Scratch. Scratch.

There is still time before the first lesson of the morning.

Second year, class one, Cheonghwa High School.

Quiet, and the only sound laid across the room the small one of ballpoints and mechanical pencils working.

Class one has Lee Jeongjun in it, called the crown prince of the whole second year.

Grandson, on his mother’s side, of Hanguk Group, one of the country’s ten largest.

And on his father’s, grandson of Doa Ilbo’s honorary chairman. One of the royal family.

Across the whole of the second year he has never once lost first place.

Short hair made a cold impression colder.

Before the lesson began, Lee Jeongjun was concentrating on a mathematics problem with the form of it altered.

That I couldn’t solve a thing like this……

The hardest question Lee Jangyong, the maths pervert, set on these papers.

He saw that the form had been altered, and there was not time enough to go at it.

It wanted ten minutes at the very least.

The rest of the questions were at the top end too, so time was badly short.

Put it bluntly: it is a question a Gangnam star tutor would have to hold his head in both hands and go at.

Grrk.

Working the question he had dropped marks on, Lee Jeongjun ground his teeth.

If I couldn’t solve it, none of the rest of them had a hope.

One mathematics question cost him full marks in every subject.

This time he confirmed why there has been nobody with a perfect score since the school opened.

He had wanted the glory of being the first.

And this time too it went past him.

“Hoo.”

Lee Jeongjun set down the ballpoint he had been working with and let a short breath out.

Cheonghwa’s written papers are several times harder than the questions on the worst entrance exam.

Solve at this level and full marks on the national exam are entirely possible.

“Oi, oi! Second year, class three has gone up.”

“What? Why?”

“Somebody’s taken full marks in every subject, they say.”

“……!!”

The whispering came from the seats behind, and Lee Jeongjun’s face twisted.

Classes are assigned by results.

Class three has Lee Hyoju in it, third in the school.

The two of them are related.

His own grandfather’s younger brother, the chairman of Oyang Group, is her grandfather.

The two grandfathers are brothers and may well be close.

But leave them out of it, and from their children downward the whole structure is competition, thoroughly.

Once the two of them are gone there is no telling how the board turns.

In an age of global competition especially, being relatives does not mean a great deal.

And Lee Hyoju is no exception for him.

To Lee Jeongjun she is a competitor and nothing else.

Fuck. Lee Hyoju……

He had thought her comfortably behind him, and by the sound of it she has taken a perfect score.

The anger came up and his fist closed on it.

The mathematics question he had been working a moment ago.

His pride was cut.

He had put her below him and not troubled much about her.

“You know what the astonishing part is?”

“What!”

“First in that class isn’t Lee Hyoju……. They say Ha Tae-ung took the full marks.”

“Ha Tae-ung?”

“Ha Tae-ung the charity case! Don’t you know him?”

“Ah! The charity case!”

“……??”

Lee Jeongjun was horrified at what followed.

That the opponent he had assumed was not Lee Hyoju but a charity case was more than he could take in.

For the school’s honour, Cheonghwa gives an unfortunate pupil a privilege through the charity case admission.

He has never exchanged a word with one, and he knows there are a few.

In two years not one of them has been able to meet his eye even once.

They are laid down as a mat for the school’s public standing, and there is no more meaning in them than that.

The school admits them with an eye on being cited as a model in education, and almost none of them finishes and graduates.

And one who is lucky enough to get a certificate is under an obligation, out in the world, never to say he came from Cheonghwa.

Graduating from an ordinary school would do rather more for them, all told.

Under Cheonghwa’s roof, in fact, they are——

Bondservants.

And…… a charity case like that took full marks?

“Is it true?”

“The whole place has gone up, hasn’t it.”

“Gone up over what?”

“Maths Thug rolled his eyes back in his head and declared Ha Tae-ung a law-breaker.”

“Did he steal the papers?”

“Who knows. There’s a bomb gone off in class three right now.”

Scrrrape.

Lee Jeongjun had been listening, and he rose quietly.

He means to see a thing he cannot believe with his own eyes and judge it himself.

And if the charity case has broken the law as they say——

I’ll kill him.

A bondservant who has dared to want his masters’ rice bowl.

For people no different from the low-born, the only answer is death.

“……”

There was a killing air coming off him, and the room, which had been a little unsettled, went silent at once.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

The murmuring of class one turned to watch Lee Jeongjun go out of the room like a reaper.

“Let’s go too.”

“What’s happening at this hour of the morning?”

“A charity case bastard, daring to cause a thing like that……”

“We should use this and clear the charity cases out, the lot of them.”

In a rush.

Every one of them kicked back from a desk and went out together.

And they were not a little surprised to find the corridor already packed with pupils.

By rights today is the day results go up.

That they had not was strange to begin with.

And in the end a charity case breaking the law has turned Cheonghwa over.

Lee Jeongjun cleared the classroom door, and the corridor, crowded solid, split and opened as though it were a lie.

“Everyone to the great hall!!”

“The charity case has challenged Maths Thug!”

