The Mad Blade of the Law
The boy Jung-woo of that day was known as none other than the 'Mad Blade' — a prosecutor who shredded anyone who crossed his path.
Nothing worked on Jung-woo. Bribes, threats — in front of him, they were all meaningless.
There was only one thing Jung-woo wanted.
"Hey, you little bastard! You think you're the only prosecutor in the world, huh? Huh? You the only one?"
"Yep. Seems like I'm the only one."
This was the War on the Rule of Law.
"Pack your things right now! You're being transferred to the provinces—"
"Hey, mister. You not following the situation here? You know what this is? A double ledger. A double ledger. I go down to the countryside. You take your uniform off. Wanna try me?"
Here it came — the famous scene I already knew. That exact moment that spawned hundreds of GIFs from his face alone.
This is right about when Myeong Je-ha appears….
Myeong Je-ha's screen time was barely a little over ten minutes. And yet he had carved himself into the public's memory as a near-lead in War on the Rule of Law.
Almost the instant I thought it, Myeong Je-ha appeared on screen.
"Ooh—."
An eye for people is the same everywhere. The moment Myeong Je-ha showed up, the theater rippled with a chorus of small gasps.
And this wasn't a crowd-pleasing stunt.
It's like how everyone screams together at a jump scare in a horror movie — except every time Myeong Je-ha's face appears, everyone marvels together instead….
In the film, Myeong Je-ha was manning a vehicle checkpoint, ordered arbitrarily by the brass up top. Dressed crisply in his police uniform, he glared at the luxury sedan with open displeasure.
"Slick as hell, running a red with no lights on. Man, being top of the food chain really is something, isn't it? You'd agree, right?"
Even to the senior officer beside him, Myeong Je-ha answered with a sullen edge.
"Something, sure. Whatever you say."
Beyond the sedan gliding leisurely through the empty road, Myeong Je-ha's rebellious gaze was unmistakable.
The reason prosecutor Jung-woo could come to be called the Mad Blade was thanks to the 'double ledger' he had obtained during War on Crime.
Jung-woo's father, who had scraped by running errands for the underworld, had taken the fall for someone else's sins and served a long prison sentence.
The kitchen aunties and uncles who grieved for him slipped the ledger out mere moments before a raid descended, and handed it to Jung-woo.
Inside were visitation records. Who met whom, where, and when.
The home of a dirt-poor boy with no guardian was safe ground. Because no one ever bothered to search it, the double ledger became his trump card.
He'd taken plenty of small fry's heads with it. Now it was time for the blade to point upward.
"That bastard… struts around way too damn much."
The bigwig, pouring liquor into a snow-white glass at an upscale Japanese restaurant, let his eyes glint with menace.
Everyone knew who 'that bastard' meant — Jung-woo. The man who had once given Jung-woo his goal of becoming a prosecutor had, at some point, become chief prosecutor.
Which meant his word was law.
Now they had to kill Jung-woo by any means necessary and bury the evidence for good.
"Chief Prosecutor! Don't waste your nerves on that punk — you need to focus on the bigger picture!"
Someone fawning for favor piped up to lighten the mood, and as if they'd all been sworn to a sacred duty to dispel the chief's fury then and there, the rest of the table chimed in one after another.
"Shall we talk about the next election, sir?"
"Ah, of course! Right. Can't let some lowlife punk muddy such an important topic."
The conversation turned in a heartbeat. Money laundering to fund an election campaign.
Since War on Crime, they had held the power to bend every authority in the world to their will.
The gang members they'd arrested-not-arrested and let slide had since become their faithful lapdogs.
Drip. Tap.
Above the small pond in the garden, bamboo rocked gently like a seesaw. The clear water trickled along, as if scrubbing away tonight's filthy talk without a trace.
Their world moved with unhurried ease — a boast made flesh, flaunting the untouchable, lofty wealth no one dared covet.
The dark night passed quickly, and dawn broke.
