<CHAPTER 9>

She’s here!

Three-stripe Nike slippers.

My weapon of pride.

An ordinary everyday item they looked down on.

With my foot still planted on Oh Gwang-jun’s face, I turned toward the sound.

A female student had just entered through the back door of the classroom and stopped in her tracks.

The moment I saw her, she filled my entire field of vision.

It was as if the whole classroom suddenly grew brighter.

In the past, she was the kind of girl who made me cower just by looking at her.

A young lady from a noble family whom commoners like me didn’t even dare to look at.

“Still beautiful, huh….”

The thought slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.

She was around 170 centimeters tall.

She had a small, snow-white face without a single blemish, framed by short hair.

Perfect features without a single flaw and a body with golden proportions.

Her name was Lee Hyo-joo, a girl who supposedly received handfuls of agency business cards whenever she stepped outside the school grounds.

Unlike the other girls, she didn’t even wear makeup.

Her fresh, youthful skin and natural purity were enough to make her shine.

Her large eyes beneath naturally formed double eyelids stared straight at me.

Clear and limpid.

As far as I knew, she had gone on to attend Korea University.

And yet here she was….

“……??”

She—or rather, Lee Hyo-joo—opened her eyes wide and looked at me questioningly.

Her gaze demanded an explanation for my sudden remark.

There wasn’t a single person in this school who would have dared say something like that to Lee Hyo-joo.

And on top of that, the situation itself was ridiculous.

Oh Gwang-jun, who had been throwing his weight around in our class all this time, was currently pinned beneath my slipper.

Anyone would find it bizarre to see me standing on his face and casually spouting nonsense.

“…Ha Tae-woong’s definitely gone crazy, right?”

“He said Lee Hyo-joo was pretty!!”

A commotion erupted among the students.

Their reaction.

I understood it perfectly.

Lee Hyo-joo was the real deal—a genuine chaebol heiress.

She was the granddaughter of the current chairman of Oyang Group, which ranked around sixtieth among South Korea’s major business groups.

Like most chaebol families, her father was the CEO of one of the group’s affiliates.

If that had been all, you might have thought, Well, so what?

But there was more.

Her great-uncle was the current chairman of Doa Ilbo, one of the nation’s three major daily newspapers.

She stood right at the heart of the tangled web of political and business marriages among Korea’s chaebol families.

She naturally belonged to the apex predator class where wealth and media power converged.

Her roots were simply different.

She was descended from Lee Jang-su, Sangchon, who had been the richest man in Korea during the Japanese colonial period.

Just look at that subtle golden aura radiating from her entire body.

Her haughty bearing perfectly complemented that aura, making her stand out even more.

And that Lee Hyo-joo….

Snicker.

Perhaps finding the whole thing absurd, she let out a small laugh.

“Ha Tae-woong.”

She called my name precisely.

It was the first time anyone had called me by name since I entered Cheonghwa.

A glorious moment for the family.

“Yeah.”

It was also the first time our eyes had met.

I looked directly into hers.

“Can you handle this?”

Lee Hyo-joo’s gaze shifted toward Oh Gwang-jun beneath my slipper.

She knew.

Among all the students in Class 3 of the second year, I was the ultimate Eul—the lowest rung in the hierarchy.

She was reminding me of the reality I was in: I was standing on top of one of the Gaps I was supposed to look up to.

“More or less.”

I was concerned about what Oh Gwang-jun’s father did for a living, but I wasn’t afraid.

A prosecutor?

There were ways to deal with someone in that line of work.

“Don’t do this again. Violence isn’t allowed in my classroom.”

My classroom.

That was how Lee Hyo-joo referred to it.

She was our class president.

Lee Hyo-joo was practically a perfectionist.

For someone like her, who treated even being class president as an opportunity to build up her résumé, violence in the classroom was unacceptable.

She didn’t ask why I had done this to Oh Gwang-jun.

Scuff, scuff.

