The Rod of Love
I looked at him, and his sins rose to the surface—the foul residue of every crime he had committed.
He was nothing but a teacher. Even so, the charges against him were staggering.
His negative Karma had reached five thousand. Ordinarily, that would have been the end of what I could see.
But not this time.
This individual has a recorded total of 120 serious violations and has inflicted severe psychological harm upon at least fifty student victims.
History of Judgment, now at Level 5, laid even the reach of his harm out before me, clear and complete.
"What are you? Get out. Now. I'm calling the—"
His hand went for the phone in his pocket, thumb already hunting for the police. But my fist lashed out, light and effortless.
Crack!
The device shattered, spraying its fragments through the air.
"...Huh?"
While he stood there stunned, I took up the hockey stick leaning beside the teacher's desk. It was the instrument he had used to beat me—a symbol of violence, neatly packaged as a rod of love. The stick that had wrenched my arms, stolen my breath, and beaten me until the bruises went black.
I closed my hand around it. A strange sensation traveled through my fingertips. In the past I had never been allowed to touch the thing myself. I had only ever learned its feel through my hands, my feet, and my backside.
Now it was my turn to swing that symbol of violence.
"You always swung this rod of love. And the reason was always the same."
I took a step toward him.
"Because I was poor. Because I smelled. Because my parents were pitiful. So a future little criminal needed correcting. Corporal punishment, for the sake of his reform."
"D-don't come any closer! Hey—what are you all doing? Call someone, now!"
Sensing the threat, Park Geuntae stumbled back and urged them to report me. The kids reached for their phones.
Bang. Crack!
The chalk I flung from my hand smashed every phone they held.
"Wait. Your turn comes later."
They were second-years in high school now. Even so, above more than a few of those heads, the charges burned far too clearly.
I turned my gaze. Backed against the wall, Park Geuntae opened his mouth.
"Wh-who are you? What kind of grudge makes you do this to an innocent teacher—"
"Han Seungwoo."
"...?!"
"The child you tormented so viciously. That pitiful boy whose very soul you shattered."
"Y-you're Han Seungwoo? Impossible. You—"
He never got the rest of it out.
Creak.
Muscle and bone shifted. To heap a deeper despair on him, a sharper humiliation, I returned to my original form.
"Y-you—?!"
For an instant, puzzlement crossed his face at how ordinary I looked. Then he knew that face.
"You always had the same line ready. To keep a kid from going bad, punishment was necessary."
I stepped forward. He pressed himself to the wall, flinching, shaking.
"Corporal punishment isn't violence, you said. It's part of education."
"...Th-that was... from an educational standpoint... I—I—!"
I didn't need to hear it. The hockey stick came down across the back of his hand.
Thud!
I had held my strength in check. Even so, it was a monstrous force, far beyond anything human. Skin split, and the sound of breaking bone rang through the room.
"Assault dressed up as discipline."
His old voice struck the inside of my ear. Not a memory. Not a hallucination. History of Judgment was resurrecting that exact moment and laying it bare before me.
"AAAAAGH! My hand—my hand!"
He clutched the hand where the blow had landed and thrashed across the floor. I did not stop.
"Abuse of a teacher's authority."
Thwack!
This time it was the ankle. The stick bent, and his foot snapped at an unnatural angle.
"GRAAAH! P-please... my leg... my leg...!"
Flesh burst, and the blood that came with it soaked the floor. He screamed and tried to crawl.
"Accepting bribes!"
The hockey stick came down on his thigh.
"Degradation of a person!"
"Aiding suicide!"
Thud! Thwack!
The stick chose its targets with precision. Hands. Feet. Backside. Exactly as he had done—only the pain was far, far greater.
"Hhh—hhnnn—"
He twisted and wept. Snot, tears, and blood tangled across his face as he ground it into the floor. And still he begged.
"Please... please, just once... I was... wrong...!"
He cried out without end to be spared. I shook my head.
"Every time I asked you to stop, you always said the same thing."
I lifted the hockey stick high. This time it was not aimed at hands, or feet, or backside.