[ Vigorous & Strong Kids' Safety Education with the Police ]
In the auditorium where that banner hung enormous and proud, the detective who'd promised to talk elections with the chief prosecutor just the night before stood in uniform, gripping a microphone.
"Your friendly neighborhood police officers work hard every day for your safety, kids! Day and night, night and day, rain or shine—."
Standing at one side of the auditorium, Myeong Je-ha watched him with a blank, indifferent expression.
"Mister! Hey, mister!"
One of the elementary schoolers filing out after the lesson called out to him. Myeong Je-ha bent down close, matching himself to the child's eye level.
The schoolboy, giggling shyly, held out a fist.
"This! For you!"
From the small hand emerged a candy half-melted inside its wrapper — the treat the boy had been stubbornly resisting eating all day.
"Thank you!"
Beaming, the schoolboy dashed off into the crowd of friends, laughing brightly.
Myeong Je-ha squeezed the candy hard in one hand. Because he'd never once done anything that deserved this kind of thanks.
Something about this… feels almost familiar.
I kept my eyes locked on the screen.
Someone seized Myeong Je-ha's forearm, dragging him to a stop as he headed home after his shift, exhaustion written across his face.
"Hey. Talk to me."
"Who might you be, sir?"
Myeong Je-ha asked back, face guarded.
"I'm Prosecutor Yoon Jeong-woo. Keep refusing to come with me and I'll scream right here. Officer! Officer, help me!"
"…What even is this…."
With that bizarre brand of extortion, in the blink of an eye Myeong Je-ha found himself sitting inside a car parked nearby.
Yoon Jeong-woo handed him a tablet and explained briefly, walking him through the data.
"Politicians burn through a crapload of campaign money. But they're broke, right? So where's it gonna come from?"
"…You're referring to illegal funds, sir?"
"Sharp head on you. Good. Here — a sports gambling site run by the old Cheongsan faction, now known as CS Holdings. Except it's got no actual substance whatsoever, just a paper company. They're cramming all that filthy money into shell corporations. The cash spins around and around like a hamster on a wheel."
So-called money laundering.
Beneath Jung-woo's fingertip, a photo flashed past — a low-level CS Holdings man scurrying across a CCTV blind spot in a hurry.
"But where does it all end up? We dug into it, and guess what — it pours straight into a charity foundation run by a relative of our dear Chief Prosecutor himself?"
"…."
"So, pop quiz. How many of those gambling-site thugs do you figure asked politicians to look the other way?"
Myeong Je-ha hesitated, unable to answer right away.
He couldn't render a proper judgment, but he could tell at least this much: he'd stepped onto a board far too vast for him to handle.
If this was a tug-of-war between a sitting chief prosecutor and a rookie beat cop, it was plain to see who would lose.
"Hey. Last month's elementary school case. You remember. Redevelopment district."
Jung-woo brought his hand close to the tablet Myeong Je-ha was holding. The screen swiped to the next page.
Up came the records of a violent crime against a young girl — a case the news no longer even bothered covering.
"That bastard got three years today. Suspended for five."
"Is that even possible?"
"Yep. It is. Your precious higher-ups buried it nice and pretty."
Yoon Jeong-woo took the tablet from Myeong Je-ha's hand.
His now-empty hand had nothing left to grip.
As if recalling the feel of the candy the schoolboy had pressed into it earlier, Myeong Je-ha's hand trembled faintly.
"The CS Holdings thugs. The paper-company thugs. The corrupt little politicians. They're gonna keep pulling this same dogshit stunt, over and over, for the rest of their lives."
As he watched Myeong Je-ha, a smile rose on Yoon Jeong-woo's face.
The background check was already finished.
Before coming to find him, Yoon Jeong-woo had gotten hold of a photo — Myeong Je-ha glaring at the bigwig's luxury sedan.
"So. Are you going to just sit there and watch?"
Myeong Je-ha, who had been sitting with his head bowed, slowly straightened his posture.
It was a motion heavy with resolve.
"…What do you need me to do, sir?"
Over an ominous swell of music, the narration rolled in.
