Boxe clandestine à l'Ares Garden

Underground boxing at Ares Garden is an illegal operation that makes Jungkook Jeon its foremost attraction. The fights give visible form to his struggle with rage, while the venue’s concealment and the people around him reveal the danger sustaining that spectacle.

Organization and operation

Ares Garden presents a bar as cover for its illegal fights. Chen Wu, the venue’s manager, cultivates the police officers who come to drink; some watch the bouts, and their corruption helps keep them from exposing what happens inside. Jungkook Jeon arrives prepared for the fights and is treated as the operation’s central draw: spectators cheer as he enters the ring, and the crowd throws dollar bills. He wraps his fists and wrists, fights without gloves, and is known for being first to compete and for continuing until his opponent is unconscious. The bouts are brutal, but he does not want to kill anyone and carry that death on his conscience.

Violence and its witnesses

A fight exposes the gap between the spectacle Ares Garden sells and the violence Jungkook Jeon unleashes. After his opponent taunts him, Jungkook answers with a flurry of unrestrained blows. His rage escalates as he attacks; the opponent’s face becomes unrecognizable, and Jungkook feels bones break and muscles give way. He raises his fist for a potentially fatal final strike, but the referee steps in and declares him the winner. The opponent is carried from the ring unconscious and close to respiratory distress. Chen Wu then leads Jungkook to the locker room, praises his performance, and tells him to shower while he prepares his payment.

Shelby Anderson sees the brutality from the audience. The fighters wear no gloves, and she gradually understands that the bar conceals an illegal venue. She is not afraid of the fight itself, but cannot name the strange feeling it stirs in her; when Jungkook attacks, her body jolts. His anger and pride are plain, and his dark expression unsettles her. The scene makes the ring more than a place where Jungkook earns money: it is where his fury becomes public spectacle, witnessed by someone who has already begun to notice the darkness surrounding him.

The violence beyond the ring

The underground bouts sit within a larger history of violence in Jungkook Jeon’s life. Years earlier, when he was eight, he tried to break into a family argument despite his older brother Ye-jun holding him back to keep him safe. As a teenager, Jungkook returned to Sunmi Eun’s home with a badly beaten face, concealing that his father had struck him by claiming he had fought at school. At sixteen, he fled home and Sunmi took him in; she later recalled that his father did not even try to find him. These details do not establish a single cause for Jungkook’s fighting, but they place the ring’s violence against a childhood in which violence was already part of his surroundings.

The people closest to Jungkook recognize the danger that the spectacle can obscure. Namjoon Kim knows that Jungkook refuses to kill an opponent, yet his concern grows when rage drives Jungkook toward a potentially fatal blow. Sunmi, who has sheltered him, also sees the darkness around him and worries about the things he has turned to since running away. Against this pattern, Shelby Anderson’s later openness and warmer behavior register as change within their wider circle, not as proof that the ring or its violence has vanished. Ares Garden makes Jungkook’s fury visible and rewards it; the care around him offers a different response, while leaving the conflict unresolved.

Night, performance, and the inner adversary

The fights unfold in the part of the day Jungkook Jeon most prefers: night, when darkness feels like both refuge and element, yet also reveals a face stripped of visible emotion. Before entering the ring, he wraps his fists and wrists as the “demons” on his shoulders laugh; the image turns the preparation into a ritual in which he appears to arm himself alongside the force he is about to unleash. Ares Garden’s audience sees the violence as spectacle, but the narration places its source within Jungkook, whose chosen darkness gives the “beast” in him room to break loose. The ring thus externalizes an inner conflict without resolving it: each bout makes that conflict visible, while the language of demons keeps the violence from seeming merely a performance for the crowd.