Crunch!
His head burst. The skull caved in, and gray-white brain matter erupted. Blood sprayed, and that filthy blood spread across the classroom floor.
Perhaps it was the sheer unreality of the sight.
"..."
The children could not speak. There were no screams. They watched without even breathing.
"Please... please, spare me!"
The scream was clearly from the same floor, a classroom not far away. Kang Taejun paused for a moment before the blackboard where he had been working through a problem.
Chalk dust drifted. The students murmured, but no one moved. They were used to it.
In this school, a commotion was not a call for help. It was the first sign that one ought to look away. Kang Taejun gazed slowly out the window, then quietly shut it.
...Park Geuntae again.
The class next door. His chest felt tight, but that was as far as it went. He knew better than anyone how that man handled children.
Forced punishment. Insults. Pressure to drop out. Even sexual harassment. Among the women on the faculty, Park Geuntae was known as someone to avoid, and among the men he passed for a teacher who knew how to break students in.
Conscience had pricked Kang Taejun more than once into thinking of reporting him. But—
Get tangled up in that and put my own position at risk? I can't.
That was the honest feeling of every teacher in the school. Even the vice principal and the principal knew. No one, however, could touch a man who had spent a long career tying himself to those who held power.
Kang Taejun gave a bitter smile and took up the chalk again. The screaming went on.
Someone else is getting hit. Whoever it is, school is going to be miserable for them. They'd be better off just dropping out.
Nothing had ever changed. Park Geuntae always won. He only ever went after opponents he could beat—students from poor families.
How it would end was obvious. And he was not the only teacher who heard the screams and did nothing.
The teachers in the nearby classrooms figured that stepping out now would only drag them in. They drank their coffee, or quietly closed their laptops and killed time staring out the window.
If it's truly serious, someone will handle it.
Most of them thought that way, and with the school's creed of do-nothing safety at their backs, they quietly bowed their heads.
The silence of those who had witnessed a death. The fear that they might be next crushed every movement, every sound.
But not everyone was like that.
"Whoa. Holy shit."
Park Geuntae's corpse. Someone approached it as if it were a curiosity.
Lee Dongha.
Through History of Judgment I read Park Geuntae's memories, and I came to know, well enough, the one who had proposed that wicked bet.
He did not so much as blink at the body. If anything, he clapped, as though he found it entertaining.
"First time I've actually seen someone die... Whoa, is this a movie or what?"
I looked at him. Those eyes. That expression. There was no fear in them—only an ease so strange it was uncanny, and a sneer that looked down from the very bottom.
"But what are you? Hitting like that, you know how to use your body. You interested in bodyguard work or something? Happens I was looking for someone useful."
The eyes fixed on me were full of curiosity and greed.
"Killed a guy? I can bury that, no problem. Or slash the sentence way down. That's nothing. My dad's about to become a minister."
"All you gotta do is be loyal to me. How about it? No background, from the look of you—an opportunity like this ought to be huge."
He was smiling. That ease was no lie. It was the arrogance of someone who had possessed everything from the moment he was born.
No one had ever touched him. No—no one had been able to.
His father was a member of the National Assembly. His mother was the cherished daughter of a chaebol. Family and relatives alike had ties everywhere: the press, the prosecution, the police. There was nowhere they did not reach. All of them were on his side, and he took every favor and every bowed head as his due.
But none of that buys ease in the face of death. The reason he found death so laughable was this.
He was seventeen. Nothing more. And yet his record of crimes rivaled Park Geuntae's, who had spent long years breaking students' souls. This was a monster wearing a human shell.
"Tsk. Slow to answer, aren't you? I don't really like waiting..."
Thud!
One fist. No warning, no tell—I drove it straight into his face.
Restraint? There was none. And so the frail flesh and bone, unable to withstand that monstrous strength, simply exploded.
Splat.
Chunks of flesh, shards of bone, and brain matter mixed with blood sprayed in every direction.
Instant death. The brat who had strutted on nothing but his background was dead.
"..."
