“You little piece of shit, for real. Do you know how badly I got reamed out by our director because of you? Huh?”
The trail had led him to the school’s back courtyard. Yeon Haejeong stood at a distance, frowning as he watched the scene unfold, the loud stream of curses carrying clearly to where he stood.
“How dare you snitch to the director? Ha. Fuck, I swear, I can’t believe I’m dealing with a useless piece of shit like you…”
There were several of them. The one leading the charge, barely containing his rage, stood out as the roughest-looking of the lot — and the biggest. His head was shaved down to the skin, as if he wanted to make it obvious to anyone watching that he was a thug. Baldy kept slapping Munyeong across the face with his open palm, smack, smack, as he continued.
“Enough. Go bring it all back.”
Baldy narrowed his eyes and barked the order viciously. Munyeong, who had simply been standing there without fighting back, shook his head — not lunging at his attacker, not looking wronged, not looking like any of this was unfair.
“…No.”
The answer came out without any hint of being cowed — fairly firm, all things considered. Without any hesitation, the other guy drove his fist into Munyeong’s face. Crack — a brutal sound rang out, bone mashing against teeth, and Munyeong crumpled to the ground under the force of it. He crouched down and gave Munyeong’s head a few light kicks as he issued another threat.
“Bring it back if you don’t actually want to die.”
“……You know I can’t.”
But Munyeong didn’t break. He let the words fall in a calm, almost soothing tone.
“What do you mean you can’t.”
“……It’s not ours. …It’s stealing.”
“For fuck’s sake. Hey. If we don’t steal, what are we supposed to eat? Huh? God, this dumbass is still out here acting like this all on his own.”
“……”
“You living in some fantasy world all by yourself? Or what, you got some sugar daddy stashed away somewhere? Wait, are you… doing something with the director?”
The guy smirked nastily, cracking his fist against his palm. Even as he hurled filthy insults at Munyeong, the one being insulted responded in the same steady, unhurried voice.
“…You know she’s not like that.”
“Not like that, my ass. What the hell do you know. Dumb piece of shit.”
“……Stop it. The owner of the stuff was going to let it go anyway.”
“Ha. This is driving me insane, what the fuck! Did you go and tell him?!”
“…I didn’t say anything.”
“This fucking idiot, what am I gonna do with him? Hey, what do we do with this guy? Should we just kill him?”
The guy had hit a full boiling point — he grabbed Munyeong by the hair and dragged him somewhere, hauling him like livestock being led to slaughter. They didn’t go far before stopping at a small building that looked like a storage shed — an annex that had been partway through renovations before the work was abandoned. Left mid-construction, it was barely holding together. There was a no-entry sign posted, but they moved toward it with the ease of people who’d used the place many times before.
The space was packed with dirt mounds and construction equipment. Rusty shovels, pipes that looked like they hadn’t been touched in years, bricks half-buried under dust — all of it scattered around in a hazardous mess. On top of that, the spot was squarely in the school’s CCTV blind zone.
A pained groan escaped Munyeong as the grip on his hair threatened to tear his scalp away, but the other guy had zero intention of letting up. He reached down and grabbed a brick off the ground.
“Hey, hey!”
The others tried to pull him back, alarmed by the escalation, but he shook every hand off and roared.
“Did you not hear what this idiot said? He told that bastard everything!”
His eyes were wild and rolling — he’d clearly gone off the deep end. Yeon Haejeong, who had been standing off to the side watching while smoking a cigarette, let out a quiet sigh and exhaled a stream of smoke as he finally started moving.
“Is that bastard he’s talking about me?”
Thud, thud. Yeon Haejeong walked forward at an unhurried pace and casually flicked the half-smoked cigarette somewhere nearby. The unexpected appearance of this particular person froze everyone in place. That included the thieves — but also Im Munyeong, still with his hair in someone’s grip.
“I said, is it me, you fucking asshole.”
He bent down at his leisure, picked up a random stone rolling by his feet, and hurled it with everything he had. The stone arced high and came down straight — landing square on Baldy’s forehead.
“Aaagh!”
Hit by a stone barely half the size of a palm, the guy screamed like he was dying. He clutched his forehead and crumpled his face into every possible expression of agony, gasping for breath. Munyeong’s hair was finally released, and he looked up with a dazed expression, clearly at a loss for how to navigate whatever this situation was.
