A short while later.
When Kang Hyeon came into the office, Lee Se-a asked as though she had been waiting.
“Well? What did Hwang Tae-gwang say?”
Gwak Do-jin and Yoon Hyeon-jong swallowed too.
“He asked me to delete the footage I took yesterday.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“That if that Hwang Min-woo confesses everything at the committee with his own mouth and hands over the professors' bribery ledger, I'll delete it.”
“......Sorry?”
The one who reacted was Gwak Do-jin.
What on earth was all this supposed to mean?
He had already given everything up and was thinking only of being expelled tomorrow, and now what?
Hwang Min-woo's confession?
A professors' bribery ledger?
“Professor, what exactly is this......”
The man who had just come by was the actual Guild Master of Taewang, so it was hardly idle talk.
“Do you really think he'll throw away his own son?”
Beside the frozen Gwak Do-jin, Lee Se-a worried.
“The odds are high.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Hwang Tae-gwang isn't especially fond of Hwang Min-woo.”
You could infer Hwang Tae-gwang's character just from the bribing of professors and the corruption.
A man who will use any means and method to maintain his own power.
To that type, a child is nothing but an ornament to decorate his signboard.
With his own torso about to be taken off, would he not cut a tail?
“Come on, it's still his son.”
“If he had cherished his son to begin with, would he have left him to grow into garbage like that?”
“That's true. Garbage raised garbage.”
“Hwang Tae-gwang wiping up after him all this time wasn't paternal love — he simply didn't want muck on his own face.”
“What if he tries to take revenge?”
“On whom, on me?”
That one line put Lee Se-a's mind at ease.
‘Right.’
Black is who he is!
The man who burst the Leviathan with a wave of his hand when five S-rank Hunters couldn't manage it!
‘If anything I'd be grateful.’
From the state's point of view it would be able to cut out a rotten guild with barely any effort.
“In any case. Gwak Do-jin.”
“Y-Yes?”
Gwak Do-jin flinched.
He still had not grasped the situation.
“There's nothing for you to do tomorrow. Just sit there quietly and watch. No talk about expelling yourself or any of that nonsense. Understood?”
“......Professor.”
“The drink was good. Fine flavor.”
***
Hwang Tae-gwang was even more cold-blooded than expected.
“To throw a son away this fast.”
A file arrived at the professor's email.
The corrupt professors' bribery ledger, sent from Taewang's side.
“Wow, everything you said was right, Mr. Kang Hyeon.”
Skimming the ledger on the screen, Lee Se-a clicked her tongue.
“Good grief, they've eaten a tremendous amount. Now I finally understand why everyone says life gets easy the moment you pin on an Academy professorship.”
“Right, now call them in.”
“Sorry? Call who?”
“Who else. Oh Seong-hun and Park Tae-su.”
He had waited beside the rice bin and caught his rats.
So now those fat rats had to be cooked, didn't they?
“Will they come obediently just because I call?”
“You said you had ability.”
Lee Se-a flinched.
Thinking about it, it was humiliating.
She had boasted about entering the Bureau at the top of her intake, but what had she actually done?
While she was moving by the proper procedures within the bounds of legality, Kang Hyeon had made Hwang Tae-gwang come to him overnight and hand over the ledger of his own accord.
Overwhelming work, done and gone in the time it takes to roast a bean over a lightning flash.
‘Does this even make sense?’
So this was why her seniors in the field had drummed it into her ears that practical experience was what mattered.
Everything she had studied through the night at a desk really was nothing more than theory.
“......I'll call them right now.”
Biting her lip, she tapped at the tablet.
And astonishingly, in under five minutes the two professors came bursting in.
“Hgk, hah!”
“Professor Kang? What was that just now!”
Kang Hyeon was impressed.
“What's this, how did you manage it?”
“I sent the ledger file to their personal emails. And said that if they weren't in the professor's office within five minutes I'd send it to the Ministry of Education and the National Police Agency.”
“Ha, top of your intake indeed.”