After saying just that, Lee Hyo-joo walked past me with light footsteps.

Whoosh.

Plop.

Without a second thought, she picked up a pack of wet tissues from someone’s desk and dropped it in front of Oh Gwang-jun’s face.

“Clean up your own mess.”

Her clear voice was devoid of emotion.

Shiver.

Oh Gwang-jun trembled beneath my foot.

A single word from someone in the Brahmin class was an absolute command.

“You heard her, right? She says you should clean up the shit you made yourself. Heh.”

I laughed at him the way Oh Gwang-jun used to laugh at me.

I wouldn’t endure it anymore.

This is how you live a smart school life.

If someone steps on you, you have to squirm!

If they bare their teeth, bite them back!

If I kept swallowing everything like I had back then, I wouldn’t be Ha Tae-woong.

I had spent my life enduring things, but the world had never moved according to what I wanted.

Either way, the world kept turning the way it always did.

I had no attachment left to Cheonghwa High School.

At my current level, I could even take the GED route and be fine.

But….

“This is fun.”

The playback button on the Sa-baeja’s school life had just been pressed.

This is freaking entertaining.

I had high hopes for what was to come.

—

Rustle.

Lee Hyo-joo sat down and began solving the math problems her private tutor had printed out for her.

But the pen wasn’t moving as smoothly as usual.

Her head was filled with distracting thoughts, leaving her feeling suffocated.

The horrifying scene she had witnessed moments ago.

It had shocked her deeply.

She had pretended to remain calm, but she had been afraid.

She had attended an elite private kindergarten in Gangnam before eventually coming to Cheonghwa.

She had seen minor acts of violence before, but never anything as brutal as what had just happened.

Ha Tae-woong had stood on a person’s face and laughed.

He looked like a safari hunter who had captured a wild beast.

He was definitely crazy.

He had always been the quietest person in the classroom.

Tall and handsome enough to rival a model, yet burdened with the status of a Sa-baeja.

He had always known his place and behaved accordingly.

Lee Hyo-joo had occasionally seen celebrities who acted arrogantly simply because they trusted their looks.

But she had never had any personal curiosity about Ha Tae-woong.

His academic performance was fairly good, but he had never managed to break through the wall surrounding Sa-baeja.

Oh Gwang-jun occasionally crossed the line in class, but never enough to become truly bothersome.

That was simply how the world she had grown up in worked.

Only the strong could hold their heads high.

Power, wealth, connections—if you lacked even one of them, you became weaker.

And at that moment, you had to lower your head.

She had grown up learning those facts firsthand.

But today, Ha Tae-woong, a Sa-baeja, had shaken the beliefs Lee Hyo-joo had always considered unshakable.

He had rebelled.

He changed. Why?

He had looked at her and said, Still beautiful, huh?

It was an impossible provocation.

There was no one around her, apart from her family, who would dare say something like that to her.

And yet, she hadn’t disliked it.

Their eyes had met, and unlike before, Ha Tae-woong hadn’t looked away.

“Heh.”

A soft, inexplicable laugh escaped her lips.

The punishment for what had happened today wouldn’t be light.

By now, the rumor had probably spread throughout the entire school.

For starters, Oh Gwang-jun, whose father was a chief prosecutor, wouldn’t let this slide.

And there were plenty of nasty boys who associated with Oh Gwang-jun.

“Just don’t make things troublesome for me….”

Lee Hyo-joo muttered quietly to herself.

Ever since entering Cheonghwa, her position among her cousins had become rather ambiguous.

It was a complicated matter, one that carried several meanings for the children of chaebol families as they approached adulthood.

Soon, it would be decided how much of the family fortune each of them would receive.

When she was younger and carefree, she had dreamed of living freely like ordinary people.

She no longer felt that way.

Wasn’t there even a saying in the Talmud that nothing was worse than an empty wallet?

Lee Hyo-joo, born into a chaebol family, had understood the way the world worked a long time ago.

