My father was a lawyer.
More precisely, a public defender.
To be even more precise, a court-appointed public defender.
There is a common misconception people like to repeat.
That misconception is that public defenders are somehow less capable.
Ha! As if.
These days, the legal profession is hard enough to survive in as it is.
So a public defender's post, with its guaranteed stable income and the added advantage of building a career quickly, is far more competitive than people imagine.
Of course, that means the lawyers who win those positions are usually better than most private attorneys.
If you managed to land a dedicated public defender post, there was nothing more to explain.
Still, it isn't as though people think public defenders are inferior for no reason.
Unavoidably, when you handle more than two hundred cases a year, you simply cannot pour much care into any single one.
It got to the point where people even said that a lawyer who had worked public defense for a long time had more trial experience than most prosecutors or judges.
The workload was murderous.
Because of that, most public defenders would use the career they built up quickly and move on to a law firm or open a private practice.
In particular, public defenders gained a great deal of experience in criminal cases.
So they would continue their careers under the title of criminal defense attorney.
It was absolutely not a job meant to be done for long.
But my father was different.
"Dad, isn't it hard?"
"Hard? Hard for who? The people standing trial have it worse. The hardest part is for the people doing this work."
Ever since he became a lawyer, my father had worked only as a public defender.
He even devoted himself to each case with a level of care that did not lose to any other lawyer.
What time he lacked, he made up for with the overwhelming experience he had accumulated over the years.
And what still wasn't enough, he made up for by grinding down his own body.
"How many times in a person's life do you think they ever stand trial? I don't have exact statistics, but roughly seventy percent of people go through their whole lives without ever even seeing a courtroom."
I might be the only lawyer this person ever has in their life.
The sense of duty that I might be this person's only ally in this case.
The conviction of a legal professional who believes that even if ten villains slip through, not a single innocent person should be wronged.
Because of that stubborn personality, my father was always busy to the point of exhaustion.
So I didn't have many memories with him.
But I liked the conversations we sometimes had like this.
And I was prouder of my father than anyone else in the world.
"I'm going to become a lawyer too."
"Huh? I thought you were going to medical school?"
"I only said that because my grades were good enough for it. I already applied to law school."
Fortunately, I had talent.
No, saying I had talent was not enough. I was overflowing with it.
I knew how obnoxious the line "studying was the easiest thing in the world" sounded.
But I'm not joking when I say studying really was the easiest thing for me.
All I had to do was put the contents of a book into my head and derive the answer appropriately.
I had already been at the top of my class, and once I decided to study seriously, I never once missed first place in the school or a perfect score in every subject.
Of course, with grades like that, I got into the best undergraduate law program in Korea without any trouble.
And even through law school, I held onto the top spot.
"My son... you were a genius....."
"Didn't everyone around me say that?"
"Ah... no, I thought they were just flattering you. Parents tend to see their own children as geniuses too. But this was real....."
Still, I had no intention of walking the same path as my father.
Call it underdog dogma.
My father always fought on the side of the weak.
But because I had watched him from the side all my life, I knew better than anyone that being weak did not make someone good.
There were people who, even after my father had done everything he possibly could, still spat accusations at him because the verdict had come down guilty.
There were even people who never trusted him to the end, hiding their own shame and turning all of my father's efforts into nothing.
"I want to be a lawyer who speaks up for the truly wronged."
".......My son is choosing a harder road than his father."
"Is that so bad?"
"No, it isn't. Hold to your convictions. Your dream is not wrong. But remember this: Lady Justice, Dike, always wears a blindfold. It means she will not be swayed by emotion or prejudice, but I also think it means that because a human cannot distinguish the good and evil in each individual, we must look at them only through the law."
There is no such thing as a person who is pure white.
There is no such thing as a person who is only dark.
All people are gray.
Some are just a little whiter, and some are a little darker.
"Don't hate people. That's the one thing I worry about."
Don't hate people.
...My father's concern was right.
Because I came to hate people more than anyone else.
"Father...."
In the final year of law school, my father died.
The cause of death was a traffic accident.
A truck driver, drunk out of his mind, got behind the wheel and slammed into a convenience store.
And of all things, my father had been there late, eating ramen for dinner, when he was struck down.
My mother had died of illness before I could even learn to walk, so I kept vigil at the funeral as the chief mourner.
For the three days of the funeral, I could only stare blankly at my father's portrait.
That was probably the first time I truly began to hate people.
Our father had spent his whole life suffering for his convictions.
All that was left was for me to let him live in comfort.
And then a truck driver stole that away under the charge of drunk driving.
I wanted to kill him.
No, I intended to kill him.
My life had no family left to worry about anymore.
There was nothing to hold me back.
I planned to make him taste every ounce of pain I could inflict, then go to prison cleanly.
But unfortunately, I couldn't do that.
Because the truck driver died in the accident too.
"Then who am I supposed to pour this resentment and fury onto?"
As the thread of reason in my head snapped, what I instinctively sought out was the truck driver's family.
But they were not what I had imagined either.
I thought they would simply be grieving the loss of their family member and the price that would follow.
