The Age When Every Man Goes Crazy for Strength
There comes a time in every man's life — without exception — when he goes absolutely insane for 'strength'.
A time when he begs his parents to send him to a taekwondo studio, or wastes entire evenings watching YouTube videos with titles like Top 5 Deadliest Martial Arts for Real Fights.
I was no different from anyone else.
Those were the days of my childhood, pure as a brand-new smartphone that hadn't even had its screen protector peeled off yet.
Like every other kid, I yearned for strength in the most innocent sense, and I spent my after-school hours at the taekwondo studio my parents ran.
There was, however, one small difference between me and the rest.
—WHAM!—
"Match over! Blue wins!"
I had talent.
And a considerable amount of it, at that.
At fourteen, I won the Korean National Taekwondo Championships in the middle school division.
At fifteen, the World Junior Taekwondo Championships — plus a gold medal at the Youth Olympics.
By eighteen, I'd claimed the long-coveted Olympic gold itself.
Man, I'm out of content. Nothing left to do.
Having achieved everything a taekwondo athlete could achieve at such a young age, I quit the sport outright and plunged into the world of MMA.
In the early days, I struggled quite a bit with the full-contact rules, so different from taekwondo's.
Thankfully, though, my talent was the kind that translated to MMA as well.
After a year of grappling training, I turned pro at nineteen.
UFC debut at twenty.
Middleweight champion at twenty-three.
Light Heavyweight champion at twenty-four.
Even now, while grinding through the agonizing bulk-up phase in pursuit of the Heavyweight title, I was living my life as faithfully as ever.
I never got flattened by a truck, because I always — always — obeyed traffic signals.
Too timid to curse people out to their faces, I never even left a 5,700-character rant on a work I didn't like.
I simply went to the gym every day, trained hard, sparred, and occasionally enjoyed a little leisure time. That was all.
So then, seriously, why?
"...Goo?"
Why did I suddenly get reincarnated?!
Meritocracy (Supremacy of Strength).
I first learned of that manhwa around the time I'd just won the middleweight championship.
I'd devoted my whole life to training with no real hobbies to speak of, so I was killing time watching trashy YouTube videos when it happened.
"...Huh?"
A Short with a shocking thumbnail had popped up in my algorithm.
Clenching a fist. With that one simple act, a human being drifts away from civilization.
Words, status, law — all of it loses meaning.
You collide head-on with another's body and convictions, and in the end you force your existence upon them.
In that moment, everyone is a beast.
And a beast is granted only one law.
The strong stand above all.
──Meritocracy. Supremacy of Strength.
Spellbound, I dug through other Shorts, and what I found was even more shocking.
People brawling openly in the middle of downtown.
Kicks that shattered walls — or solid steel.
Fighters taking hits like that and getting back up, perfectly fine.
And most astonishing of all — the vast majority of the characters in those Shorts were minors.
Apparently, this genre of manhwa was called the School Violence genre.
I browsed a few more bits of trivia and memes afterward, but it didn't really seem like my taste, so I never bothered to actually read the manhwa.
"Goo goo."
"Oh my~ did our little Han-ul make a poopy?"
...If I'd known this was going to happen, I'd have sucked it up and read it, taste be damned.
When I first opened my eyes in this world, I was a newborn baby, cradled in the arms of a mother who looked barely a day older than she had decades ago.
The father who first taught me taekwondo? Him too.
The taekwondo studio he ran, the house we lived in — all exactly as I remembered.
I occasionally read web novels, so I'd concluded at the time that this was a 'regression' — a return to my own past.
Come to think of it, I've never actually lived a normal school life, have I.
Successful as my life had been, it hadn't been entirely without regrets.
A childhood spent as a taekwondo athlete had naturally distanced me from my school friends.
And since fighting was the only thing I knew how to do, every relationship I managed to start ended badly.
Maybe this was heaven giving me a second chance — a chance to finally find true happiness.
"Son, you're getting older now. I think it's time we had a talk."
"Of course, Father. Go ahead."
...I didn't get to enjoy those carefree thoughts for long.
I was five years old, still carrying baby fat. Father summoned me to the Neighborhood Back Mountain and opened his mouth with the gravest expression I'd ever seen on him.
"The truth is, our family are descendants of Choi Yeong-eui, the founder of Kyokushin Karate."
"...What?"
"We run a taekwondo studio on the surface, but that's merely a cover. What we must truly inherit is not just taekwondo — it is everything that carries the soul of the Korean people!!"
"Uh, but... our family name is Kang?"
"Exactly! And as the eldest son of the Kang family, the time has come for you to shoulder that heavy duty!"
"You JUST said we were descendants of Choi Yeong-eui!!"
From that day on, my hopeful second playthrough of life came to an end.
How on earth had I never noticed before?
That my father's body was covered in scars he'd never had.
That he'd become... forged beyond all comparison to before.
"*Hff*...! *Hah*...! What the— Father, this is insane...!!"
"Don't give up, my son! Persist! The refusal to quit — that is the very spirit of Kyokushin!"
"HOW am I supposed to do a THOUSAND SQUATS at my age?!"
From that day forward, Father forced on me — a boy too young even for kindergarten — training so brutal it bordered on abuse.
Anyone with even the faintest knowledge of sports science would have called it 'insane.'
I sensed immediately, from the very first day, that something was deeply wrong, and I desperately begged my mother for help.
"Sweetie, I don't like seeing you suffer either. But sometimes, there are things you must not run from..."
"What... does that... even mean..."
"For you to overcome all the hardships life will throw at you, your father's training is absolutely necessary. That's what I believe."
