“I asked what you're doing here.”
Gwak Do-jin's body twisted for an instant as he advanced with a rough expression.
‘Damn it.’
The aftereffects of the horse stance.
His lower-body muscles were shredded to the point that even walking was difficult.
“Senior!”
Baek Yu-yeon cried out in surprise.
“How did you even know to come here?”
Hwang Min-woo stepped in front of her with a sneer on his face.
“Well, well. Mad Dog. You'd better calm down.”
“You son of a bitch......”
“What, going to hit me again? Get yourself disciplined again? You do know the reason you got off with being held back after all that discipline is me, don't you?”
“You! You!”
Up on the roof, Kang Hyeon was watching the situation with interest.
Gwak Do-jin had been a good kid until his second year, hadn't he?
By the look of it there was some history tangled up between those three.
“Discipline? Fine, you little shit. Go on and keep disciplining me.”
When Gwak Do-jin advanced like a charging bull, Hwang Min-woo flinched and stepped back, cowed by the force of him.
“Has this crazy bastard actually lost his mind.”
“Senior! Please stop!”
The one who blocked his approach was Baek Yu-yeon.
“Why are you always like this, senior?”
“What?”
“There's no reason for you to get involved in whatever I do here. I'll handle my own affairs, so please don't step in.”
At the edge in Baek Yu-yeon's voice, Gwak Do-jin's feet came to a dead stop.
That both of her fists were trembling faintly, Gwak Do-jin knew better than anyone.
“Hear that, Mad Dog? Learn your place a li......”
“You be quiet too, Hwang Min-woo.”
Baek Yu-yeon's gaze turned coldly on Hwang Min-woo.
“Watch how you speak to my senior. Keep showing me that side of yourself and I'll lose any desire to sign your contract.”
“F-Fine. Fine, I get it. Senior Gwak. My apologies, all right?”
Bowing his head perfunctorily, Hwang Min-woo signaled Baek Yu-yeon with his eyes.
A suggestion that they move elsewhere.
After a moment's hesitation, Baek Yu-yeon turned her head sharply and disappeared from the spot.
Grinding his teeth as he watched her go, Gwak Do-jin started to say something and in the end could not.
And then.
“Rraaaaagh!”
BANG! CRASH!
Howling like an animal, he hammered the wall with his bare fists.
Passing cadets frowned and steered clear, in a way that suggested they were watching a familiar sight.
Something along the lines of the Mad Dog doing his mad thing.
Behind his back came the sound of someone landing lightly.
“......!”
When a startled Gwak Do-jin turned his head, a familiar face was holding out a whiskey bottle.
“Fancy a drink?”
***
Sitting on the ground in an alley, the two of them each swigged straight from a bottle.
Kang Hyeon drank while venting the liquor's heat in measured amounts, but Gwak Do-jin was drunk in no time.
“Fuck. Fuck!”
He poured drink after drink down his throat.
Did Gwak Do-jin know that bottle cost five hundred thousand won?
Ordinarily he would have let it pass.
He tended to think children's problems were better settled between children than with an adult wading in.
‘Only.’
With Baek Yu-yeon involved, it was a different matter.
Especially with her on the verge of signing some strange contract.
“So, you little shit. That girl. Do you like her?”
“......It isn't like that.”
“Then what?”
“That's none of your business, Professor.”
Gwak Do-jin shot back sullenly and swigged from the bottle again.
Gulp, gulp.
“None of my business, true. Whoever you tangle with, whether you tuck your tail in front of some pretty boy.”
“......I did not tuck my tail!”
Gwak Do-jin flared up.
“No? Then what was it I saw back there? You couldn't throw a single decent punch, you just stood there shaking.”
“That was......!”
Kang Hyeon was provoking him on purpose.
To scratch at the wound he had buried away and drag it out of him.
‘Get drunk. And bring it up.’
Wounds do not heal by being hidden.
Hide them and they fester.
What festers eventually rots from the inside, and in the end it ruins a whole person.
So just tear it open.
Turn the insides out, squeeze out the pus, spill blood if you must — empty the rot first.
Only then will something else fill the space it leaves.
“If you're afraid, better not to bark at all. Bark and then fail to bite, and what kind of mad dog is that? A mongrel.”
“You think I don't bite because I don't know how?”
“I thought you didn't know how.”
“I don't bite because Yu-yeon gets hurt if I do!”
Gwak Do-jin was worked up enough that he hardly knew what he was saying, but with that shout he felt his throat open a little.
Once the blockage loosened, he wanted to loosen it a little further.
“Hwang Min-woo is the eldest son of the Taewang Guild Master.”
“Taewang Guild?”
“You don't know it?”
“I don't.”
“......”
Gwak Do-jin looked at him with an expression that said, what is with this professor?
Taewang was not one of the three great guilds or in the top tier, but it was a famous guild no Hunter could fail to know.
“About a year ago, there was a dungeon practical.”
A demon beast had drawn its aggression onto Baek Yu-yeon, and Gwak Do-jin had thrown himself in to save her.
Then he learned the circumstances afterward.
It had been Hwang Min-woo's doing.
He had been carrying a torch for Baek Yu-yeon, confessed publicly, and done it out of spite at being turned down.
“Son of a bitch.”
“He is one.”
Grind.
Gwak Do-jin ground his teeth.
“So I knocked his teeth in without stopping to think.”
“Good for you.”
“Good for me, my ass!”
Gwak Do-jin surged with emotion and tipped liquor down his throat.
“I nearly got expelled for it!”
That had been the beginning of the whole affair.
From that day, Gwak Do-jin was disciplined on a charge of assaulting a fellow student and referred to expulsion review as well.
He had naturally protested fiercely, but the Taewang Guild had already bought off several professors.
