The Killer Comes Back to School

The Young Lady Wants That Dog

Author | Jjwoljjwol
Publisher | Black N
ⓒ Jjwoljjwol, 2026

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A building with not a single window to be found, where anyone who entered from the outside could never leave by the same road. The people with nowhere else to go had settled there, and as illegal residents and those doing work that couldn't see the light of day trickled in to fill the empty floors, the bare skeleton of a building began reshaping itself to suit their tastes.

In the end it wound and tangled like a labyrinth, and unless you were one of the people who lived and died there, you could never have guessed which way any passage led. The basement was a restricted zone where a members-only VIP club operated, open only to those with permission—and at the very bottom of that, the deepest restricted area of all.

The first floor held small stalls and hole-in-the-wall eateries, kept in business by Ant Cave residents who needed goods and outsiders who came sniffing around out of curiosity. The second floor belonged to the junkies. The third floor did a brisk trade in gambling and prostitution.

The fourth floor was a hospital that took the people dragged in over their debts and took them apart.

From the fifth floor to the twenty-eighth, the residents of the Ant Cave lived knotted together like the ants they were, making their living off everything the law forbade.

Jang Hee-jo was the blood of Chairman Jang, who had reigned over the Ant Cave—and in the end, for the sake of Choi Baek-young, one of those ants who had lived her whole life inside it, he brought the whole thing down.

This is the story of what came after: after the notorious Ant Cave of Cheonghan City vanished, after Jang Hee-jo's right hand—the boy who had been raised as his dog since childhood, who woke one morning with no job left to do—became the story himself.

The killer came back to school.

The rumor set every bulletin board on campus ablaze.

Woo Tae-kyung had a cigarette clamped between his lips in the school smoking area when he sensed, earlier than anyone, that the campus felt strangely off today. The smoking area was quieter than usual; people were huddled over their phones sharing something, then trading glances and murmuring among themselves. And the moment anyone's eyes chanced to meet his—even by accident—they would slyly look away.

Woo Tae-kyung, for his part, stared back unblinking until they were the ones to drop their gaze first. Only after draining the last drag did he roll the butt dead between his fingers and flick it into the trash can.

He stood a hair over 190 centimeters, and the scar slicing from the right side of his nose, under his eye, and down across his cheek meant that no matter how hard he tried to pass for ordinary, it was hopeless. He was the same age as the kids around him—but the places he'd been rolled through were different, and the atmosphere that clung to him was something even Woo Tae-kyung couldn't do a thing about.

She'd begged him to please, please dress normally for school, so he had searched out the most normal clothes imaginable and turned up in a black T-shirt, black joggers, and sneakers. If she was this worked up about it, she could have just told him to come in his workout gear—or better yet, told him not to come at all. Either show up looking normal or don't show up: she fussed over it so relentlessly it had become a genuine nuisance.

Nuisance or not, here he was again today, outside the university where Choi Baek-young—the woman Jang Hee-jo loved more than life itself—was enrolled. The class schedule had been shared with him in full last week, and Woo Tae-kyung, smoking in front of Haemu Hall with his timing matched to her last lecture, checked the hour once more.

Jang Hee-jo, having finally shipped Choi Baek-young off to university, had lasted exactly one semester before throwing up both hands and declaring that he would be going to college too.

Only, his idea of going to college "properly" turned out to be meeting with the university president. Jang Hee-jo knew perfectly well that with his own brain, studying his way into the same school as her for the following year was a lost cause, so he'd gone hunting for the fastest route instead.

Money.

Woo Tae-kyung had snickered outright when Jang Hee-jo came sniffing around with donation-based admission—only for the man to end up enrolled alongside her the very next year. Some joke.

"Crazy bastard."

Neither of them was right in the head—him, lingering out front like this waiting around, or Jang Hee-jo, who'd offered to build a library worth hundreds of billions of won just to attend the same university as Choi Baek-young. Hands tucked into his jogger pockets, Woo Tae-kyung swept his gaze over the students streaming out of Haemu Hall, one by one.

There were still about ten minutes to go, but the habit of arriving early to wait had never been an easy one to break.

He let the stares raining down on him slide off without a second thought and waited only for his target. Then, belatedly checking his phone, he found a message from Jang Hee-jo saying he was coming to pick Choi Baek-young up himself—and Woo Tae-kyung turned his back on the building without a flicker of regret.

Getting soft, aren't we.

The only thought in Woo Tae-kyung's head, dulled by the same peaceful routine repeating day after day, was that and nothing more.

"Woo Tae-kyung!"

The voice was a complete stranger's, yet it called his name with the easy warmth of an old friend. When Woo Tae-kyung angled his body toward the steps, he saw long hair reaching all the way down a curving waist, stirring in the wind. Fair skin, brown eyes that at a glance looked almost kind, and lips of a vivid red—whether their natural color or painted on, impossible to say—parted now, a row of even white teeth showing through the gap.

She wore a white string camisole, the black bra beneath it far too much for a school campus, though on a woman it somehow passed as fashion. Below that, short black leather shorts rode up nearly to her hip line, leaving her long thighs and calves bare without ceremony. If she was here, she ought to be a student—yet she carried nothing in her hands.

Who is she?

When Woo Tae-kyung made no answer and simply studied the woman who'd called him, she broke into a radiant smile.

The gall of her—meeting his stare head-on and smiling right back. It was nothing like the rehearsed performances the server girls he'd once managed on the Ant Cave's VIP floor used to put on. She came down the stairs light on her feet, almost drifting, showing not the slightest intention of stopping.

Descended with her eyes locked straight on his, she advanced until she was close enough that her breath could have touched him—close enough, in fact, that she couldn't arrest her own momentum, and her hand landed quite naturally against his chest.

Woo Tae-kyung, who had learned to sidestep everyone except the one man he served, did not flinch even from that presumptuous touch, and simply faced the woman standing a head shorter than him. She was on the taller side for a woman, but even so, he still had to look down from a height of over 190.

"Still playing Jang Hee-jo's little errand boy?"

When did I see her again?

The woman was greeting Jang Hee-jo's lackey as warmly as if he were an old friend, while Woo Tae-kyung had to go digging through his memory. Anyone who knew he worked under him would be one of their own.

A face to smile at, or a face to push away—just as the answer began to surface, the hand still resting on his chest rose toward his face.

White fingers.

For a woman who dressed to expose nearly everything she had, her nails were bare and unpolished, and somehow that incongruity struck him as stranger than anything else.

Woo Tae-kyung, watching the fingers drift up to just before his eyes, thought exactly that and nothing more.

Then, a beat too late, he snapped his hand up and caught the wrist reaching for his eye—the exact spot where his scar began.

"Ah. That hurts."

"How rude of you."

Woo Tae-kyung said it while looking her dead in the eye. Somewhere in the middle of sorting her into friend or threat, he'd remembered exactly who this woman was.

"Woo Tae-kyung. Do you know who I am?"

"Should I?"

He answered with complete indifference, tilting his head to look at the woman caught in his grip. The Ant Cave had already collapsed; there was no reason left on this earth to treat her like a VIP of some secret club. At his flat, unadorned informal speech, the brown eyes that had seemed so docile a moment ago went slick and gleaming.

"That's right? Of course you do. I made that scar. You should have known me on sight."

Why didn't I recognize her right away?

Probably because of those madness-lit eyes that had looked, for just a moment, so tame.

Woo Tae-kyung felt the scarred skin around his eye itch for no reason at all.