Instead, they were fighting in front of the prosecutor's office.
"There's no way he drove drunk!"
"We demand a reinvestigation!"
They dared to say that the man who killed my father had been framed.
That there was no way he had done it.
That it was unfair.
In the end, I couldn't hold back any longer and walked straight up to them, telling them to say it to my face too, if they thought they were so wronged.
At first they were hostile because they didn't know who I was, but once they realized who I was, their faces collapsed for the first time.
And yet, when we met again, the truck driver's daughter still spoke of injustice.
"My father would never drink and get behind the wheel."
"And how am I supposed to believe that?"
"Because my father was the one who lost his mother to a drunk driver!"
"That's a pretty flimsy reason."
"Ghk! Besides, he wasn't even in a condition to drive! He'd had surgery to insert steel pins into his leg, so he couldn't even work the truck for a while!"
In that instant, my mind went cold.
The first reason.
Having suffered a bad experience because of drunk driving was not something I trusted.
People are the sort who do things just because they can't be bothered.
You can doubt it to some extent, but honestly, that alone is not a valid reason.
But surgery?
That was different.
After surgery, abstaining from alcohol is the rule.
Of course, he might not have followed it, but a normal person would at least not drink themselves into a stupor.
If he was a family man trusted this much by his relatives, he would have done at least that much.
And yet he drank until he was completely drunk, then got behind the wheel?
Especially someone who had already lost family to drunk driving?
Each piece alone could be dismissed as coincidence, but all of it together could not happen by chance.
With a little more reason restored, I investigated the case again.
As a result, I discovered that the prosecutor had wrapped the case up with shocking speed and carelessness.
I also found that the investigation itself had been conducted in an absurdly crude manner.
"Something... is wrong. Does this even make sense?"
Unlike the driver's family, who had only gone as far as holding a picket protest, I went through the proper legal channels.
I finished law school, passed the bar exam, and obtained my license as a lawyer.
Then, together with the truck driver's daughter, I dug into the case from every angle through the network of friends I had made in law school.
But all that came back were even more incomprehensible questions.
And one of the friends I had asked for help quietly came to see me and said, "Il-gyu, stop this."
"What are you talking about?"
"If you go any deeper, you'll die too."
"Explain it in a way I can understand!!"
"That's all I can tell you. It can't be helped. There are people in this world who live outside the law. I don't want anything to happen to you too...I'm sorry."
After that day, even that friend could no longer be reached.
What on earth was happening?
"People who live outside the law?"
What was that supposed to mean?
How could such people exist?
Then what about my father's life?
What did the life of my father, who had lived protecting the law, amount to?
"Student Yang Il-gyu."
At the columbarium where my father's ashes were kept, I was burning with anger, despairing over the contradictions and questions piling up inside me, when the person who came looking for me was a professor I had met during law school.
He wasn't someone I had been particularly close to.
He was just someone I remembered because of his unusual appearance, because he had no right arm.
Calling out my name, which he would have known only from the attendance sheet at best, he walked into the columbarium and said, "You look terribly angry."
"Do you know me?"
"Haha, I wouldn't fail to recognize the top student in the undergraduate program. More than that, you're someone whose talent cannot be compared to any jewel."
".....Why did you come looking for me?"
"Because I wanted to talk."
The professor said to me, "What are you angry about?"
What was I angry about?
Of course—
"A law that is weak to the point of helplessness."
Huh? Was that really the answer I had meant to give?
I wasn't sure.
Right now, I just didn't want to think about it strangely.
"Law can only be weak. Humans made it. A creation can never completely surpass its creator."
The professor.
No, that being asked again.
"What are you angry about?"
"Myself, for keeping my eyes covered."
"The judge's eyes are blindfolded because of the fairness the law ought to possess. Why do you wish to open your eyes?"
"Because a weak law doesn't even deserve fairness."
"What will you do once your eyes are open?"
Those who stand outside the law.
Those whom the law cannot reach.
Those who transcend the law.
"I will look each and every one of them in the eye and judge them with my own justice, the justice the law could not deliver."
"That is heresy. That is neither justice nor rule of law."
"I don't care. Once I have crushed them all beneath the law, the law will become justice again. I will become the power of the law and stand above it."
"That is self-righteousness. The path of one who walks the road of tyranny."
But—
"Then it would be the path of a king."
He slowly stepped toward me.
Then he placed a law baton in my hand.
And then he knelt before me, bowed his head, and confessed his crime.
"I am a sinner who deceived and betrayed the child who followed me as a father. A traitor who imprisoned that child in hell until the end of the world. And yet I remained a being standing above the law, never punished by anyone."
Render your verdict.
Jewel who wishes to become king.
"Death."
I swung the law baton he had given me at his head.
Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been nothing more than a wooden gavel.
It should have been a punishment that only stung a little.
But at the moment the sentence of death was spoken, the cross on the baton blazed with light.
And the baton burst his skull open on the spot.
Immediately after, his corpse scattered into golden dust.
From somewhere unknown, his final voice rang out.
Bow your heads
Human beings of an age that has lost justice
Raging justice
Your king has returned.