“The great hall? How irritating.”

The freest presence in first year, class ten.

Long straight hair with a gloss on it, and the style makes the most of it.

Cold, haughty eyes, a stubborn red mouth, a high bridge to the nose that seems to speak for her pride, and a fine-boned face.

And for all that, Lee Hyorin gives off a second, sultry sort of attraction alongside it.

The morning bell went a long time ago, and she has only now come in.

Her uniform skirt is shorter than the other girls’.

It plainly runs against Cheonghwa’s strict rules on dress, and she does not mind.

Makeup is not permitted either, and on her it looks natural.

Her face and the air about her catch the eye at once.

At school her face is ordinarily without expression, and it creased slightly.

The room she has come back to after several days is far too quiet.

Ordinarily her arriving is enough on its own to draw the others round her.

And Lee Hyorin holds the centre of Five Fairies, which has gone off like a bomb.

For a girl with an attention-seeker’s streak running through her, the present situation is deeply unsatisfactory.

She takes her charge from the eyes that turn on her.

At Cheonghwa too, of course, being the object of the pupils’ warm interest was simply the daily round.

The child of an ordinary house could not attend school and run an idol career alongside it.

Lee Hyorin alone, of everybody at Cheonghwa, has been permitted a life as an idol enjoying the public’s affection.

The house itself is beyond comparison.

The president of the parents’ association is her mother.

And both sides of the family besides are chaebol houses holding fearsome power.

Lee Hyorin, joining the great hall late, came in and ran her eye round it.

Hm?

She has appeared in the great hall and not one person is paying her any attention.

The eyes of the massed pupils, and of the teachers, are driven into the platform.

Oh? My brother?

She found her cold-blooded, study-obsessed brother, Lee Jeongjun.

Standing blankly up on the platform with an expression she has never seen on him.

A brother ordinarily so cold you could put a needle in him and not draw a drop of blood, and he looked like an idiot.

His mouth was open and his wits were gone, and the direction he was staring in——

“And what is that?”

The sound came out of Lee Hyorin before she knew she was making it.

A boy she has never once noticed came right into her eye.

He is extremely tall.

He is handsome.

You do not often see a face like that among ordinary people.

Something about him even against the surgically finished male idols she works alongside.

And the thing that stands out most——

“He’s giving off light……”

She hated the atmosphere at home, and from early on she lived by picking out exactly whatever she was told not to do.

Which is a large part of why her parents are not on good terms.

Parents in pattern only. A shop-window marriage.

The two of them have been like that for more than ten years now.

The longer it went on the less she could stand the sight of how they live.

In adolescence she put a foot into the entertainment world her family were violently against, and became a member of a girl group.

Her mother said she would not be made into a clown, and tried to press it down by force.

Lee Hyorin did not give ground.

She held her wrist out in front of her mother and threatened to cut it, and forced a permission out of her.

Both of them already knew her character and knew that she would go through with it.

From then on her parents became active supporters of the thing.

The astonishing part is that Chairman Lee Doseong stepped in himself and began pushing his granddaughter forward.

That was work done to turn the direction of opinion on her mother, of course.

With her grandfather’s help, Lee Hyorin showed a thousand faces.

On a broadcast she apologised in tears for what her mother had done.

The tears of a beautiful girl, and still so young, and sympathy came up at once.

The move was calculated to the last degree, and it carried with the public.

That is how Lee Hyorin became a famous idol, packaged as a fairy who loves her mother, and a fandom came with it.

At school, though, her nature shows exactly as it is.

Cheonghwa is a world where the law of the weak as meat and the strong as eaters applies thoroughly.

An atmosphere formed in which everybody accommodated Lee Hyorin’s airs.

School is somewhere she comes to work off the strain of being an entertainer.

Today, though, she has met a situation unlike the usual one.

“Whoa.”

There is an aura off that boy of the kind that stopped her breath in front of the great seniors of the entertainment world.

Standing level with her brother, he looked haughtily down on the pupils and teachers watching him.

“Is he really…… a charity case?”

“His presence is insane.”

“…… He looks like the student council president.”

A charity case?

Lee Hyorin was thrown.

The one giving off a light nobody can go near is a charity case.

A second shock, and it came from the pupils’ talk.

That can’t be.

She is only in the first year, and she knows perfectly well what a charity case’s position is at Cheonghwa.

Here they are untouchables.

A pitiable sort who can never be friends with an ordinary Cheonghwa pupil.

“You charity case bastard! Do you know who I aaaaam!!”

Maths Thug, who had been down on the floor, came up onto his feet.

He had lost his reason, and his eyes had gone right round.

“Keep your promise, please.”

“What promise!”

Lee Jangyong looked at the boy and growled it.

Fuck it. I’m throwing this school away.

He was invited long ago to a well-known Gangnam crammer as a top-grade lecturer.

