While he was wandering around the bar alley with a troubled mind like that, a drunken stranger’s shoulder brushed against high school senior Jo Taeeun, whose college entrance exam had just ended.

Normally, Jo Taeeun wasn’t the type to get into conflicts easily on the street. With his height, people who were coming up to pick a fight often turned around and pretended not to see him.

But Jo Taeeun was learning for the first time that people who were dead drunk could be this completely incapable of judgment.

Well, they say if you’re really drunk, you’ll even punch a utility pole. Taeeun was smaller than a utility pole and less solid than concrete.

He took a punch that came flying at him without warning, right on the face.

Later, the stranger’s companions treated Jo Taeeun like a hardened bastard who had deliberately taken the blows so he could extort compensation money, but…… in truth, Jo Taeeun was just soft-bodied.

He had zero actual fight experience beyond tugging at shirt hems or slamming shoulders hard as a show of dominance when other kids were fighting. Meaning he really was just a piece of trash weakling who could hurt from getting hit by a drunk’s blind punch.

The situation calmed down thanks to the companions who rushed out of the store late and tried to stop it. He hadn’t taken the punches on purpose, but Taeeun’s first thought was, naturally, about compensation money.

‘Should I call the police first?’

While he was thinking about it, one of the companions tried to smooth things over.

It sounded like, _“We both had a drink and got into it on the street, so let’s not make a big deal out of this and settle it with a reasonable amount—”_

The amount they first named was a little stingy for compensation money, but Jo Taeeun had no way of knowing that.

By the time he was thinking, _Hitting someone a few times and getting this much back is actually a pretty good deal, isn’t it?_ his usually unused brain suddenly spun like crazy.

The phrase _“We both had a drink and got into it on the street”_ belatedly stabbed into his frontal lobe.

‘What do you mean “we both had a drink,” old man……? I’m a high school student?’_

Your companion or friend or whatever wasn’t the one getting into a fight with some drunk on the street. A decent neighborhood high school student was being grabbed on the street and beaten like a dog.

Besides, even if Taeeun was a head-empty layabout on the brink of adulthood, he absolutely did not have the kind of thug face that looked like he’d start shit first with a group of grown men.

Once Taeeun, having found a good opening, started barking back fiercely, everyone’s attention around them focused instantly.

He was clean-cut and handsome, but at the same time his face still had a faintly youthful look, and if you just judged his physique, it was definitely believable that he was a high schooler.

From then on, the murmuring around them got louder.

He beat up a high school student while drunk?

At the whispers, the men surrounding Taeeun all became more and more helpless-looking.

Even the accused man, who had been red-faced and insisting he was not at fault while the others were trying to hold him back, had his expression change a little.

The minor, drawn-out conversation after that isn’t very important. What mattered was that Jo Taeeun got a pretty large amount of compensation money, and realized how he should make money for the time being—at least until he finished high school graduation.

_‘Yeah, first I’ll save up some money and get out of this neighborhood!’_

After he made up his mind, Jo Taeeun was really diligent for the next few weeks.

Even after the exam, he was supposed to keep going to school until winter break ended, but he just ditched it. Now that he had a way to make money, attendance couldn’t possibly matter.

He slept from morning until afternoon, and went out of the house before evening so he wouldn’t run into his father. If his father saw his face covered in bandages, he might guess he’d gotten into trouble somewhere and tell him to get out right this second.

After that, he wandered around downtown a bit. He’d go to the convenience stores in neighborhoods where the girls who liked him lived, loiter there, and get a few things that would pass for a meal.

Unlike the male bastards who went around mocking Jo Taeeun for only having a pretty face and being dead broke, the girls generally felt a little sorry for him or thought he was cute, whether they were older or younger.

You can’t just go by a man’s face and let some guy like our Jo something get brought home so he can latch on to your wallets, can you?

The girls even thought Taeeun’s self-dissing and filial piety violations were cute and laughed.

“Hey! You’re the one mugging our wallets right now!”

If they teased him like that, Taeeun would put on a slightly sulky face and say things like, “Still, getting a cup noodle for thirty minutes of looking at my face is basically a steal.”

It was a line he’d learned once from an older sister he knew in middle school and had been milking ever since, but it always got a good reaction.

Since he often went to the convenience store near the cram school district, he also became friendly with some of the female underclassmen. Those girls were even bolder than the girls his age or older ones.