“What? Maths Thug?”

A nuclear device gone properly off on a Monday morning.

In the school’s history there has never been an uproar like today’s.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

I came out of the room and walked.

And the children packed in there opened a path, like the sea before Moses.

What is in their eyes as they look at me is——

Contempt.

I doubt the way an aristocrat looks at an untouchable is any different from this.

“A charity case with full marks?”

“How did that one get the questions out?”

“Look at the sheer bloody brass on his face.”

“Fucker……”

Whatever comes into their mouths comes out, and it reaches me unfiltered.

Aggrieved? Go and regress, then~

There is nothing for me to shrink about, so I put my shoulders back.

These little bastards looking down on me. Laughable.

Not one of them is more solid than my wallet.

Honour? Power?

Every one of those comes down helplessly in front of money.

In a capitalist market, money is the Creator.

It realises most of what a person wants.

It cannot buy the things with no body to them — love at its highest, or moral and spiritual elevation.

But nearly everything outside that, it can satisfy.

The group families the pupils here look up to with their eyes shut.

They too are only lords of a castle made of capital.

Lose the capital overnight and go under, and everything they had comes to nothing in a morning.

On that reckoning I am a winner with nothing he cannot do.

Moment by moment the money in my account multiplies without limit.

And decisively, I am——

Blood of the great Haryun Group.

A fate tangled with them, which the first time through I would have died to avoid.

I have been given another go at it, so I will take it up and use it, actively.

Why?

Because in the future I am dreaming again, the great Haryun Group——

“Tae-ung……”

Our homeroom teacher, who has come with me as far as the hall.

His face is full of worry.

My parents know nothing about any of this.

I asked him not to contact them under any circumstances.

“Bring the principal as well, please.”

“……”

He looks at me, and there is a good deal in it.

He has some idea of what I am.

“I will.”

He gives me a small nod, turns and goes.

Grrrooan.

I entered the great hall in the new building squarely.

A building finished with parents’ association money.

A swimming pool in the basement.

The great hall on the first and second floors, doubling as a multi-purpose gymnasium.

Above it the third-year classrooms and the society rooms that matter.

Twenty to a class at full complement, so the whole school together comes to about six hundred.

The space takes all of them.

I opened the grand door of it and walked in with some spirit.

“Brazen little bastard……”

Teacher Lee Jangyong came in a step behind me and let the word out.

A fool who does not dream what he is about to meet today.

“He’s really going up against Maths Thug?”

“Has the charity case taken something?”

“Stand on him properly and drive him out! The nerve of it!”

The ones crowding in behind him and spitting hatred have picked their day, and picked it well.

I went up onto the platform.

And stood in front of the electronic board hung there for the lectures notable people give when they visit.

From up there every expensive fitting in the place came into view at once.

I had not wanted to go this far.

But my fans’ warm interest has put me up on a platform in the end.

Honestly, privately, I had been hoping a chance like this would come.

Working over an Oh Gwangjun and an Oh Seora was never going to get a strong warning through to them.

Today’s board has been laid out for me. That much is right.

Shff.

I turned round.

Snap. Snap-snap.

The hot eyes of the second years coming in behind all swung onto me at once.

The first time through I could not have imagined it.

As a charity case I would have had to put my head down and apologise on the spot.

The me standing here has no reason to.

This is a coronation for a king newly come into being.

A slow grin.

I smiled, at my leisure.

“He’s smiling?”

“Has he got a flower bed in his skull? He’s not right, is he?”

“Fucker!”

“Drag him down!!”

Cheonghwa pupils ordinarily hold back from swearing, and it came out of their mouths.

A charity case they had treated as a bin for their feelings, and a perfect score.

That alone has done their pride serious damage.

“This is the way you wanted it. Lose, and…… confess and get out.”

Lee Jangyong laughed meanly, as though he had already read the win. The maths thug — or rather the maths pervert.

Losing is nowhere in his head.

“Have you not considered the reverse, sir?”

There is no need for me to go low because the man in front of me has.

I asked it back in decent language.

I have no wish to be at the level of a piece of human rubbish who swears and bullies.

On a second run, patience comes fitted as standard.

“Heh heh. All right. If I lose……. I’ll go down on my knees in front of you.”

Lee Jangyong knows Korean high-school mathematics past the point of mastery and into something like cheating.

“Then we’re agreed. If I lose I’ll withdraw from the school cleanly.”

I have no confidence.

None at all, in losing to him.

Thanks to Lee Jangyong at this point in my life, I was still hanging on to mathematics after I got to university.

And the buff my grandmother gave me on the way back is doing its share.

Not only the body improved. The speed the brain turns at has changed too.

And decisively.

“Fair play, if you please.”

I put my hand out.

The pupils crowded in like spectators turned their eyes up to the platform.

“Heh heh heh. Fair play. Good!”

Certain of the win, Teacher Lee Jangyong laughed slyly and took my hand.

And in that instant!

—You have encountered an acquired evildoer!

(End of Chapter 53)