When Kang Hyeon gave her a thumbs-up, Professor Oh Seong-hun flared up.
“What do you think you are doing!”
“What about it?”
Kang Hyeon did not respect these two professors.
Hwang Tae-gwang shielding his own child he could at least understand; that was an animal's instinct.
However stupid and rotten the child, he was still his own blood.
But these two?
Men calling themselves professors, who had watched one student nearly lose her life and another have his life unjustly destroyed, and who had chuckled away happily because someone put a few coins in their hands.
Personally, this was the type Kang Hyeon hated most.
“I don't know where you obtained that file, but it's a fabrication. Threatening a professor without even verifying the facts!”
“For a fabrication, isn't it eerily identical to the one you received?”
“Professor Oh, wait.”
This time Park Tae-su, sensing that the situation was serious, stepped in.
“So where did you get that?”
“Where do you think. The man who gave the bribes sent it to me.”
“Wh-What did you say?”
The eyes of both professors went wide enough to pop.
Which meant it had come from the Taewang Guild?
‘Impossible. Why would Taewang do that to us?’
“What I want is one thing. At the committee tomorrow, spit out the truth with your own mouths. Everything Hwang Min-woo has done up to now, and how the pair of you, blinded by a few coins, shoved a perfectly decent cadet's life into the gutter. Lay it all bare. Honestly, I'd rather not waste my strength squabbling with you here either. Let's take the easy road while I'm still asking with words.”
“Preposterous! Is this man drunk? What outrageous nonsense is this!”
“Right. In fact I didn't think you'd listen obediently either.”
“Then what?”
“I intend to say it again to a nicer version of you.”
Rising from his seat, Kang Hyeon loosened the joints of his fists.
“Do you know this? I believe people are born good.”
“What nonsense is that now?”
“Human nature is born good, originally. But live long enough and a black demon of greed and selfishness inevitably settles in. At first the conscience howls, so you feel the prick of it and lose sleep, but later you grow numb even to that voice. And in the end the demon devours you whole.”
Kang Hyeon advanced on the two of them slowly, the way one drives game.
“But here's the thing. Do you know the fastest and surest way to strip off a demon that clings that stubbornly?”
The two professors backed away.
An eerie light settled in Kang Hyeon's eyes.
“You get beaten. That demon, you see, is so wretchedly cowardly that it has neither courage nor patience. In the face of pain it comes off very easily indeed.”
“Y-You crazy lunatic bastard! You think I'll stand for this?”
Feeling the threat, Oh Seong-hun and Park Tae-su hurriedly tried to raise their energy.
But.
‘What?’
‘Why is my energy......?’
The professors' faces went white.
Their energy was completely blocked.
Without either of them noticing, the acupoints of their whole bodies had already been perfectly sealed.
‘Impossible? When on earth?’
They were not given even the space to be astonished.
CRACK!
Kang Hyeon's fist drove mercilessly into Oh Seong-hun's solar plexus.
“Kuh, kuheok!”
Seeing Oh Seong-hun crumple, Park Tae-su tried to flee, but Kang Hyeon's kick lashed brutally into his shin.
Thud, thwack! Thuuud!
Kang Hyeon does not beat children.
They are not yet grown, so a word will get through to them.
But grown men who have aged without becoming adults?
They deserve a beating.
They cannot be reformed by anything but the rod.
How much time passed.
“Spare me!”
“I was wrong! Professor Kang!”
At last the demon lifted from the two professors.
“Have you turned obedient now?”
“Yes, yes! Perfectly obedient!”
“And what I said earlier?”
“......If we do, what becomes of us?”
“What do you think becomes of you.”
Kang Hyeon dropped back onto the sofa and answered languidly.
“There are only two options. Tell the truth with your own mouths tomorrow and pay the price for your crimes, or run and be beaten to death by me.”
“......!”
“I've given you the chance. Choose as you like.”
The two professors, limbs trembling, looked at each other.
Their deliberation would probably not be long.
***
At that hour.
“Father, you called for me?”
