“Is this actually happening?”

“Maths Thug, wiped……”

“Is that bastard’s ability the real thing??”

Three second-year boys standing at the back of the great hall.

The three sports-place boys.

They came to watch and are seeing Maths Thug come down live, with their mouths hanging open.

“Haa.”

Oh Gwangjun of second year, class three, standing with them, let a deep breath out.

This feels fucking awful.

Ha Tae-ung. Until very recently the charity case bastard crushed into a corner of the room, unable to meet an eye.

He came out to the great hall because the word was that the first perfect score in Cheonghwa’s history belonged to him.

Oh Gwangjun cannot get used to any of this.

He provoked him and trod on him, and now he is publicly humiliating Lee Jangyong, Cheonghwa’s Maths Thug, in the great hall.

A type of question you have to concentrate hard on even to recognise, and he solved it far too easily.

Lee Jeongjun, who has never lost first place in the second year, has only just got the opening formulae down.

And more serious than that is Teacher Lee Jangyong, the maths thug.

He was first to pick up a marker, wrote a few characters, stopped, and has not moved since.

A complete defeat, confirmed by every person here.

Only one question was set, and at Cheonghwa anybody can solve one.

“Is that loser really the one with full marks?”

“Were our papers that easy?”

“Don’t talk ignorant bullshit. Cheonghwa is tier one for difficulty in this country.”

“Is it?”

The sports-place boys, who do not put their weight into study, are there to lay a floor under the ordinary pupils in any case.

What matters to them is a record of appearances at official competitions.

“But why is Lee Jeongho looking for that charity case bastard?”

“Do they know each other?”

“Hardly. The air round him was savage……”

The savagery in the air and in the eyes when Lee Jeongho came to the three of them looking for a charity case.

“What’s this about?”

Oh Gwangjun, who came in late this morning, showed some curiosity.

He is not unaware of how Lee Jeongho ordinarily treats the sports-place boys.

Lee Jeongho lives mostly in the Business Studies Society room, which nobody connected with the school touches at all.

To qualify for that room you have to belong to a family inside the country’s hundred largest groups.

Cheonghwa keeps about ten pupils who meet it at any time.

“He turned up this morning out of nowhere asking who Ha Tae-ung was.”

“Did he?”

“That charity case bastard has got himself properly tangled with the Lee family, by the look of it.”

“Heh heh heh. Stupid bastard. Beats one Maths Thug and he’s already up in the clouds.”

“Here — Lee Jeongho and Lee Jeongjun are relatives, aren’t they.”

“That’s right, and Lee Hyoju over there.”

“Those ones aren’t so bad. The real article is Lee Hyorin, in the first year.”

“Ooh. Lee Hyorin……”

At the name the three of them shook.

Lee Hyorin, the idol Cheonghwa produced.

Without Hanguk Group and Doa Ilbo behind her it is not a road anybody could dream of.

The upper class still treats people in the entertainment business as clowns.

However close the relations, it is not a line of work that can ever develop into anything deep.

Lee Hyorin, who holds the centre of Five Fairies, known to the whole country as fairy idols — what she really is——

“Oi! You son of a bitch!!!”

An enormous obscenity rang round the great hall.

“What’s the matter with the principal?”

“Ha! The charity case bastard’s dead. Heh heh.”

“So the mild old boy knows how to swear.”

“Here we go!!”

Principal An Jongwuk came through the back door of the hall and threw it open as he came.

Tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk.

Shouting as he went, he made straight for the platform and ran up onto it.

Every eye in the hall followed his line across the floor.

Ha Tae-ung, the charity case, has been properly marked by the principal.

If the principal has come as far as the great hall the thing is over.

However he has soaked Maths Thug, once the principal steps in himself——

CRACK!

“……!!”

“Wh— what!”

“God.”

“Insane!!”

The principal came up onto the platform and put a hand hard across Maths Thug’s face.

He hit the teacher, not the charity case.

An arm swung at very nearly full stretch.

A palm with real weight behind it, and Lee Jangyong took it on the cheek.

CRASH!

He had checked in the middle of going to strike Ha Tae-ung, and he took the clout round the ear and went over on the platform.

Pupils and the staff mixed among them were appalled.

A reversal nobody had imagined.

Principal An Jongwuk had laid a hand on Maths Thug.

And in a place with a great many pupils watching.

“P— Principal……”

Lee Jangyong lay where he had fallen, holding his cheek, looking up at him.

The face of a man whose world has come down.

An Jongwuk, who has always doted on him and called him Cheonghwa’s pride.

The look in his eyes now is a reaper’s, come up out of hell.

There is hatred in the eyes turned on Lee Jangyong, and a killing air.

“You dare block my road! Who do you think you are!!”

The principal’s shout went round the hall again, ringing off the walls.

“……”

Every face in the room was full of a doubt nothing would resolve.

His road? Why?

It is a mathematics contest between Maths Thug and a charity case, over pride.

Lee Jangyong has been shown up by a charity case, and that is not a thing that blocks a principal’s road.

Nobody gathered in the hall could make sense of it.

“Who was it! Who put you up to it? Which one! The vice-principal? Or the head of academic affairs?”

