Click. Tssss.

“Hoooo……”

“Aah. Nothing sweeter than the hangover cigarette~”

“Ugh. How hard did we go at the weekend?”

“Don’t. I thought I was going to croak.”

“Heh heh. The returns were good, though, weren’t they?”

“They were. Killer. Hee hee hee.”

The three sports-place boys of Cheonghwa High School.

Gathered in the PE prep room again today, burning cigarettes.

The weekend had been a good one.

They are minors, and they got into a Gangnam club anyway, on money, on power and on who they know.

Cheonghwa sunbaes had stepped in for them.

Club Pentagon is a place the police of that district can do nothing about.

As long as the money is certain, you can enjoy yourself in there like a king.

Take a room, order a champagne set at several million won, and everything after that rolls along on its own.

There is a manual, and all of it happens without being asked for.

The people who matter at the district station and the club’s proprietor are bound in close.

When a crackdown comes round they call ahead, well ahead, and see to it.

And behind that, the children of the upper class get the taste of capitalism and the pleasure of it early.

“You lot in Canada again this time?”

“It’s driving me mad. What is there to do in the maple country — no fun in it, stiff as a board, full of old bones.”

“Heh heh heh. Go and look at the waterfall.”

“The coach is a blockhead, isn’t he. And here come the tears again, at the thought of my lungs tearing open.”

“We’re going to Pennsylvania this time.”

“Mind your bones. Collide with that lot and you’re wrecked for life.”

“Heh heh heh. Don’t worry. I’m a superior human resource, so I start on the bench.”

“Hee hee hee. True — where would they find assets like us? Enrol and the first thing they do is lay fresh turf across the school field.”

“I’m laying the bench~”

The three of them are preparing for university on rugby and hockey.

They carry no worry at all about their road, or about competing for a place.

As sports-place candidates aiming at Yeonguk University, the gate they can choose from is wide.

Have the ability behind you and no money, and the whole thing comes to nothing.

Even after enrolling you have to keep melting money down, on overseas training and the rest of it.

And there is no need to work yourself up about winning a gold medal at hockey or rugby either.

It is, precisely and no more, one of the admissions routes for the children of houses with money and no head.

Rrrattle.

The prep room door opened.

Three sets of eyes went to it.

No ordinary pupil would dare come to the sports-place boys’ own prep room at this hour.

Most of the third-year sunbaes are out at a fixture.

At an hour when they are not to be disturbed, and somebody comes into the prep room without a trace of fear——

“Oh!”

“……”

The three faces turned to the door went visibly stiff.

Click. Tsssss.

A presence came into the prep room putting a lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.

“Je— Jeongho.”

All three tightened at once, with nobody first about it.

They are upper class at a middling sort of altitude. Lee Jeongho is a diamond spoon, and of the Oyang Group family.

Pupils from a house inside the hundred largest groups, and from the families at the very top, smoke openly in their own society room.

The Business Studies Society, where by the rumours drinking is possible as well.

Lee Jeongho spends most of his time resident in that room.

He hardly ever appears in a shabby (?) place like the PE prep room.

And yet——

“Like a set of moles down here……”

He drew deep on the cigarette, let it out, and looked at the three of them as though they were of no account.

With the cigarette clamped in his mouth he did not look like a pupil of the same kind as them at all.

“……”

Had it been an ordinary pupil the three of them would have flared, but the one in front of them is Lee Jeongho.

As though they had agreed it beforehand, all three avoided his eyes.

“Let me ask you something.”

“……??”

Lee Jeongho, of all people, did them the honour of asking.

“Ha Tae-ung, second year, class three. What sort of bastard is he?”

“Ha Tae-ung?”

“You mean Ha Tae-ung the charity case?”

“What? A ch— charity case??”

Lee Jeongho’s face twisted without mercy at the answer.

“The nerve of it…… a charity case, of all things…… Grrrrk.”

He brought back, sharply, the boy who had disregarded him at the golf course at the weekend.

Now that he has what the boy really is, his teeth ground on it.

“Son of a bitch……. I’ll kill him.”

Why bring the principal into it all of a sudden?

Lee Jangyong was badly thrown.

Of the dozens of teachers, those on the main subjects — Korean, English, mathematics — carry weight, and the ones on the non-examined subjects carry almost none.

And of those, the representative subject is unquestionably Chinese characters.

Cheonghwa discriminates hard in one way and another, and a non-examined-subject teacher is in no position to straighten his back.

That is the environment, and here is Kim Changyong of Chinese characters, letting a roar out in the face of a mathematics teacher.

And naming a principal he has no acquaintance with.

“Why does the principal come into it! I am telling you it was the head of academic affairs who told me to dig out that charity case’s cheating!”

Lee Jangyong sprayed as he said it.

There is a pride of a sort riding on this for him.

Nobody at Cheonghwa High School is on a charity case’s side.

The principal? Once he knows what this is, he’ll be grateful to me. Heh heh heh.

The present principal wants to serve his term out quietly and retire.

He will want nothing at all to do with anything the president of the parents’ association is tangled in.

“Have you evidence? Evidence that our Tae-ung committed an act of cheating!”

“Heh heh. Of course there is.”

“What is it?”

“In the whole history of Cheonghwa, no pupil sitting fifth in his class has ever suddenly taken full marks. That is the evidence!”

“I beg your pardon?”

It sounds forced, and it is not wrong.

There are grounds under what Lee Jangyong is asserting.

Since the school opened, charity case or otherwise, no pupil has taken full marks.

However confirmed a genius, Cheonghwa’s own pride does not permit a perfect score.