“That was when I learned what the world is. That it's a rotten place where rich thugs with connections thrive more than people who live decently.”
That was probably the moment.
The moment Gwak Do-jin began to go astray.
Kang Hyeon drank in silence.
‘No wonder.’
Every time he looked at Gwak Do-jin, he had the sense of a man barking in clothes that did not fit him.
He was no thug, yet he had the feel of someone imitating a third-rate thug.
Kang Hyeon had seen countless pieces of trash while rolling through the martial world.
Genuine bastards who took heads and laughed about it.
Do you know what the defining trait of men like that is?
They never bare their teeth in front of someone strong.
If it looks like they might die, they piss themselves, grovel and run.
That is the true nature of real trash.
‘But.’
Gwak Do-jin was different.
Under killing intent that felt as though it would take his head off, he had crawled across the ground and crossed the line regardless.
Real trash can never do a thing like that.
He had simply been hurt, and had thrown a tantrum asking someone to look at him.
And there had been no adult to set him straight.
“Khh, the drink is bitter.”
Nearly through one bottle, Gwak Do-jin's voice trembled faintly.
“I know it too. Why I haven't been expelled. It's because of Yu-yeon. That idiot......”
Gwak Do-jin clenched his fist.
“She begged in front of that garbage Hwang Min-woo, saying I was about to have my life ruined for saving her. Asking him to spare me the expulsion, at least.”
“......”
“That son of a bitch must have been delighted, a girl who never even looked at him going down on her knees. He used it as leverage to jerk Yu-yeon around for a whole year.”
If he was honest with himself, Gwak Do-jin had been relieved.
At the fact that he was not being expelled.
“I don't have parents. I was raised by my grandmother from a young age.”
Kang Hyeon felt a kinship at that part.
He too had no parents, and in his youth had been raised by...... old men.
“She spent her whole life selling greens in a market stall trying to make something of me. When I got into this Academy, she threw a party for the whole neighborhood and cried. Saying our Do-jin was going to be a Hunter now and give her an easy life.”
Drip, drip.
In the end, tears ran from Gwak Do-jin's eyes.
“How am I supposed to tell a grandmother like that...... that I was expelled for beating up a classmate. How am I supposed to make the excuse that I was thrown out unfairly for having no connections?”
In the end, what had shackled Gwak Do-jin were the people who loved him.
Baek Yu-yeon's sacrifice, kneeling for his sake.
The expectations of a grandmother who lived looking only at him.
“Do you know Professor Hwang Ye-rim? The best in the country in martial medicine. Yu-yeon is a prodigy who could get in as her personal disciple. But...... to save me, she's about to go under that son of a bitch Hwang Min-woo's guild on a ten-year slave contract. I went to find her today because I heard about it! Raaagh! What a shitty world this is!”
“The world is like that to begin with.”
There had been no shortage of the Hwang Min-woo type in Murim either.
Hypocrites who hung out the glossy signboard of a prestigious orthodox sect and bound people with money and power behind it.
And conversely, he had seen no end of men like Gwak Do-jin who cried out clumsily for justice, then were trampled and discarded for having no strength.
‘Justice? A nauseating word.’
The world is not corrupt.
It simply turns by the logic of power.
Justice without strength is always devoured by hypocrisy with it.
“If it galls you, then get stronger. Why roll around in the mud alongside them boasting about how you're dirty too? Idiot.”
Kang Hyeon rose unhurriedly to his feet.
Beating the dust roughly off his trouser legs, he snatched the empty whiskey bottle out of Gwak Do-jin's hand.
“Uh, uh-uh?”
Gwak Do-jin's eyes, half unfocused with drink, followed the movement blankly.
“Emptied it, then.”
Kang Hyeon knocked his own bottle against Gwak Do-jin's empty one.
Clink!
The clear ring of glass cut through the night air.
“I heard the whining out well enough.”
“......I wasn't whining. It just galls me.”
“And what if it galls you. Were you hoping somebody would step in on your behalf and take that pretty boy's head off for you?”
Gwak Do-jin's lips pressed shut.
He had never hoped for that.
Because he had learned, bone-deep, that this was a world in which nobody would help him.
“Listen well, mongrel.”
The languor in Kang Hyeon's eyes settled coldly for an instant.
A weighty voice mixed with the scent of alcohol came down on Gwak Do-jin's ear.
“If it was taken because you had no strength, then take it back with your own strength and be done with it. Rolling in the mud barking about how unfair it is had better end today.”
“......”
“And you're an exception.”
“Sorry?”
What did that mean?
“You can no longer skip my class. If you're not out there at six tomorrow morning, know that it won't be the pretty boy who kills you first — it will be me.”
“......A-All of a sudden?”
“The price of drinking my expensive liquor.”
With those last words, Kang Hyeon's form melted away into the darkness.
As though he had never been there at all.
“Hah?”
A faint, empty laugh hung at the corner of Gwak Do-jin's mouth.
Even so, the weight in his chest felt eased, at least somewhat.
***
That night.
The corridor of the faculty residences.
Knock, knock.
At the sound, the door flew open.
“Mr. Kang Hyeon?”
Lee Se-a, a towel wrapped around her hair as though she had just finished a shower, greeted him with round eyes.
Kang Hyeon abruptly shoved two empty whiskey bottles into her arms.
What that meant, Lee Se-a knew very well.
‘He wants me to buy the same again.’
“Oh, these were expensive, and you've finished them both?”
“Something's come up to look into.”
“Sorry? Ah, that Cadet Baek Yu-yeon you mentioned this afternoon?”
“No, not that.”
“Then what?”
“The Taewang Guild.”
“......Taewang?”
“Yes. And a list of the Academy professors tied to that guild, whether by money or by their livelihood.”