“……”

“That’s it. The head of academic affairs. Isn’t it. The two of you always together — causing trouble in my school!!”

Once the principal’s anger caught, nobody in the hall could make even a small sound.

However well backed a house is, no pupil of Cheonghwa challenges a principal’s authority carelessly.

The strange thing is that he is behaving as though he were protecting the charity case, rather than the Lee Jangyong he has always favoured.

“Principal. You needn’t raise your voice.”

It was Ha Tae-ung.

A smile at the corner of his mouth, and one line handed to a man in a fury.

“No! A creature with a character that low has to be driven right out of Cheonghwa! I cannot leave Cheonghwa’s future to a man who wears his eyeballs as decoration!”

The answer came back rough and settled.

This has to be tidied up by getting rid of him cleanly.

Lee Jangyong has picked a fight with the direct line of the royal family of the great Haryun Group.

Show mercy to a creature like that and there is no telling what comes of it later.

A charity case — no, the young master — and of course he can take full marks.

“Wh— what??”

“Is this actually happening??”

“Polite speech, to a charity case??”

The teachers and pupils watching were appalled in earnest.

The principal, who has always kept a certain gravity in front of ordinary pupils.

To a pupil — and a charity case at that — he used the polite forms.

They had heard it and seen it and could not believe it.

And the naturalness of the two faces and the two manners was more appalling still.

“Grh……”

Lee Jangyong held his cheek and let out a sound like an animal.

What was happening in front of him would not be believed, and his head was clouding.

“……”

It was the same for Lee Jeongjun.

Ordinarily it would be right to see to him first, the son of the president of the parents’ association.

Lee Jeongjun, maternal grandson of Hanguk Group’s chairman and paternal grandson of Doa Ilbo’s.

Across the whole school there are not many at a higher level than his.

He could not begin to understand the principal’s conduct.

The principal is plainly taking measures that put the charity case first.

Their eyes met briefly and he took no notice of it at all.

Does this make any sense??

Lee Jeongjun could only blink at an experience he did not know and at how the principal was handling it.

He learned the charity case’s name for the first time today.

And lost to him in a contest.

He read the type of question and began writing out the formulae.

And while he was still finishing his working, the charity case finished his.

The astonishing part is that Maths Thug never even got the formulae set up. He came apart.

After this, staying on at Cheonghwa as a mathematics teacher will be difficult.

The board was laid out in front of pupils and staff, with a wager riding on it.

“Teacher Lee Jangyong.”

Ha Tae-ung looked down at him where he had not got up, and spoke to him kindly.

Lee Jangyong poured insults at him in front of the pupils, deliberately, and there is nothing emotional in how he is being answered.

Somehow that was more frightening.

The charity case who was sworn at in his own classroom and dragged to the great hall.

His face is nothing but calm, as though none of it had ever happened.

The thing was running somewhere nobody could follow, and only then did pupils and staff begin to feel there was something wrong.

Ha Tae-ung…… what are you, really??

Lee Hyoju gave up imagining any further.

He felt like something in a territory she could not guess at.

Several hundred pupils and the teachers of Cheonghwa High School are watching.

How can a person stand there like that?

And how many people could?

Lee Hyoju looked back at herself.

She has no confidence she could do it.

And there stands Ha Tae-ung, the charity case, on the platform, plainly, as a pitiless avenger.

He has used no violence, and no power to press anybody down with.

That aura coming off him, and no telling what it is.

A good many of the pupils whose eyes seemed to meet his turned their heads and looked away.

That’s my friend!

Park Jiung, watching from the floor, was seized by a violent feeling.

A place where the whole of the grudge he has had to carry as a charity case seems to have been thrown clear.

Not one person here could handle Ha Tae-ung carelessly.

Under every provocation he does not blink once and keeps his composure, like a master of refusing the bait.

Park Jiung closed both fists on respect and on a swelling in his chest.

I’ll give the whole of my life for you.

Meeting Ha Tae-ung was heaven’s own luck.

A little later and there is no telling what his life would have turned into. The thought alone is dreadful.

He was going to leave the school, and he had made plans, imagining hunting down every one of the children who tormented him and killing them.

And exactly then Ha Tae-ung appeared.

As of today, Ha Tae-ung has become a Cheonghwa legend.

Tae-ung……

Pro An Hyeonju, who heard and came at speed.

Joining late, she found in front of her a Ha Tae-ung who had settled the whole room.

The same man who did not blink once in front of the chairman of Oyang Group.

I mean it. I’ll prepare for the LPGA, as you said.

Now she can believe it without doubt.

That is how far the trust has gone.

Anybody who knew would call her somebody with a straw stuck in him, and it was all right.

I’ll succeed…… and pay all of it back.

An Hyeonju has a conscience too.

Magnificent.

One word went straight into Kang Ari’s head.

The Ha Tae-ung sunbae in front of her looked like a male lead who had torn his way out of a webtoon.

Different from the air about him on that rainy day, steeped in melancholy.

What she saw today was a hero, complete.

Thud! Thud.

Kang Ari’s heart went.

And in that moment.

“Kha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

(End of Chapter 58)