"First-timers never pull big scores. It's a psychological thing, see. A pickpocket doesn't graduate to a burglar for nothing. He's already crossed that line somewhere before. Load the missing case files onto a USB drive."
Myeong Je-ha, who'd turned down lunch with his colleagues citing fatigue, slid a USB into the PC beside him with perfectly natural ease.
"One more thing. Some people commit crimes because they're hungry for money, but you can tell who's headed for disaster just by watching their daily habits. You know the guys who look at the higher-ups and go, 'man, I wish that were me'? Somewhere in their brain, something's broken and they're running on pure dopamine. Kids like that."
The owner of the neighboring PC was the same officer who'd done traffic control alongside Myeong Je-ha.
Myeong Je-ha's hands moved fast.
On the desk, untouched, sat the bag of candy the schoolboy had given him.
The film barreled toward its climax. The evidence Prosecutor Yoon Jeong-woo laid on the table was utterly airtight.
Thanks to the whistleblower — Myeong Je-ha — the board was nothing short of perfect.
Jung-woo had even managed to join hands with the detectives.
"Ha… well, I'll be damned."
Yet the chief prosecutor, phone in hand, remained perfectly at ease. He could maybe understand a joint task force between prosecution and police — but there was no way he'd crumble from a partnership between one lone prosecutor and a handful of lowly detectives.
He dialed somewhere.
"Bury it."
With a single phone call, the chief prosecutor was trying to smother the whole affair again. He was an omnipotent power broker who could command even a single car on the road.
"Get the car ready."
Checking the clock on the wall, he issued the order to his secretary. It was time to move the slush fund.
The chief prosecutor's hands and feet knew his power well — even in handcuffs, not one of them opened their mouth.
Corrupt cops in black moved in lockstep to arrest Prosecutor Yoon Jeong-woo.
Their perfectly synchronized footsteps echoed down the corridor.
The detectives allied with Yoon Jeong-woo were caught in a bind of their own. They needed to stop the chief prosecutor, but the order came down to disband their team.
"Hey, what are you idiots doing? Pack up! You're being transferred out!"
"Captain!"
The digits on the digital clock inside the anti-corruption squad room changed.
Those numbers glowing red against the black background looked for all the world like a warning.
It was a hair-trigger situation — they had to block the chief prosecutor's convoy. Even the journalist, Yoon Jeong-woo's staunchest ally, had gone unreachable.
"Ah, dammit, why won't anyone pick up!"
Yoon Jeong-woo dialed someone, frantic.
There was no time left. If they missed this moment, the chief prosecutor's position would harden like stone, and everything would turn to dust.
The ticking of the clock hands sounded maddeningly anxious.
Tick-tick-tick-tick—.
In the meantime, the chief prosecutor had set off.
"Tsk…."
Cumbersome as it was, stuffing the slush fund into the trunk and riding with it was the best choice he could make, lest the national treasury snatch it from his grasp.
No one dared stand in the chief prosecutor's path.
There had never been a red light in his life.
The car carrying him barreled straight through the glowing red signals. Nothing in this world could stop the chief prosecutor.
BANG!
Then it happened. The back seat where the chief prosecutor sat lurched violently. The driver scrambled to make excuses.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir. A police car braked suddenly right in front of us, and…."
Knock-knock.
Came the sound of knuckles rapping on the front seat window. As the glass rolled down a sliver, a courteous voice drifted through the gap.
"We ask for your cooperation in an investigation. We've received a report of election-related slush funds."
"What the hell is wrong with you, punk? Do you have any idea who's sitting back there?"
The driver blew up. But the owner of that polite voice showed no sign of wilting or backing down.
"Open the trunk, please."
"…Unbelievable."
Forty-some years on this earth and I've finally seen it all. The chief prosecutor muttered to himself. The gall of the man — one phone call from him could strip that peon of his uniform.
He crossed his legs at his leisure and began to adjust his posture — and in that exact moment.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!!!
The back seat rocked harder than ever.