Walking Adrenaline
"………"
A back alley behind the school, far from any foot traffic. Park Tae-min, who had stormed out of the classroom on the very first day because he couldn't stomach the mocking atmosphere, was cursing up a storm, his face twisted without restraint.
"Fucking hell!!"
BANG!
His pent-up rage came crashing down on an innocent wall. Yet the only thing that hurt was his own fist. Just like the pathetic reality that surrounded him, the solid wall didn't budge an inch—it simply stood there, unmoved.
"Hey... you okay?"
Choi Min-seok, the lapdog who had followed him out, sidled up cautiously, eyes darting around. Faced with Park Tae-min's thunderous expression, he hesitated for a moment before finally working up the nerve to speak.
"...Tae-min."
"What."
"Can't you just... let it go?"
Let it go. At that short plea, which carried so many unspoken meanings, Park Tae-min's face contorted beyond recognition.
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
"No, listen—that guy's freakish, you know. You kicked his desk and he just grabbed your leg and—"
"So?"
"......"
"You're telling me to back off because I'm scared of him?"
"That's not what I meant."
"That's exactly what you meant, you bastard."
Park Tae-min gritted his teeth. It wasn't as if he didn't know the guy was a monster. That exchange that morning had made it crystal clear. No idea what kind of screwed-up martial art he'd learned, but he was not someone Tae-min could beat. And yet if he let this slide, he'd be treated as a cripple for the rest of his life. For the next two years, every little punk in that school would laugh in his face, openly. Somehow... somehow, he had to break that guy at least once. No matter what it took.
"...I'll ask Woo-hyuk-hyung. Hand over every won I've got, and he'll at least pretend to listen."
'!!'
At the name that slipped out of Park Tae-min's mouth, Choi Min-seok's eyes wavered violently. Jung Woo-hyuk. At Haewon High School—a school with no notable delinquent gangs to speak of—he was, for all intents and purposes, the apex predator. A third-year now. Once a promising young boxing prospect, until a violent incident drove him into the underworld—an invasive species in the school's ecosystem. They said he was a monster who blasted opponents away with a relentless, brutally strong infighting style, like getting run over by a dump truck. He'd supposedly picked a fight with actual gangsters carrying sashimi knives and put them all in the dirt. There were even rumors that the Three Major Alliances had tried to scout him—a heavyweight who had long since left ordinary delinquents in the dust. Without a doubt, that man would be more than enough to flatten the transfer student.
Rrring~
As Park Tae-min dialed, the corners of his mouth twisted upward.
"That bastard's dead tomorrow."
After all the commotion, Kang Han-ul and Jin managed to table the whole ex-girlfriend(?) issue and sat back down to talk in earnest.
Snip, snip
"So, are you done with martial arts, then?"
"I'm not quitting. Like you said, I'll have to come back eventually... but I'm going to hold out as long as I can."
Crunch
Kang Han-ul took a bite of the apple Jin had carved into the shape of a rabbit and went on.
"I'll make friends with everything I've got, try studying, actually sit through classes... and then, after I've crashed and burned into a complete mess, I'll come back."
That way, there'd be no regrets. Kang Han-ul gave a wry smile and popped another slice of apple into his mouth.
Shhhrrrk!!
He did his best to ignore the apples being mercilessly diced to pieces. Red peel flew everywhere, splattering across Kang Han-ul's face.
"...Could you maybe not use a katana to peel apples?"
"Don't worry. It's a fake—it doesn't rust."
"That's not the point. It's an aesthetic problem."
Having thus massacred every apple—none longer than ten centimeters—with his two-meter odachi, the man wiped the juice from his blade with a wet wipe and continued.
"I get the gist of what you're after. Then let's have a spar today."
"...How did we get there?"
"You've been miserable holding back for civilians. Think of it as a change of pace."
Shing
Jin leveled the odachi at Kang Han-ul's throat. A mass-produced katana made of 5160 spring steel. Even more suited to cutting a man down than an authentic, near-artistic Japanese blade. Kang Han-ul let out a deep sigh and gently pressed the odachi away from his neck.
"I told you. I'm going to give it a real shot for a while. I've got a school schedule to sort out, so put the sword away."
A refusal so clean there was nothing left to say. But Jin wasn't fazed in the slightest. Calmly, he took into his mouth a fine word he'd learned in Korea—a magic word that breathes courage into anyone who's frozen, unable to make a decision.
"Scared?"
"…………"
Shing
Quietly, Kang Han-ul drew a single longsword gleaming on the wooden floor. His eleventh birthday. The first real blade his mother had ever given him.
[Happy Birthday, my sweet son ♡]
His mother's love, engraved into the blade, was almost too much to bear. It had become one of his trump cards—something he only drew when going all-out.
"...Follow me to the training hall."
What followed was a frenzied, bloody spar. And so, the next morning, Kang Han-ul showed up at school covered head to toe in bandages and adhesive strips. Standard wear and tear from sparring, really.
"Um... Han-ul, what happened to those wounds?"
"Fell down some stairs."
"...You did?"
"Ahem. Let's just go with that."
"O-okay..."