"You and your dad look exactly the same, right? Looking at your face, I think I get why those ladies let him stick a straw in them. You should let me stick one in you too. Then I’ll buy you cup noodles and triangle kimbap every day. Hurry up and take the straw out, their family runs the most famous galbi restaurant in this neighborhood!"

And then they would laugh and have fun.

Then Taeeun would smile awkwardly. The girls, seeing a handsome guy who played along just enough to make them feel good but couldn’t actually act slick like a real gigolo, would kindly buy him dessert ice cream too and hand it to him.

He’d sit there at the convenience store like he owned the place, listening to them complain about their academy teachers, about their boyfriends, about entrance exam worries he couldn’t really understand anyway, and then watch them leave one by one for their academies.

After that, he’d go to the elementary school playground nearby, which had already turned dark, and zone out.

Sometimes he’d lie down on the stand and surprise middle schoolers who came to smoke, and once night deepened, he’d begin his “activity.”

It was hardly enough to call it activity.

0. Walk around the bar alley and pick a target.

1. Rub against drunk people who are too far gone to know what’s going on and start a fight. (Even if they’re smashed, many people still feel threatened by a 183-centimeter guy, so it’s better to walk bent over or crouch down and throw words at them.)

2. Because getting hurt sucks, take one hit and collapse to the ground so you can get hit as little as possible. Say things like, “Sir, why are you doing this all of a sudden? I’m a high school student!” and pretend to call the police.

3. Get money. If there are people who try to soothe you by buying drinks instead of paying all the way through—check their back pockets.

3-1. If nobody takes the bait, pick out a drunk person who’s just barely staying conscious while waiting for a designated driver or taxi, and take their wallet.

It wasn’t a job that took no effort at all. Still, he liked that he didn’t have to commute regularly, cater to anyone’s mood, or spend energy doing hard labor. He quickly got used to slipping his long arms into someone’s back pocket to steal whatever was there.

For two months, it was a pretty sweet way to make pocket money. Thinking he should make money quickly and leave here, he came outside often without caring about the neighborhood people’s eyes.

Actively provoking body contact was fine, but sneaking up on people so drunk they couldn’t see straight and stealing their wallets while they waited for a taxi was also a good harvest.

Because it was the dead of winter, people who had finished paying for drinks tended to shove their wallets into the large pockets of coats or jumpers instead of putting them deep somewhere, and that helped Taeeun’s pickpocketing.

Extorting compensation money was one thing, since he had to get hit first to receive it, so the line was a little blurry. But stealing other people’s wallets was plainly a crime. Still, Taeeun was in the middle of that phase where he mistakenly thought his life was the most hopeless and miserable thing in the world.

On top of that, he was lucky enough not to get reported once for two whole months despite his noticeable looks.

Even if I started a fight, those people were the ones who threw the first punch, and I’ll be making money again soon anyway, and they probably have a lot saved up, so whatever.

Taeeun’s rationalizations went on endlessly. In the two months that followed, office workers who held company drinking parties in these bar alleys started spreading word about everything from the fact that pickpockets were rampant in this area to the scammer who deliberately picked fights with drunk men’s groups and squeezed money out of them.

Since he had been causing trouble by roaming around every bar in the alley where all the businesses were clustered, it was becoming obvious that he should probably stop soon, but he still couldn’t quite let go of the easy money.

Just one more day. Let’s make as much as yesterday and stop. I didn’t make anything yesterday, so I’ll make up for it today and really stop. Just one more day.

⌗ • ⌗ • ⌗

“So. Today was the last time?”

The man grabbed Taeeun’s body and pulled him upward.

He wasn’t helping him stand up. The man, who had so easily forced a body as big as 183 centimeters into a kneeling position, bent his own legs and sat down in front of Taeeun.

He looked like he was more than used to this kind of thing. You know, the kind of thing where you force someone to kneel and then beat them up.

“Yes, yes……”

Taeeun’s insides shrank tight. His shoulders were trembling so much they shook.

From Jo Taeeun’s point of view, who had never even properly gotten into a fistfight in his school days, he had already been hit more than enough. But in this atmosphere, it felt like if he irritated even a little bit of nerve, a hand would fly again. And it would absolutely not end with one hit.

The tightly wound Taeeun tried to bite down on his lip, then pressed the corner of his teeth directly against the fresh bleeding spot and flinched all by himself.

Argh…….

As Taeeun groaned softly with his head down, a snicker sounded above the back of his head.

Then a large hand roughly grabbed his hair and yanked it up.