Scared?

Me??

Lee Jeongjun could not take it in.

A charity case, of base standing, provoking him with his spirits up.

“……”

The children muttering in threes and fives looked appalled as well.

Who could provoke a family of Doa Ilbo and Hanguk Group like that?

Across the whole of Cheonghwa, one or two at the outside, and nobody else.

A charity case, of no standing above a bondservant’s, had lifted the corner of his mouth at a nobleman and goaded him with it.

Grrrrk.

Nothing in Ha Tae-ung’s manner that is not disregard.

Lee Jeongjun ground his teeth, meeting a situation like this for the first time in his life.

It is a declaration of war.

By instinct he knew he must not let it go here.

“If you haven’t the confidence——”

“Shut up!”

Pulled in by the provocation, Lee Jeongjun started for the platform.

I’ll stand on him. You think I’d come off worse against something like you?

He has the shelter of a house, and he has never lived carelessly on it.

From the time he could understand what was said to him, Lee Jeongjun has had his mother’s upper-class education, thoroughly.

The one who survives is justice.

Never give ground where a contest is being decided.

All of it in order to take Doa Ilbo and Hanguk Group.

His mother’s philosophy of education became, like an incantation, the conviction of his life.

He has worked until the blood came, to set himself apart from the other heirs in the running.

His grandfather Lee Doseong, honorary chairman of Doa Ilbo.

The only way to be well thought of by him and to be noticed is a head for study.

The Oyang Group household, relatives though they are, are competitors and nothing else.

Let anybody on either side stand out in ability and be acknowledged by the grandfathers, and the two groups could be swallowed at once.

And a stupid charity case has provoked the timber of a great group’s future successor.

“Whoa……”

“You have to get a shot of this!”

“Stand on that charity case bastard today!!”

“Jeongjun oppa~ I love you!”

The shots taken here this moment would become a meme at Cheonghwa High School that would never come again.

At a thing they will not see twice, the first and second years let out a cheer.

Of the pupils gathered, ninety-nine point nine per cent are behind Lee Jeongjun.

The ones looking at Ha Tae-ung with any pity came to a handful and no more.

And they could not readily step forward.

The board is laid out, and it has become a contest ground nobody who arrives now could stop.

“If there are student council officers here, would you come out and help?”

“Yes……”

Officers came up onto the platform in a rush.

“There are mobile boards at the back. Bring three and set them out with gaps between them.”

They moved to Teacher Oh Jeonghye’s instruction without a word of complaint.

“Well, I never……”

“Will this be all right?”

“If the parents hear of it——”

“It’s a charity case matter. There’s no problem.”

Most of the staff who heard had gathered in the hall.

Their faces were lifted, no less than the pupils’.

A considerable number of the teachers working at Cheonghwa do not like the charity case admissions either.

They know that, teachers or not, they are clever helpers for the children of the upper class and nothing more, and they work at looking away from it.

A card that says they teach at Cheonghwa High School brings a large social satisfaction on its own.

No teacher at any school in Gangnam is in a position to disregard them.

And the store vouchers and designer bags the parents hand over from time to time are a pleasure of their own.

Addicted to Cheonghwa’s particular culture, they have no thought at all of transferring elsewhere.

In exchange, a teacher cannot be idle at his own studies.

The houses are the houses, and the pupils are clever.

An answer has to come the moment one of them asks something unexpected.

Let your ability be doubted and the parents’ association will press for your resignation.

Quietly, Cheonghwa’s teachers take the dye of the upper class as well.

Most charity case admissions disappear before the second year is out.

The scheme is for building a justification with the education office, and for show, and nothing else.

Grrrrrrk.

The mobile boards came up onto the platform one by one.

They are the ones used when a notable person is invited to lecture.

“I will set the question.”

Oh Jeonghye opened her mouth as though she had been waiting.

She holds a master’s in mathematics from Seoguk.

She comes at the subject with an academic depth of her own, and she has killer questions too.

She was pushed aside by Teacher Lee Jangyong and never granted the right to set the core questions, and she is not behind him in ability.

“All three of you close your eyes.”

She sat at the computer wired to the hall’s projector.

Tak. Ta-tak.

She worked the program quickly and entered a mathematics question into it.

If they can’t solve this one today——

All three of them will be left with a stain on a life.

Ha Tae-ung, the charity case who made the situation, is driven out of the school under an accusation that makes no sense.

Teacher Lee Jangyong will be struck off Cheonghwa’s rolls.

Lee Jeongjun, insolent as ever, of the royal family.

Even with the same result there is no saying how the penalty falls on him.

Thrilling.

Oh Jeonghye has been pushed aside by Maths Thug, and where mathematics is concerned she is something close to a pervert herself.

Leading a contest as good as this one, her heart went about like a mad thing.

Tick!

In a moment she had it finished.

A killer question of her own, stored on her phone, and the solution with it.

“Right. Open your eyes…… and begin.”

Flash!

At her word, the question came up on the projector.

“Inverse function graphs?”

“The shape of a function, and differentiation……”

“Oh……”

A sound of shock broke out of the pupils at what filled the screen.

One look at it and the head aches. A killer question.