"What kind of, reasoning is that... Mom? MOM?!"
That was when it began.
When I truly started feeling that something was off about this world.
Corporate names that were ever so slightly off.
—CRASH-BANG!! WHAM! WHAM!!—
"Heh heh. Kids these days sure do play cute, don't they."
"...That one's cracking a kid's skull with a pipe?"
Brawls breaking out constantly, even in an otherwise perfectly normal neighborhood.
And above all...
"...What is this? Why do I keep getting stronger?"
"The body grows stronger the more you use it, my son. That's simply how it works."
Stronger. I was getting stronger.
So unmistakably that denial was impossible.
Normally, a human body does not grow stronger just by training mindlessly.
You need sufficient rest and nutrition, carefully calibrated intensity, and a sound training methodology — and if even one of those falls short, you break down astonishingly fast.
And yet, despite my father's utterly unscientific, absurdly irrational regimen, my young body never broke.
Quite the opposite — like steel folded again and again, it grew more honestly resilient with every hammer blow, climbing to a level no one would believe belonged to a boy who hadn't even started kindergarten.
Durability and recovery far, far beyond the limits of ordinary humans.
Somewhere, this all felt familiar.
Every last bit of this strangeness surrounding me on all sides felt, paradoxically, familiar.
Only then did a single work rise to the surface of my mind.
"H-hahahaha..."
Meritocracy (Supremacy of Strength).
All the wrongness I'd brushed aside and ignored came together at once, assembling itself into one perfect, precise shape.
At that moment, Kang Han-ul was five years old.
"*Urk*... uhhnn..."
"Son?! You can't sleep! If you don't finish today's training, you'll suffer muscle loss!!"
Only then did I realize it: I had transmigrated into a School Violence novel.
Of course, that realization changed precisely nothing.
Had it been a work I knew well, fine. But what good was recognizing a story I'd only skimmed a few memes of through Shorts?
I didn't know a single major event or plot point of the original — hell, I didn't even know the original protagonist's face or name!
And even if I had, what exactly was a tiny five-year-old brat supposed to do about it?
In the end, half-resigned, he had no choice but to keep training under his father's direction.
Taekwondo, Taekkyeon, Kyokushin Karate, Kali Arnis, Krav Maga, CQB, MCMAP...
"...Dad, these aren't Korean martial arts."
"Nonsense! Kali Arnis is a traditional martial art of the Korean people — it appears even in Goguryeo's Subakdo murals!!"
So he carved into his body the many martial arts that carried the soul(?) of the Korean people.
"Now! Two thousand punches and two thousand kicks each on this special steel conditioning rig, forged from solid steel!"
"...Won't my bones break if I hit it raw like that?"
"Breaking them is the point, so it's fine! That's how conditioning has always worked!!"
Striking drills that were tough going in every possible sense.
"See this fist, boy? From now on, I'm hitting you with it. You dodge, deflect, or strike me first and stop me — that's the drill."
"I'm sorry, isn't that just straight-up domestic vi—"
—WHAM!!—
Reflex training, surviving his father's fists full of love.
—SHRAAA-KOOM!!—
"Now, cleave that wave you see over there with your kicks! It won't be easy, but I'll support you with everything I have until you manage it, so fear not!!"
"Forget the support, just send me HOME!!"
Kick training on a beach where his feet sank in with every strike.
—MOOOOOO!!—
"Now, the final training of the year. Hunt down that poor brown beast you see there. In exchange, your father shall cook the meal."
"...That is NOT a cow. It looks nothing like one — the neck thickness alone is completely different...!!"
And a one-on-one duel against a massive American bison.
Beyond that came months of mountain training without once descending, a one-versus-a-hundred real fight against a Mexican gang — an endless parade of absurd training regimens.
And so, twelve years flowed past.
The front gate of the school, on the first day of the new semester.
In that place where countless students walked through carrying their own dreams and ambitions, one boy stood gazing at the gate with an expression overflowing with emotion.
"...Hah. Finally."
Finally, finally, FINALLY!!
He was free of that damned father's training!!
Seventeen years had passed since he transmigrated into the world of Meritocracy.
For all that this was supposedly a 'School Violence' story, he hadn't been able to attend school properly even by his second year of high school.
He'd shown up every single day, without fail.
But being worn to a thread digesting his father's hellish daily training, he'd had no hope of making friends — he could barely keep his eyes open through class.
And so, in his second life too, an ordinary school life had slipped away from him, just as it had in the first.
But now, everything was different.
Because his father's hellish training had finally come to an end — with one last regimen in Russia.
What a... truly horrific experience that was.
Rebellion had been impossible. Escape, even more so.
Because along with his transmigration into this world, his father had changed as well.
Despite repeating that hell every single day, Kang Han-ul had never once beaten his father.
And the training had ended only because he'd finally completed every item on the curriculum his father had laid out for him.
But the fruit of that long ordeal was this.
He had, at long last, wrested his freedom from this world.
Now, at last, I can live like a normal person.
So what if it was a School Violence world? It was still just a school, wasn't it?
He'd transferred to a new school for a fresh start.
It was late in coming, true... but at last, an ordinary school life was within his grasp.
Kang Han-ul walked toward his assigned classroom with an expression bright with anticipation.
Class 2-7, second year.
Somehow, even the number felt like a good omen...
—Tap.
The very moment he took his first step at the classroom door.
Two puppies confronting a stranger blocked his path.
"Hey. Who are you? Drawing stares on your first day?"
"Kgh, don't be so snappy. Guess he got a little cocky, trusting that face of his~"
...Ah.