Daesung woke to the numb feeling of morphine, the sterile smell of the medical wing, and the sight of Jiyong sitting at his bedside. Daesung would have been touched at his fearless leader’s concern, but he knew better, even without the stormy glare in Jiyong’s eyes, the wicked gleam of his canines as he opened his mouth-

    “So I hear you cheated through your Tech 10 class.”

    Ah, Seungri must have tattled, the little snitch. Daesung couldn’t blame him though; Jiyong was scary when he was being nice, so an enraged Jiyong was truly a sight to see. From a safe distance, preferably with several layers of defensive separation, of course.

    “I’m feeling well, thanks,” Daesung rasped drily. Jiyong’s glare intensified. Daesung sighed.

    “Didn’t Seungri already divulge all the relevant intel already? I don’t understand what you want from me.”

    Jiyong snorted.

    “I trust your abilities to deliver crucial facts in a succinct manner. Also, the little looked like he was going to piss himself if I interrogated him any longer.”

    “Wow, does the Dragon actually care about the feelings of his peers?” Daesung gasped in mock surprise.

    Jiyong rolled his eyes.

    “The Dragon doesn’t want to get bodily fluids on his new boots. Also you’re hopped up on all the good meds so you’ll spill easier.”

    Daesung grinned lazily. 

    “What do you want me to say? We were dumb kids, obsessed with grades, looking for a shortcut in an impossible class. When a golden ticket came along, of course we jumped on it. It’s not like we haven’t learned better since then, and we obviously are still competent technicians. Hyung, I know even you can’t always crack a multi-layer encryption, especially with the time limit we were working on. This isn’t Seungri’s fault.”

    Jiyong’s lips thinned and Daesung quickly tried to backtrack, before Jiyong held up a hand and slumped back in his chair. 

    “I know,” he said quietly, the steel gone from his voice. “We’re a great group. We have power, stealth, tactics, you name it, but we don’t have a solid backup monitoring our moves and catching our mistakes. We need someone to smooth things over behind the scenes, and we can’t afford to keep leaving one person whose skills we need in the field.”

    Daesung hummed sympathetically. 

    “You think our cheat sheet dealer from tech training is our missing link?” 

    Jiyong nodded.

    “Tell me about him.”

    Siwon had heard about him from a friend of a friend of a friend. Siwon used his services in secret for two weeks, before finally breaking down and gloating to Donghae about his new ‘guardian angel.’ Of course, Donghae had to tell Eunhyuk, who had let it slip to Heechul, who promptly informed the entire class.

    For a price, Siwon’s guardian angel would hack the teacher’s server after the assignments had been submitted, then correct botched questions and fill in blank ones. The higher the requested grade, the higher the price. 

    Daesung, who wasn’t flush with cash but was failing, paid twenty-five dollars a test to bump his grade up to a C-

    “You were FAILING?”

    “Shut up, Jiyong, we can’t all be as perfect as you.”

-and eventually stopped once he independently mastered the material, thank you very much. But, Seungri, ever the perfectionist had forked up ten thousand dollars for a perfect score on his final exam. Stupid rich boys and their real estate mogul parents.

    No one knew who this guardian angel really was. Occasionally, he (she? it?) left short messages concerning fees and payment methods that flitted across the screens of their personal computers, then disappeared without a trace. The drop locations for payments changed every time, dotting across the city, in shrub, the knot of a tree, or behind an old lady’s mailbox.

    Eventually their savior inspired a new moniker for himself. Junsu had once refused to pay for services rendered, doubting that the hacker would notice a small dent in the sizable cash flow he was receiving from the student body via various public bathrooms. During the next test, Junsu’s screen went black halfway through, before filling up with green lines of code. Each line held the same message:

    do_not_change_the_tempo

    Tempo, as he was then known, promptly received twice the debt Junsu owed. Junsu’s computer went back to normal the following day, though he could never buy a grade from Tempo again. Poor bugger ended up getting a 39% on the final exam, and subsequently had to repeat Tech 10 two more times.

    “That’s it?”

    “Afraid so, hyung.”

    “Hmmm.”

    “You know, Jiyong-hyung, the last time you had that look on your face, Seungri ended up tied to the training room rafters.”

    “It built character. And please, we both know he enjoyed it.”