—

Ding-ding, ding-ding-ding~ ♬

Fourth period had ended.

“The scope for next week’s midterms covers everything we learned up through today. You all know how important the Writing and Reading section is, right?”

Teacher Han Yu-ra gave them a bright, charming smile.

“You’ll make the questions easy for us, right?”

“Teacher! Give us a hint!”

No matter how brilliant or exceptional they were, once they were inside a high school classroom, they were all just teenagers.

When facing an objectively graded exam, chaebol and Sa-baeja alike stood on equal ground.

“I’d like to do that too. But you know the standards of the other teachers, right?”

Second-year Korean language.

The exam questions were jointly written by three teachers.

“They’re way too hard….”

“Teacher, the difficulty of your questions is the worst!!”

As befitted a prestigious private high school, the difficulty of the exams was on another level.

Even among the famous top-tier private academy instructors in Gangnam, Cheonghwa High School’s exams were considered some of the hardest.

“Enjoy your lunch.”

The adorable teacher left the classroom with quick, light steps.

Whoosh.

I stood up from my seat.

It was the moment I had been secretly looking forward to ever since I returned to school.

Lunch!

Cheonghwa High’s cafeteria was on a completely different level from other schools.

Just thinking about it made me swallow.

I was just about to leave the classroom when—

“Fucking bastard….”

A curse-filled voice came from behind me.

And then a right hand rose straight into the air.

“Go eat shit, asshole.”

I gave him a proudly raised middle finger.

Then I headed toward the cafeteria with a light step.

No matter what anyone said, lunch came first.

My stride was confident and full of swagger.

The cafeteria had been newly completed beside the main building a few years earlier.

Unlike other schools, students weren’t divided by grade and forced to share the same space.

The enthusiastic parents and committee members simply couldn’t stand to see even a moment of time go to waste.

The cafeteria was large enough to accommodate the entire student body.

However, the third-years had their own cafeteria in the new building.

That way, everyone could eat lunch at the same time.

The facility was fully equipped with excellent air purification, heating, and cooling systems.

As a private autonomous high school, Cheonghwa freely accepted large donations from outside benefactors.

Of course, they didn’t accept money from just anyone.

First, you needed substantial wealth.

Then you needed enough power to back it up before you could join the school’s operating committee or parent association.

Those were the people who provided the donations.

If you wanted a typical example of the kind of power-abuse drama set in an ultra-luxurious school, you could think of Cheonghwa High School as the perfect model.

Whoosh.

Even the cafeteria’s tempered-glass doors were automatic.

And then the cafeteria spread out before my eyes.

“Whoa!”

I let out an involuntary exclamation and grabbed a plate.

This wasn’t an ordinary stainless-steel school lunch tray.

Cheonghwa High School’s meals were….

“A buffet. Heh-heh.”

The cafeteria was run by a chef who had once been the head chef at a luxury hotel, along with a dietitian who held a doctorate.

It started with organic vegetable salads, followed by high-quality meats like Jeju black pork and premium Korean beef from native cattle.

There was fried fish such as tilefish and giant hairtail, all kinds of appetizing side dishes, pizza and spaghetti, seasonal fruits from various countries, and even slices of cake.

It was the kind of food a Sa-baeja like me would probably never have the chance to pay for and eat in my entire life.

And there were two full sets of everything prepared on each side.

“How can you not eat this when it’s this good?”

Only about half of the entire student body used the cafeteria each day.

Despite its enormous size, the relatively small number of students made the atmosphere surprisingly peaceful.

After graduating from Cheonghwa High, this was the one thing I had missed.

The high-quality school meals.

I had felt it even when I was working as an adult, but the food here could put famous hotel buffets to shame.

Cheonghwa High School was truly serious about its cafeteria food.

I love you so damn much!

“Hanwoo bulgogi! Japchae! Young radish kimchi!”

I piled generous portions of delicious dishes onto my plate.