyes met Lee Hyoju’s.

“Hyoju. Good morning~”

He raised a hand and tipped it lightly at her.

“Is— is he insane?”

“To Hyoju??”

The class was astonished.

Lee Hyoju is chaebol family, and speaking to her at all is a thing people hesitate over.

A rank a charity case must never presume to recognise.

“Uh…… morning.”

Lee Hyoju took the greeting.

“Hah!”

“Ah!!”

“Wh— what!!”

A sound of shock broke out of the class.

Lee Hyoju, of all people in the world, had answered a charity case’s greeting.

“So…… what’s the mood about?”

He found his own seat, sat down, and asked her.

“The results haven’t gone up.”

“Ah. The results.”

He squared his chair and nodded.

And that was exactly as far as the reaction went.

With no interest in the results on his face, he took out his phone.

Unlike everybody else in the room, he is not much bothered.

Isn’t he expecting anything from it?

The composure was the thing Lee Hyoju found herself envying.

He had said he sits an exam on whatever ability he has on the day.

Whether he made a mess of this one, there is almost no change in his face.

A charity case does not get into a university on a principal’s recommendation or by early admission in any case.

The standard route is the national exam and regular admission, and nothing else.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

And a familiar silhouette came in at the front door.

Lee Jangyong of mathematics, Psycho, at whom any Cheonghwa pupil throws a fit.

Thick gold frames, a face pulled hard into a scowl, and he swept the room with it.

“……??”

Every pupil in second year, class three was thrown.

He is not their mathematics teacher.

There is no reason for him to be in this room——

“This class. Which one of you is Ha Tae-ung?”

That voice of his, unkind and unpleasant in its particular way, went round the whole room.

Every eye went at once to Ha Tae-ung, sitting at the back.

Lee Jangyong’s look followed theirs and landed on him.

“You’re Ha Tae-ung?”

Lee Jangyong, in the posture of a judge who has settled the guilt already and come to hand the sentence down.

“I am Ha Tae-ung. What is this about?”

“……!!”

“Whoa……”

The way Ha Tae-ung stood to the psycho of a maths teacher everybody else is busy reading the face of.

He did not shrink at all.

The whole class watched it with their jaws open.

It is not how you stand to the absolute authority who moves Cheonghwa’s mathematics whichever way he pleases.

Ha Tae-ung asked what he was wanted for in a voice with almost no feeling left in it.

“A little bastard who cheated…… and look how upright he is.”

“Ch— cheated?”

“Ha Tae-ung did??”

The class was appalled at a statement they could not believe.

Ha Tae-ung, who had had no presence in this room at all.

Inside a few days he has turned into a complete trouble maker.

Even so, cheat is going too far.

Ha Tae-ung is a charity case.

How would cheating even be possible at Cheonghwa?

“Cheating? By me?”

He asked it back without being thrown in the least.

“Hah! Has the little bastard’s liver swollen up? Or is he this brazen because he’s a charity case?”

An open sneer hung at the corner of Lee Jangyong’s mouth.

He is not an ordinary teacher.

He is a psychopath who takes delight in one thing only — tormenting growing children through mathematics.

There are pupils who must never get through his questions, and a charity case above all.

He simply cannot accept that one has.

“Hn……”

Ha Tae-ung laughed down his nose.

“You little bastard! Oi! Are you looking down on me? You fucking charity case bastard!!”

The laugh took Lee Jangyong’s lid clean off, and he lost his reason and threw the obscenity out.

“……”

Second year, class three went under into a silence made of shock and astonishment.

The children read faces and were bewildered by the contest of force between the two of them.

A Monday morning, which sets the rhythm of a week.

And a storm blown into the room before the first lesson has begun!

“Hahahahahahahahahaha.”

Ha Tae-ung broke into a great open laugh, like a man gone mad.

The sound of it filled the room, and there was something grotesque in it.

(End of Chapter 50)