He stayed at Cheonghwa because grinding down prodigies was better fun than a large salary.

Now that it has come to this, there is no longer any need.

He has been made a poor sight.

Beaten by a charity case bastard and slapped by the principal in front of the pupils.

Putting it all down, he found his mind was easier for it.

“You said you would go down on your knees and apologise if I won, didn’t you?”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“Heh heh heh. Mad little bastard. You think I, Lee Jangyong, would go down on my knees to a beggar charity case like you? Is that a thing that could even happen?”

“Teacher Lee!”

“Shut up!!”

The principal put himself in and Lee Jangyong turned on him, glaring straight at him, and shouted.

“L——”

The colour went out of Principal An Jongwuk’s face.

From the man’s manner he could tell that he had made up his mind to part with Cheonghwa.

“My condition was bad today and I slipped for a moment. You think creatures with flower beds in their skulls could beat me?”

The mind Lee Jangyong has kept hidden came out unfiltered.

He looked round the pupils and sneered at them openly.

He grew up in a wretched household, and the Cheonghwa pupils who enjoy every advantage became the object of his resentment and his hatred.

He has carried on a teaching career for the pleasure of making the superior ones submit.

None of it is needed now.

“You truly won’t apologise?”

“That’s right. Why would I apologise when I’ve done nothing wrong? And what would a charity case like you do about it? Heh heh heh heh.”

Certain he had seen the end of it, Lee Jangyong laughed him to scorn.

“You’ll have to take responsibility for saying that.”

Ha Tae-ung held his eyes on him, level.

“Responsibility? What are you going to do? Do everything you can, if you can! You fucking blockhead!”

It is a charity case he is dealing with.

Having given Cheonghwa up, there is nothing in the world for Lee Jangyong to fear, and he came back higher still.

“Then you may take responsibility exactly as you have said.”

A middle-aged man’s voice came from the back of the great hall.

Every eye turned from the platform.

Two people nobody knew were standing in front of the doors, a man and a woman.

They are not Cheonghwa staff.

A middle-aged man in a deep grey suit, and a good-looking woman in a two-piece.

Footsteps. Steady ones.

Clack. Clack.

The two of them split the pupils, crossed the hall and went up onto the platform.

“Who’s that?”

“Outsiders, aren’t they?”

The pupils opened a path and muttered as they did it.

Outsiders are not admitted to the school.

Even the guard at the front gate is specially selected before he is hired.

Cause a disturbance at Cheonghwa and you are buried, with no recovering a working life afterwards.

And two adults had come inside the school somehow at their leisure, and stood on the platform without a check.

“Who are——”

Principal An Jongwuk put the question to two people he was seeing for the first time.

They are not ordinary people, though……

An Jongwuk has dealt with the upper class for the whole of a teaching career.

As a rule, one look at a person and he can price them.

The two in front of him carry the particular smell of people who have succeeded to some degree in the world.

Scent made up specially for them, and a manner running over with room and unhurriedness.

That authority is worked into both of them.

You can tell it too from clothes whose maker cannot be read off them, and from a document case.

The two of them plainly belong to the class that has succeeded.

“Allow me to introduce myself.”

The middle-aged man handed over a card and inclined his head.

Who on earth……?

An Jongwuk checked the card with doubt filling his eyes.

“……!!”

The firm’s name in gold leaf, and the title stamped in front of the man’s own, and his eyes went round.

“Jo…… and Jang.”

The Jo and Jang An Jongwuk knows is the core body of the country’s foremost judicial cartel, which exists for the legal interests of the upper class.

“What! They were Jo and Jang attorneys?”

“Why??”

“What’s this about, suddenly?”

“Jo and Jang, at the school??”

Once the two were placed, the pupils’ composure went to pieces.

Since this morning the incidents have not stopped coming.

A charity case’s perfect score, and a contest with Maths Thug.

Lee Jeongjun entering the field out of nowhere, and then the principal assaulting a teacher.

The quicker pupils have already sent their parents a message.

Ping. Ping.

Sure enough, notification sounds went off one after another on every side.

That is how much of a shock a Monday morning at school had become.

“Wh— what are you people!”

Lee Jangyong, who has still not grasped the situation, shouted it out as though calling them to account.

Jo and Jang? What of it.

Lee Jangyong has committed no crime.

And in truth an ordinary person has no occasion to come face to face with Jo and Jang at all.

Snap!

Attorney Kim Gyeongmin looked coldly at the man with his eyes rolling.

The world is packed full of ignorant people who live without knowing what they have done wrong.

The teacher in front of him is one of them.

Kim Gyeongmin turned his body a moment, toward Ha Tae-ung.

And.

“Young master.”

Kim Gyeongmin, senior attorney of Jo and Jang, bent from the waist to him, respectfully.

“Young…… master?”

“……!!”

(End of Chapter 59)