Hana Is a Crybaby
Kim Yeonwoo, homeroom teacher of Class 3-1 at Starlight Elementary, sat in her chair and watched the children at play. An aide stood beside her.
The two adults kept a strict watch, determined that none of the little ones would slip under the water and come to harm. To anyone else, it might have looked like too much caution.
The water wasn't even deep enough for a child to go under. At its deepest, it only came to just below their bellies. Long before anyone could thrash and drown, they could simply stand up and be done with it.
But with small children, there was no telling what kind of accident might happen. This was about heading off the what-if. People didn't drown every year for no reason. Most of them went under because they let their guard down, telling themselves it was only a bit of fun in the water.
Those who feared the water never got in, and so they never had accidents. Most of the people who drowned were the ones confident they could swim. That, in the end, was what a day of playing in the water amounted to.
The pool here lay open, easy to take in at a glance. Watching the children play with all their might, Kim Yeonwoo cracked a huge yawn. She had gotten up early to prepare for today's swim class, and the fatigue was catching up with her.
Just then the aide looked over and spoke.
"Um... one of the students is trying to leave the pool?"
There were restrooms and every kind of amenity inside the pool complex, so there was no reason to go outside. And the child heading out was a certain green-haired person of interest: Hana. There was no telling what mischief she might get up to, so Kim Yeonwoo rose from her chair.
"Please keep an eye on the other children. I'll go after Hana. Something might be wrong."
Hana might be feeling sick and heading for the nurse's office. Kim Yeonwoo hurried after her. The distance was enough that she had to walk a little fast, though she didn't run. It was a pool, and the floor was slick. One wrong step and she herself could end up on the ground and in a hospital.
Following Hana, she found the girl heading—as if it were the most natural thing in the world—somewhere she had no business being: the pool where the upper grades practiced. Kim Yeonwoo opened the door and slipped in the moment Hana did. Caught like that, the evidence was perfect, and Hana wouldn't have a word to say for herself. But Hana's dive was far faster than Kim Yeonwoo had expected.
"Help me!"
Hana flailed in a pool with no one else in it. Kim Yeonwoo didn't even think about taking her clothes off. She went straight in. No homeroom teacher hesitated when the student in her charge had gone under. The water came up to just below her chest, deep enough that Hana had no chance of getting her feet beneath her.
Instinct took over. Thrashing, Hana latched onto Kim Yeonwoo with everything she had. Kim Yeonwoo shouted.
"Hana! Hold on tight to Teacher!"
"Waaah!"
Hana screamed and plastered herself to Kim Yeonwoo's body. People said children who had lost all reason were strong, and the saying was right. Whether it was survival instinct or not, Hana clung so hard that Kim Yeonwoo staggered.
If her feet hadn't been touching the bottom, both of them could have been in real danger. Fortunately, an elementary school pool didn't run that deep.
They made it out. Hana coughed as if she had swallowed a great deal of water, and Kim Yeonwoo thumped her on the back until she could come to herself. The coughing went on for a long time.
"So you know you deserve a scolding, don't you, Hana?"
"Teacherrr..."
Hana looked up at Kim Yeonwoo with sparkling eyes, but Kim Yeonwoo stayed cold. If the girl was already causing this many incidents, there was no telling what would come later. She had to be set straight from the very start.
Hana had been brought back to the original pool, where she now stood beside the teacher's chair with one hand raised. The other children kept sneaking glances that way. Jiyu and Yumi, well aware that Hana was being punished for something she had done, didn't come near her either.
Hana looked at the friends who had abandoned her with eyes begging to be saved. But there was nothing Jiyu or Yumi could do for her. And so swim class came to an end, just like that.
"All right! Spread out and find the Tangles! Don't wander too far. And don't forget to be back on time!"
Kim Chunbae and the villagers had grown bold in their crime. They scattered in every direction and started picking fruit as if they were simply workers on the Tangle farm. It was the third day since the fruit had set, and not many were left.
Kim Chunbae had aimed for that third day, when the guard was at its weakest. On the first and second days the trees hung heaviest with fruit, and security was strictest. Perhaps because of that, an hour of searching had yielded little. Even with half the village out looking, they had gathered only about fifty.
Even that, of course, was an enormous haul. There was no farm work in the world that cleared over a hundred million won in a single hour. That was about as much as these people had made in all their years of farming put together. They had only ever worked small plots.
"Hehehe... to think there's a living this easy."
They said a thief of needles became a thief of oxen, and Kim Chunbae was losing his fear by the day. In his old age, he had gotten a taste for money.
"Elder Chunbae, you're not running a Tangle farm, are you? Didn't you only grow rice?"
"Now, now. Don't ask for the details. Just figure I've found a clever trick for growing Tangles. And all you need to do is buy them, isn't that right?"
"That's fair. Long as I can buy Tangles, I don't care."
He was an employee who had done business with Kim Chunbae for a long time, so he didn't make an issue of it. Nor did he press for details, not when Chunbae kept bringing him genuine Tangles rather than knockoffs.
So long as the Tangles themselves were sound, that was enough. Nothing else mattered. It was the same way banks, hungry to make money, accepted cash no matter how it had been earned. Money won by shedding blood, or money made by fraud that wrung bloody tears from someone else's eyes—a bank treated it all as the same money.
From this employee's point of view, it was no different. If he could buy Tangles cheap, he wasn't particularly curious about how they had been obtained. A steady supply was plenty. There was no need to pry and ruin a good business relationship.
Kim Sehee was not sitting idle either. The first line of defense was a wall. Once a barrier enclosing the Tangle farm was finished, she would no longer have to worry about thieves coming in from outside.
Vanishingly few people could scale a sheer wall five meters high with nowhere to set a foot. Once it was complete, they would only need to screen the people already inside.
In the meantime, after looking for a way to catch the thieves, they had decided to put a drone in the air. The farther one went beyond the Tangle farm, the more there was nothing but flat open ground. Nowhere to hide a body, no obstacles at all. A single drone on watch could cover an enormous stretch of land.
One drone could probably cover a kilometer out, measured as a circle from the center. Drone technology had improved enough these days to keep them aloft for a long time, and Kim Sehee had fitted this one with an excellent camera. She had added night vision as well, so it could see after dark.
Fortunately, along the outer boundary of the Tangle farm, there were no houses other than the village where Kim Chunbae lived. Choosing a countryside empty of any sign of people had been worth it.
"These people are getting bolder by the day."
Kim Sehee was watching the evidence footage her staff had gathered. They had been filming from the village where Kim Chunbae lived. The drones were so precise, and so quiet, that even in a modern war a person might not realize one was watching; ordinary elderly civilians had no way of noticing.
Even now, Kim Chunbae and the villagers were walking toward the Tangle farm, chattering as if they were off on a picnic. The drone was recording all of it—right through the moment they trespassed onto the farm and picked the fruit.
As a bonus, the camera had zoomed in and filmed each face, one by one, so no one could later talk their way out of it. Shown this high-definition footage of themselves, a court would have little to say. They had started recording from the moment the villagers left home. There was no more perfect evidence than that.
"Still, we can't be sure. Next harvest, we'll take them on site."
Kim Sehee said it plainly. Leaving criminals like these alone made no sense. She was already planning to catch them at the next harvest.
And she was setting a goal that went further still.