Cheonghwa pupils have mastered most of the high-school syllabus in advance, at middle school.

And pupils like that looked at what was on the screen with their mouths hanging open.

It is not a question at a level anybody solves quickly.

Compound mathematical reasoning is required for it absolutely.

The three of them fixed on the question.

And.

Ta-tak, tak! Tak!

One of the three began putting formulae on a board faster than the others.

Heh. Call that a standard.

Lee Jangyong looked at the question set by Oh Jeonghye, his junior from Seoguk, and laughed at it inwardly.

Not one person at university could keep up with his mathematics.

The professors of the mathematics department and of mathematics education all acknowledged him.

He was called a mathematical genius as a boy.

By the time he reached middle school he was going out as Korea’s representative at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Up to the end of secondary school he swept every prize mathematics had to give.

Which is how he got into Seoguk, with his marks in other subjects short.

And he did not lose that celebrity at any point during his years there.

With mathematics teaching for an excuse, there were many chances to be in a room with junior girls.

And every time, without fail, he assaulted them.

They could not avoid the tutoring, because Lee Jangyong’s mathematical reasoning was exceptional.

His childhood was heavily marked by an unstable household.

His father was a lecher and his mother suffered from depression.

His mother’s suppressed feeling came out as rage, and it went at Lee Jangyong rather than at his father.

However small the matter, if he did not do as he was told, she beat him and he had no part in it.

And she was obsessive about mathematics, to the point of illness.

Something like a counter-reaction to a dream of her own, unfinished — she had read mathematics at university.

The only way to avoid his mother’s violence was to be good at it.

So he clung to mathematics problems whenever he was under strain, and the anger went down.

And his mathematical reasoning expanded enormously on the strength of it.

The trouble was his character.

Developed misshapenly in one direction only, and something went wrong in him.

When he took strong results at the Olympiad and competitions like it, interest came at him from every side.

It set light to an appetite that had woken late.

Girls he tutored privately, juniors who were behind in mathematics — he did not discriminate.

There were plenty of places to discharge a crooked appetite with nothing troubling him.

And the final destination he chose, after a great deal of thought, was Cheonghwa High School.

Called the maths thug at Cheonghwa, he took satisfaction in toying with arrogant pupils and working on their minds.

And today!

He picked out a sacrifice, and picked well.

A charity case who solved a killer question he had set with every pride in it, without a gap in the working.

Heh heh. This one, if you connect the reasoning——

Lee Jangyong went at the question without hesitating.

“Oh!”

But the mathematical linkage that always ran without obstruction on a supple mind will not start.

Blank, as though he had turned into an idiot.

Formulae that were coming out of him briskly as recently as this morning will not come up.

Somehow, now——

“Fuck……”

The word came out of him from nowhere.

Colleagues watching, pupils watching, and his mouth opened of its own accord.

It is what he used to do to pupils who could not solve a question, and to juniors and seniors alike.

Grinding them down with you can’t even do this, and hacking their pride to pieces.

And now it seemed he had become that useless creature himself.

He has certainly solved questions like this one.

At this level the hand solves it without his even attending.

Mathematical talent is the one usable piece of inheritance he got from his mother.

And now that outstanding brain is misfiring.

Tak. Ta-tak.

A brisk sound came from beside him.

Lee Jangyong turned his head without meaning to.

“……!!”

And was horrified.

Ha Tae-ung, marker in hand, has filled more than half a board.

And is filling in, without a check, the exact run of formulae Lee Jangyong cannot get through.

Tuk-tuk. Tuk-tuk.

Beside him, Lee Jeongjun had started his working as though he had been waiting.

“What is this? Maths Thug can’t solve it?”

“God……”

Snap-snap-snap.

The eyes of getting on for several hundred pupils swung onto Maths Thug.

The maths thug, who in every lesson has heaped every kind of contempt on pupils who could not solve a question.

And standing at that board, he is not solving it at all.

There is a fine tremor going through him besides.

“Surely not……. It’s a killer question, but with enough time anybody here can solve it.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Looks like he’s shit-scared.”

“Hohoho. That’s funny.”

A considerable number of pupils are filming it on their phones.

And behind them, standing quietly, a man and a woman.

The two attorneys from Jo and Jang were filming the platform as well, and watching without a word.

Tak.

A few minutes, no more.

Ha Tae-ung, having solved it perfectly, put the marker down.

“……”

The great hall went into silence at once.

A thing nobody could believe had happened in front of every eye in the room.

“You’ve lost, sir.”

Ha Tae-ung turned to him and smiled.

Lee Jangyong looked at the smile with nothing at all in his face.

“N— no! A question like this is nothing, nothing at aaaall!!”

The shout came out of him close to a scream and rang round the hall.

And not one person answered it.

A plain result, and no argument to be raised against it.

“Charity case bastard…… you were in it with that bitch, weren’t you?”

Something wild came into Lee Jangyong’s eyes.

“You’ll have trouble becoming a person before you die, sir.”

“What did you say? Shut up! You fucking charity case beggar bastard!!”

His eyes had gone right round, and he closed a fist and came at Ha Tae-ung.

And in that instant——

“Oi! You son of a bitch!!”

(End of Chapter 57)