Silence filled the classroom. Once again, it had fallen under my hand.
I turned slowly, and I looked at the one sitting in the corner.
Jung Taesik. Until a moment ago, his soul had been gone. The erasure of his person had killed every thought, even every feeling.
But when Park Geuntae died—
"..."
Hesitation entered those eyes. A man with no background, trampling the world underfoot. It was like the breaking of a taboo—a crack in reality that scraped at the mind.
I walked over quietly. He flinched on instinct and curled in on himself.
"Jung Taesik."
"..."
"I know everything that was done to you."
It was not cheap comfort, or pity. What I truly wanted was this.
"If you want it..."
At those words, the air sank, heavy. What I had said was neither a lie nor an empty threat, and everyone in the room knew it.
What that meant was one thing. The one who ruled this classroom now was neither Park Geuntae, nor Lee Dongha, nor me. It was Jung Taesik.
"..."
A little life returned to that gaze. Those soulless eyes, which had been breaking apart, swept the room.
"Ah—"
In the end, someone could not hold it in and let out a groan. Hope. Hope that if it was Jung Taesik—not me, who had brutally killed two people—they might still live.
But Jung Taesik was silent. And in his place, the others began to speak.
"T-Taesik..."
"Taesik. I—I never really bullied you. You know that, right?"
"It was Park Geuntae—no, Lee Dongha who made us. We're friends, aren't we?"
Slowly, one by one, the mouths that had lived on blame and insult began to change their words. From the corners of the classroom, from along the windows, the kids crawled toward him for the sake of their lives—clutching desks, dropping to their knees, pressing their hands together.
"...Please... I hope you'll see me differently."
"W-we weren't like Dongha. It was a joke. You know? Just the kind of joke friends play."
Until a moment ago they had treated Jung Taesik like trash. They tripped him in the halls, splashed water on him, called him by names laced with curses.
Gutter water. Cafeteria parasite. Future social reject. The poverty virus.
That he had endured every one of those insults and was still alive was enough to show the size of the vessel he carried. And now, to the boy who had survived that brutal stretch of time, they were begging for mercy—because they wanted to live.
I watched. Right now this classroom was showing its truest face: the filthiest, the most hideous. Jung Taesik stood before that truth.
"..."
He looked around him. Children on their knees. Faces wrecked with tears. Begging hands. Lips that trembled.
At last he opened his mouth.
"You too..."
The words, unlike a moment ago, seemed to carry a spark of life.
The words were a blade, sharper than any curse.
"When you're afraid, you grovel. Before the strong, you bow your head..."
"All this time, I thought I was the only inferior one."
Two years. That time had made him doubt his own existence more than it had made him doubt the wrongs around him. Through all that brutality, moisture gathered in his eyes.
"But that wasn't it."
He looked like a chick breaking out of its shell. For two years he had been taxidermied inside this classroom, a boy who could not even breathe, like a corpse. At last, now, he began to breathe.
"That's enough."
Jung Taesik looked at me as he spoke.
"Now that I know they're the same as I am... I'm not afraid anymore."
The weakest child had broken his shell, and in a single stroke he had seen through the order of this place. A hard will sat deep in his eyes. No one could call him weak anymore.
"All right."
That was enough.
It was nothing more than a change of heart. Pity for the person I used to be.
But the result was not bad at all. And so—
Rattle.
The door of the classroom where judgment had been carried out opened.
Click!
And it closed again.
"..."
Judgment was over. But no one could move. No one could even work their mouth enough to speak.
Jung Taesik, too, kept his silence. In a way he looked the same as he had in that gloomy past. His eyes, though, were not dark. He lifted his head and met, one by one, the children who had trampled him.
"..."
Not one of them could meet that gaze. Whether it was because of what Han Seungwoo had left behind, or because of guilt, no one could say.
Only one thing was certain. From now on, he would not be the one who suffered. Jung Taesik would not be the one who was broken.
The will that had just awakened inside him—harder than anything else, and still growing—left him the only one in that unspeakably hideous classroom who could face it head-on.