The Scolding Rolls Downhill
A private school had no choice but to watch its chairman's mood.
True, private schools in the modern era received a great deal of financial support from the state, but the one who actually ran them was still the chairman. And this chairman was no ordinary chaebol. He was Starlight Group, the number-one corporation in Korea — and not the group in the abstract, but its youngest direct-blood heir. In a sense, he might as well have been a wall no one could climb.
Kim Semin, admittedly, had never cared much about the school. As the youngest, it was only natural that he was known to have washed his hands of Starlight Group's management, and that reputation happened to be the truth. He had no interest whatsoever in a fight over control. What interested him was soccer. He served as president of the football association, and with sound, generous funding for its operations he was cheered by a great many fans — a far cry from the association presidents of other worlds, who heard nothing but curses telling them to get out. True to his place as the youngest son of a major conglomerate, he had money to spare.
But then Kim Semin caught something very much like a chewing-out from his older sister, Kim Sehee, and a great upheaval at the school under his charge was the inevitable result. His roar came down. Being a civilized man, of course, he delivered only an appropriate degree of scolding to the person directly beneath him. Resorting to violence and the like was an idea from a bygone age, and he had spoken strictly within the bounds of what was reasonable and acceptable.
To the people below him, however, it was nothing so mild as a raised voice. Compare it to the military. A corps commander, passing by, might remark lightly — "Hmm... the training in this 00th Division doesn't look like much, does it?" — and yet once a comment like that traveled downward, it was usually distorted in the telling, arriving exaggerated far beyond what had first been said.
Hearing a scolding of that sort from the corps commander, the division commander would turn at once to the battalion commanders beneath him.
"The corps commander says our division isn't in very good shape. Let's make sure we focus for the next exercise."
A division commander held one of the army's core posts, so he would soften the words. This was hardly the army of '88; cases of slapping faces, swinging fists, or chewing a man raw were rare, not least because the battalion commanders on the receiving end were middle-aged men in their forties and fifties. It was a group of a certain age, seniors and juniors to one another, and truly harsh scoldings were uncommon. Unless the division commander was genuinely rotten, speaking this smoothly, this gently, was the norm.
The scolding of a battalion commander, however, was another matter.
"Operations officer, you bastard! The corps commander watched our battalion train this time and said he didn't like what he saw! Are you going to get your head on straight?"
The battalion commanders were in their forties and fifties, but the operations officers they dressed down were only in their early to mid-thirties — a comfortable age to chew out, and an age at which dropping into casual speech was tolerated well enough. They were direct subordinates, after all. Even so, they would not catch the worst of the curses from a battalion commander.
The trouble began when the operations officer who had taken that scolding gathered the company commanders.
"You fucking bastards! The battalion commander said this exercise was a complete shitshow. You actually want to die? Fuck this, I can't take it. Our battalion's running the training again by itself. Screw it up again and you'd better be ready to die."
The operations officers would scold the company commanders with everything they had. A few of those company commanders might have come out of the Korea Military Academy, but most were ROTC or graduates of the Third Military Academy — perfectly safe to chew out, and with no grudge left behind afterward. They were people who would simply serve out their time and discharge. And so the operations officer's scolding grew truly severe.
Then the company commanders would assemble the platoon leaders and unleash yet another scolding down the chain. The platoon leaders would gather the squad leaders and scold them in turn, until at last it reached the bottom, where the old hands chewed out their juniors. This cascade of scolding was an utterly common, default culture in Korean society, because everyone learned it in the army and brought it home with them.
A roar of exactly that kind fell upon Starlight Elementary. The principal came back from the chairman's foundation having been scolded until even his soul was threshed. By the grace of modern society there was no beating suited to his old age, no physical punishment — but he had suffered a mental violence every bit as close. At a single word from Hana, the meals at Starlight Elementary began to change at a breakneck pace.
On a United States military base at the front line in Africa, there were all kinds of people. After the gates appeared, the civil wars across Africa had dwindled sharply. A common enemy had shown itself in the monsters. The warlords who had been splitting apart and fighting one another felt the danger: keep fighting among themselves, and they would be annihilated by the things that came out of the gates. Some of them had even reached a dramatic settlement.
Human greed, though, had no end. Even with the land laid waste by gates, civil war still broke out in Africa. Chasing the prize right in front of them, they could not see past it.
The American units here had been given the mission of protecting civilians in Africa. Inside the base were villagers who had fled the places they had always lived, because gates had opened in their villages and they could no longer stay. Today, as on any other day, the soldiers were preparing to head out. Their task was to rescue civilians still living in regions the gates had devastated, and the land was so vast that they had to roll out in Humvees to do it.
The one mercy was that there were no rebels in the area, nor anyone under a warlord's control. Fighting other human beings was the most exhausting work of all. The monsters that came out of the gates had behavior patterns that were, to some degree, standardized, which made them comparatively simple to handle. Every kind of monster had a way to answer it.
Before they set out, though, the soldiers who laid eyes on the supplies could only groan.
"I'm not seeing this wrong, am I?"
"Should've put a bullet in the heads of those guys upstairs. They don't know the field, so they send us supplies like this."
"James? Tell me they didn't just hand us cherry tomatoes and expect us to eat them instead of combat rations."
James, who managed the supplies, answered with an awkward look on his face.
"I definitely asked for combat rations. But this is what they gave me upstairs."
He insisted, hard, that it was not his fault. It was absolutely not that he was cowed by the rifles slung across their backs. What they were looking at were boxes packed full of cherry tomatoes. They had reported that the combat rations were gone and asked for more, and this was what the higher-ups had sent.
"You get full on these? This can't actually be happening, right?"
"They've finally lost it..."
They let out hollow laughs as they stared at the cherry tomatoes. They had no sense at all of how many they would have to haul just to fill their stomachs. Then James said something that laid their unease to rest.
"Each one of these is a high-efficiency food, over a thousand calories. I didn't believe it either when I first saw them, but I ate a single one and got the effect good and proper. Try one. You'll see the truth for yourselves."
They gave him a look that said they didn't trust him in the slightest, and ate a cherry tomato anyway. If the higher-ups had issued rations like these, there had to be a reason. He was right. The moment they had eaten one, the fullness that followed made their eyes go wide with admiration.
"I'm actually full?"
"And they're incredibly easy to eat. The old combat rations were hard to get down because of the smell, but these don't smell at all — food you can finish in no time!"
They understood the true worth of the cherry tomatoes. Above all, as combat personnel working in the field, they realized these were an astonishingly innovative field ration. The men who had been cursing only moments ago were long gone.
Cursing on looks alone was understandable. Being told to carry out missions of nothing but brutal exertion on a diet of cherry tomatoes made no sense. But once they had eaten them, they could understand the choice from above.
"These are way lighter than the old combat rations, and you can pack so much more."
"I just filled a whole pack."
They could carry nearly a hundred times what the old rations had allowed. Their operational range had risen dramatically — enough to last almost a year. Watching a comrade pack that much, one of them laughed.
"What, you're bringing a year's worth? The mission's only a week."
"It just puts my mind at ease to bring plenty. And even packed like this, it's not even half the weight of the old rations. Doesn't take up much space, either."
Thanks to the cherry tomatoes, they could load far more supplies than before. Soon they left the base to carry out the mission. Today, too, there were people to rescue — people waiting for them.