“I hear the disciplinary committee convenes tomorrow. Explain to me exactly what happened.”
“Ah, because of that...... Haa, it's nothing much. There's a rather clever girl called Baek Yu-yeon. I was trying to bring her over and that Mad Dog kept interfering.”
Hwang Min-woo worked himself up and poured out his grievances as though he were the wronged party, but Hwang Tae-gwang already knew the whole of it.
“Ha, haha.”
‘I have been inattentive to my son — far too inattentive.’
He had considered that the heir to an organization ought to have a ruthless side and a thorough grasp of reality.
But that was not ruthlessness.
It was simply stupidity.
To swing Taewang's name and power around that lightly, merely to force his way to one girl he had fixated on?
And in front of a monster the Bureau protects, at that?
“Son.”
“Yes.”
“At the committee tomorrow, tell the truth with your own mouth. That you threatened her, and that you bought off professors and fabricated the record.”
“What are you saying! Why would we?”
“We? Did you not hear what I just said? Not we — say that you did it.”
“F-Father......?”
“Secretary Kim, bring me an iron from my golf bag over there.”
“Which number shall I bring?”
“The seven.”
Slide.
Taking the silver iron the secretary handed over without a word, Hwang Tae-gwang rose slowly to his feet.
Hwang Min-woo's complexion went pale in an instant.
“D-Dad! W-Wait a moment. Why are you doing this?”
“Why?”
Hwang Tae-gwang's eyes settled coldly.
“I don't care what you do out there. But I will not watch the name Taewang made into a joke because of you. Get down.”
“Eek!”
“Are you not getting down?”
Screams rang out through the Taewang Guild building for quite some time as well.
***
The disciplinary committee ended as anticlimactically as expected.
Because Hwang Min-woo, who came in limping, confessed.
Everything from trying to kill Baek Yu-yeon in a fit of temper a year ago, to buying off two professors and framing Gwak Do-jin.
When the startled Dean of Academic Affairs looked at the two professors, they admitted it as well.
“Blinded by Taewang's money, we fabricated Cadet Gwak Do-jin's disciplinary record. We admit every offense, will resign our professorships immediately, and will submit to police investigation.”
Choi Byeong-gil's mouth fell open.
Was this a disciplinary committee, or had it become a confession committee?
“......!”
Baek Yu-yeon, who had come prepared to testify, went wide-eyed, and Gwak Do-jin sat with his mouth open and a blank expression.
With the whole truth exposed, Gwak Do-jin's discipline was voided in full.
Only, since it was a fact that violence had been used in the course of it, the existing decision to hold him back a year was maintained, while every disciplinary record that had unjustly accumulated through bought professors was cleanly deleted.
“Ha, haha.”
Walking out, Gwak Do-jin looked blankly up at the sky.
A fierce emotion rose from deep in his chest.
That a year of such bitterness and injustice could be resolved this completely, this anticlimactically, in a single day.
‘It's thanks to Professor Kang Hyeon.’
What kind of life would he have led if he had not met him?
Thinking of it that way, the wretched year felt instead like a fated encounter.
Because if Hwang Min-woo had not done what he did to him, he would never have met Kang Hyeon.
Gwak Do-jin headed for the faculty building without hesitation.
“Professor!”
“It's over?”
“Yes, it just finished! Thanks to you every disciplinary record has been deleted. Sincerely, sincerely, thank you!”
“In words alone?”
“......Sorry?”
Ah, the liquor!
The money for it...... he had none now.
Come to think of it, what was he going to do for living expenses?
“If you're grateful, go and talk Baek Yu-yeon round.”
“Sorry?”
Gwak Do-jin's face flushed red.
“I told you it isn't like that!”
“No, that's not what I mean. Who told you to date her?”
“Th-Then what?”
“Into our class.”
“Sorry?”
“I'm telling you to talk her into it somehow and get her to join our class.”
Do-jin, you little punk.
I helped you, so it stands to reason that now you help me a little, doesn't it?
So enough talk — go and bring me Yu-yeon.