Kim Seo-yul had his suspicions about injuries that looked obviously anything but innocent. But between Kang Han-ul's cheerful expression—which contrasted sharply with the state of him—and the man's blatant attempt to dodge the question, he had no choice but to let it go.
'Ahh... going full-power for the first time in ages feels amazing.'
Meanwhile, Kang Han-ul was wearing a lazy smile, still savoring the lingering echoes of battle across his whole body. Last night's spar had ended two wins and one draw out of three. That brought his lifetime record against the guy to 3,792 matches: 2,622 wins, 1,033 losses, 137 draws.
'Seriously, trading blows with him is just fun.'
Sure, he'd ended up battered everywhere enough to draw stares. But the adrenaline and endorphins dumped into his system by a combat-real spar had scrubbed his brain clean—he felt like he'd just stepped out of a cold shower, head crystal clear. The blades hadn't gone in too deep, so bandages were all it took; his condition wasn't remotely compromised. Right now, maybe—maybe—he could actually pay attention. To an actual school class! And so Kang Han-ul threw himself into the lesson with the most wide-eyed focus of anyone in the room.
"Ghaaaaah..."
By lunchtime, he was sprawled out, dead to the world.
"Han-ul, get up. We have to go eat lunch."
"Nnnnngh... what the hell is the formula of roots..."
"Oh, so that's where you stop knowing things?"
Kim Seo-yul swiftly pulled out his notebook and pen. Then, like a researcher observing some rare animal's behavior, he began checking off every single thing about the wreckage of Kang Han-ul's academic foundation, jotting it all down. After all, having agreed to tutor the guy, he needed to know just how much he didn't know.
"Factoring polynomials?"
"Khh-hukk..."
"Quadratic functions?"
"Urrghk..."
"Name five English words you know."
"Five words? I mean... what do you want me to say?"
"Oh, your conversation's actually good. Did you live in America or something?"
Once this round of interrogation was done, Kim Seo-yul closed his notebook and thought. His new friend from yesterday, Kang Han-ul, was even stranger than he'd expected. First he'd slammed Park Tae-min into the floor on day one. Then he'd pushed aside the popular crowd to hang out with a nobody like him. Today he'd shown up wearing so many bandages they showed through his uniform. And the strangeness didn't stop there.
"...Han-ul, can you actually eat all of that?"
"Ah, this? Healing my injuries, you know. Running a bit low on calories..."
In a voice still thick with exhaustion, Kang Han-ul calmly piled rice and side dishes onto his tray in a veritable mountain. Yesterday's food intake had already been shocking enough—and now it had gone up again. He'd heard bodybuilders and athletes treated eating as training too, but... at that volume, was digestion even physically possible?
Tap, tap, tap, tap, slurp
Those worries proved utterly pointless—the mountain of school lunch vanished at a staggering pace. An eating speed easily three times that of a normal person. To anyone else, it just looked like a guy eating fast. But Kim Seo-yul was not just anyone—his observational skills towered far beyond the average.
Grip—
The way Kang Han-ul held his chopsticks! Like a seasoned knight or samurai gripping a sword. A light, relaxed hold that could still trace a perfect trajectory at any moment—never slack, never letting go. A flawless grip, honed by an absurdly disciplined warrior's physical control. Was it mere imagination that made the mountain of food on the tray look like the corpses of all the mighty opponents he'd ever faced?
'For Han-ul... maybe even a meal is a kind of battle.'
Kim Seo-yul swallowed involuntarily, unable to look away from the astonishing sight. The man's fingertips moved at a speed invisible to the eye. And yet the tray didn't make so much as a single clatter. The angle at which he lifted each side dish was precisely forty-five degrees, every time. Right before touching his lips, he decelerated perfectly, delivering the food to his mouth without spilling a single drop of broth. His delicately wriggling lips admitted not even a whisper of air, suctioning in the food and nothing else. An instinctive movement engineered for maximum nutrient absorption. And yet the sight conjured the image of a stately royal banquet. Not a single slurp, no impatient clatter. His reverence toward the food was boundless, and the trajectory of his spoon was swift yet precise, like a dance.
'So school lunch... can be eaten that elegantly?'
The mountain of food vanished from view in the blink of an eye. It was enough to make him briefly ashamed of the way he'd been shoveling food into his own mouth. A flawless, immaculate completion of the meal. Having executed every step of it without a hair out of place, Kang Han-ul gazed quietly at his empty tray, then finally spoke.
"...Ah, still hungry."
'!!'
But you just... ate all of that?
Just as that outlandish remark made his mind go briefly blank—
"Hey, Seo-yul. Let's hit the school store. What's good at this place anyway?"
"Huh? Uh... well, the cheese bread's decent, I guess."
Faced with a Kang Han-ul who was already off in search of more food without pause, Kim Seo-yul had no choice but to grab his tray and hurry to his feet. He'd barely eaten half his lunch, distracted by the man's dining exhibition—but it didn't matter. He wanted to see it. Where did the battle called "dining," as waged by this man, ultimately end!
"I'll take two of every bread you've got, please, and three of the biggest drinks."
"My, did you make a snack bet with your friends, sweetie?"