And now not even an ordinary pupil but a charity case has taken one.

Add in the practicals and the continuous assessment and his grade band drops away sharply, of course.

Even so, a perfect score on the written papers is a result that must be put right.

“Oi! You fraud. Out here, now!”

Lee Jangyong pointed a finger at him again.

Every eye in the class is fixed on Ha Tae-ung.

Not long ago the PE teacher handled him this same way and vanished from the school inside a day.

The scene overlaps that one a hundred per cent.

“Sir. Isn’t that going too far?”

A girl’s voice, cold and level, laid itself quietly and low across the room.

Lee Jangyong looked at whoever had spoken.

“……!!”

Their eyes met and he started.

Why Lee Hyoju?

Something had happened that would not go into his head at all.

Lee Hyoju, of Oyang Group’s royal family.

An honours pupil with no interest whatsoever in anybody else’s business had put herself into a charity case’s.

Something went cold along Lee Jangyong’s spine.

Had the one with the perfect score been Lee Hyoju, he could not have thrown himself about like this.

Nor could the president of the parents’ association have found a pretext, come to that.

However black his name inside Cheonghwa, against a group family there is a limit to Lee Jangyong.

“Tae-ung’s cheating……. Is there specific evidence of it?”

Short, and it put a finger on the centre of it.

Lee Jangyong bit down on his lip.

The board is already laid out.

Give ground here and a mathematics teacher’s authority goes to the floor.

“Of course there is! Would I be doing this without evidence?”

Behind the gold frames the cunning in his eyes shone sharply.

And he did not know.

That a reaper was closing the distance on him, moment by moment, to take him.

“And what would that evidence be? I’m curious myself~”

From the back of the room Ha Tae-ung looked more at his leisure than before.

That insolent little bastard!

It is nothing like the way the other charity cases have carried themselves.

A charity case’s position is to lower himself like a criminal at once, whether he has done anything or not.

What Ha Tae-ung is showing is something else.

A look with mockery in it, and an arrogant way of speaking.

It scratched further at Lee Jangyong’s temper and raised the anger in him.

He wanted to cross the room, put a slap across the face, knock him down and stand on him.

A charity case who is nothing at all, holding both eyes open and setting himself against authority. An infringement of a teacher’s authority.

“Out here! You son of a bitch!!”

There are too many pupils watching for him to use force himself.

Main subject or not, let violence follow and the word goes round immediately and you are buried in education.

“Teacher Lee!!”

Kim Changyong had been watching, and he checked him with a shout.

“……”

The room went savage.

Pupils seeing anything of the kind for the first time could only be thrown by it.

“What is it?”

“Has something happened?”

The noise spread as far as the next class, and pupils crowded in.

Cheonghwa High School is ordinarily quiet, and orderly inside the quiet.

And in a place like that an unfamiliar noise was going on and on, from Monday morning.

The pupils caught it and got excited, like pupils at any ordinary school.

“The charity case is up against Maths Thug, they say.”

“Against Maths Thug? Why?”

Lee Jangyong goes by the maths thug among the pupils.

The corridor had filled with pupils come out to watch.

“What are you all doing!”

Student council officers on their round of the corridor arrived at that moment.

They fill the gap the third-year officers have left, and they are the school’s real second-year power.

“Right now…… Maths Thug — I mean Teacher Lee Jangyong — is pressing a cheat.”

A second-year girl passed it on carefully, to a question from Han Yubin, the cold-blooded witch.

Han Yubin, head of the discipline department, stands rather differently from other pupils.

A grandfather who was Prosecutor General and a father who is a presiding judge at the High Court. One of the legal world’s elite houses.

The manner of an old house is worked into her, and she is composed.

“A cheat? Who?”

“Ha Tae-ung. The charity case.”

“Ha Tae-ung?”

Ha Tae-ung came up in her head, the charity case with the insolent manner.

The pupil who challenged her authority in the canteen.

He was so squarely planted that there was nothing she could do about it at the time.

She had flinched at a manner she had never seen, and there was nothing ordinary about the aura of him.

She had worked at forgetting an unpleasant memory.

And here is another business with him in the middle of it.

“What kind of cheating?”

Han Yubin put the question again with the curiosity hidden.

“Ha Tae-ung……. They say he got full marks in every subject.”

“Whaaat……? F— full marks??”

Inwardly she was badly shaken.

For difficulty of written papers, Cheonghwa is first among high schools in the country.

At Cheonghwa, where even the questions from the worst entrance exam get called easy — full marks?

She dropped several questions on these papers herself.

In mathematics she lost marks in the working on the written answers particularly.

That the question could not be solved at high-school level at all had something to do with it.

And Ha Tae-ung took full marks?

“What bullshit is that! How would a charity case——”

Yang Jihun, the council officer from her own class who goes everywhere with her, burst out with it.

Sparks came off his eyes.

Yang Jihun barely got his average over ninety this time.

Which puts him about the middle of his class.

Charity case bastards are all rubbish!!

Yang Jihun lives gripped by an excessive sense of being one of the elect, and the anger went into his bones.

Ha Tae-ung, the lunatic charity case who had humiliated him in the canteen.

By the look of it he has been properly caught by Maths Thug today.

“Move.”

One word from Han Yubin and the corridor, packed solid with pupils, opened like the sea before Moses.

She went through them and in at the back door of second year, class three.

And looked from Teacher Lee Jangyong to Ha Tae-ung and back.

“Then let’s prove it. On condition that you do it with me, sir.”

Ha Tae-ung put the proposal to him in a voice with nothing in it.

“Wh— what did you say??”

(End of Chapter 52)