“If someone’s willing to let things slide for you, you ought to bow your head, say thank you, and shut the hell up. Criminals running their mouths like they own the place — unbelievable.”
Yeon Haejeong’s eyes flashed as the corners of his mouth curled up into something wicked. The group, thrown completely off by the sudden appearance of the very person they’d wronged, stumbled backward with panicked faces. They whispered to each other frantically, hands trembling.
“Do you even know how much that watch you stole from me was worth?”
“…I, I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
“If you try to sell it anywhere? Cops show up immediately. There’s only one of that piece in the entire country, so the moment a theft report goes in, I get notified. You can’t sell it without being the registered owner.”
“……”
“Lucky for you I didn’t catch you red-handed. Damn, talk about fortune. Broke little criminals.”
“……”
“Isn’t that right?”
Yeon Haejeong took one step at a time forward and tapped at Munyeong’s feet as he still sat on the ground, pressing the question.
“It’s because of you I couldn’t catch these bastards.”
Munyeong looked up at Yeon Haejeong with a blank, dazed expression. Yeon Haejeong looked like both a savior and a villain at once. Munyeong couldn’t tell whether he was being rescued or being made into a bigger problem.
“Answer me. Are those the ones you kept alive?”
Yeon Haejeong asked it coldly, and without any sugarcoating. The ones who had been throwing their weight around just moments before now shrank back quietly, standing there with blanched faces like that had never happened. It was common knowledge — well-spread enough to be rumor — that Yeon Haejeong came from a family of serious standing, so there was no way they didn’t know. They knew all too well that orphans with no parents would be shipped straight to juvenile detention the moment someone filed a report, and so they clamped their mouths shut in an instant. They turned anxious eyes toward Munyeong, watching him desperately.
Munyeong looked at the way their attitudes flipped completely in the span of a moment, and his expression turned conflicted. He was quiet for a moment, thinking — then his face twisted in pain, and he squeezed his trembling hand tight into a fist.
“……N, no.”
And then, in a low voice that made his complicated feelings plain, he answered. His eyes pressed shut like a man about to face something fatal — resolute, but agonized.
“No?”
Yeon Haejeong asked again, sweeping his gaze across the group, who had gone ashen. Standing there like condemned men, they shook their heads in tiny, urgent gestures, trying to make it clear it wasn’t them.
“……Yeah.”
“Lucky, really.”
“……”
“How many times have those bastards gotten to live because of you. Right?”
It was then that Munyeong was finally able to read what Yeon Haejeong was actually doing. In the middle of this situation that was completely stacked against him, Yeon Haejeong was not only pulling him out — he was making it stick, making absolutely sure those guys understood. You owe your lives to Munyeong, so you’d better act accordingly. He was using his own position to put them on notice. Munyeong couldn’t understand why he would go this far for him. He knew better than anyone that this was not the kind of thing Yeon Haejeong stepped in for — and that made it all the more bewildering, all the more startling. But alongside that, there was gratitude.
The situation dissolved, and as the guys scurried off like they were fleeing with their tails between their legs, Munyeong turned toward him and spoke in a low, trembling voice.
“…Thank you.”
Give me a break. Yeon Haejeong found that one word completely baffling. Not only had Munyeong passed up the perfect chance at revenge, he was saying thank you.
“For what.”
“……Just. For helping.”
“What are you talking about. I didn’t help you with anything. Hey, don’t get the wrong idea.”
“…And for pretending not to know.”
Munyeong met his gaze directly, eyes glistening with moisture. No awkwardness, no pretense, no vanity — just a look of genuine gratitude fixed on Yeon Haejeong. He stood there momentarily at a loss for words, staring back into those eyes as if caught under a spell. In that moment, a strange breeze cut between the two of them — and that breeze grazed Yeon Haejeong’s heart.
“Thank you, Haejeong.”
An irritating, uncomfortable flutter took over his body. The sensation was unfamiliar enough to raise goosebumps. Yeon Haejeong snapped, irrationally, going off at Munyeong for saying thank you like some pushover. He wanted to curse — all that, and the best the idiot could come up with was thank you — but something in him felt strangely unsettled. It was as though that breeze had lodged itself against one corner of his heart and refused to leave, an uncomfortable, lingering sensation that kept circling back.
