Dae-seong felt the old fire rise in his chest. The Crow’s bloodlust. He smiled. “You think because you have a bat, you know violence?” he said, cracking his knuckles. “I’ve forgotten more ways to break a man than you’ll ever learn.”
One night, Dae-seong tracked Mr. Choi to a karaoke bar in a rundown district. He didn’t go as Yoon-jae. He went as the Crow. He walked in, sat down opposite the burly loan shark, and placed a single item on the table: a small, rusty pocketknife.
On graduation day, Yoon-jae stood in the courtyard, wearing a cap and gown. So-ri stood beside him, her arm in a sling, but her smile brighter than the sun. She had fully recovered, and the scar on her shoulder was already fading. high school return of a gangster
Min-ho was expelled and charged as an adult for attempted murder. His father’s empire crumbled.
The fight was brutal. Dae-seong’s small body was at a disadvantage, but his mind was a weapon. He used the geometry of the room, the shadows, the element of surprise. He dislocated one boy’s shoulder, shattered another’s knee with a fire extinguisher, and sent Min-ho crashing through a glass display case. Dae-seong felt the old fire rise in his chest
So-ri was targeted by a new threat. A vicious loan shark named Mr. Choi was squeezing her mother for a debt she didn’t owe. The police wouldn’t help. The school turned a blind eye.
Baek Doo-hwan was arrested a week later. An anonymous tip led the police to a hidden ledger detailing decades of bribery, murder, and embezzlement. The source of the tip was a USB drive found in his son’s locker—planted there by the school’s quietest student. “You think because you have a bat, you know violence
He began to notice things. The way So-ri’s nose scrunched when she solved a math problem. The way she’d save him the last bite of her lunch. The way she laughed—a real, unguarded laugh—when he accidentally called his homeroom teacher a “two-bit racketeer.”