"Something like that. Seo-yul, you're not getting anything?"
"Ah... I'm fine."
At the school store, Kang Han-ul bought yet another absurd mountain of snacks, then calmly settled into a quiet spot behind the school. Sitting there at his leisure, he began unwrapping and eating the loaves one by one. Even then, the process contained not a shred of "waste."
"Mmm, the cheese bread really is good. The hamburger's kind of a letdown."
The moment every last bread from the store had disappeared into his mouth—
Gulp, gulp, gulp
Kang Han-ul began downing all three 1.5-liter bottles of sports drink without hesitation. As though it weren't a beverage at all, but air itself. That effortlessly, that smoothly.
Clunk.
Three completely drained bottles lined up on the ground. And then, the change began.
Sssssssss...
"Wha!? Wh-what's happening—"
"Oh, this happens sometimes after I eat. Don't worry about it."
A considerable volume of steam was billowing from his entire body. Despite this blatantly abnormal phenomenon, Kang Han-ul remained perfectly composed, shrugging off his uniform jacket and beginning to unwind the bandages wrapped around him. What they revealed was a body polished by a hundred battles. He could tell. What stood before him was the very pinnacle of sports medicine, near a work of art. Like bodybuilders who systematically sculpted their physiques to be big and beautiful—except this body had been meticulously designed and forged for combat alone. A true 'human weapon,' in the most literal sense.
Peel, peel
With every layer of bandage that came away, the sheer wonder of it struck home. Wounds serious enough to warrant that much wrapping, without question—and yet where the bandages fell away, there was nothing but smooth, freshly regenerated skin. In less than a single day, injuries that should have needed those bandages had healed completely. Add to that his wildly abnormal food intake today, and the steam pouring off his body...
'Don't tell me he just digested everything he ate, right here, on the spot!?'
Kim Seo-yul's mind began spinning at full speed. Wound recovery obviously required energy. The proliferation of new cells to fill damaged tissue, the regeneration of severed blood vessels and muscle fibers, the synthesis of collagen and all manner of proteins. Every one of those processes devoured enormous amounts of ATP and nutrients. So what if— what if Kang Han-ul's digestive system broke food down at speeds that couldn't even be compared to a normal human's? What if the absorbed glucose, amino acids, and fats were immediately routed through the bloodstream to the injured sites? What if his rate of cell division and protein synthesis could be pushed beyond all common sense?
'Theoretically... the recovery speed could work like that.'
It would even explain the steam. A sudden explosion in cellular metabolism, energy consumed at a breakneck pace—if his body temperature rose to shed the massive heat generated, and his sweat evaporated instantly on contact— and if the 4.5 liters of sports drink he'd just chugged were meant to replace the water and electrolytes lost to excessive perspiration, then the whole thing roughly held together—
'There's NO WAY that's right! What IS he!? Is he even HUMAN!!?'
Kim Seo-yul's brain, which had strained so hard to understand the situation, finally overloaded and gave up on accepting it entirely. What was this? What had he just witnessed? What on earth was happening in front of him? Faced with a phenomenon that defied all scientific explanation, Kim Seo-yul doubted his own observational skills for the first time in his life—but then:
"Ahem. Nobody was watching, right? Kind of embarrassing~."
At the sight of Kang Han-ul coughing sheepishly and hurriedly putting his uniform back on, Kim Seo-yul ultimately decided to stop thinking altogether.
"Ugh. All that effort, and there are still three periods left."
"Hah... hah, you're telling me..."
Having put his uniform back on, Kang Han-ul sank into his seat with a deep sigh. Thanks to all the nutrients, his injuries had healed and his mind had sharpened somewhat—but he still didn't have the strength left to survive three more periods. Just holding on to what little he'd caught from class already felt like his head was going to burst, and that was only half the day. And after school, he had to start serious studying with Seo-yul. At this rate, he was guaranteed to doze off right in front of the friend who was so kindly helping him. He had to wake up somehow—maybe a splash of cold water on his face in the bathroom—
SPLOOSH!
In that instant, a carton of chocolate milk came flying from somewhere and smacked Kang Han-ul square in the head. The contents dribbled stickily down through his hair. Kim Seo-yul's face froze solid.
"Wondered where you'd gone off to. Hiding in a dump like this."
A deep, gravelly voice rolled in from behind. He turned—and there stood a single massive student, planted at the alley's mouth like a human roadblock. Broad shoulders and a thick, corded neck. A heavy upper body that stood out even through the uniform, and enormous fists calloused at every knuckle. There was no mistaking it. A fighter.
"So you're the one? The transfer student who flattened Tae-min."
And in this very moment, that fighter was walking into a fight.
"Ah, this is bad..."
Until just moments ago, he'd been exhausted. Even thinking about the remaining classes made his head throb. He'd had no idea how he'd stay awake until the final bell. And yet. Here came a human being who could throw a proper punch, delivered at the most perfect possible timing.
'He's not even an appetizer compared to Jin, but...'
Still, something he could enjoy well enough.
"...Hyung, want to fight?"
The corners of Kang Han-ul's mouth split into a grin.
Found him. A walking adrenaline shot.