Chen Wu
𝐋𝐚𝐜𝐮𝐧𝐚 | 𝑱𝒆𝒐𝒏 𝑱𝒖𝒏𝒈𝒌𝒐𝒐𝒌Chen Wu is the manager of Ares Garden, the bar-fronted venue that secretly hosts illegal underground boxing, and one of the most important adult figures in Jungkook Jeon’s life. He combines physical intimidation with an unexpectedly generous moral code. As Jungkook’s mentor, employer, and disciplinary authority, Chen helps organize the world in which Jungkook turns rage into combat; as a witness to the damage that world causes, he is also the person most willing to enforce its limits. His trajectory moves from powerful manager to arrested proprietor and displaced mentor, making him a human measure of Ares Garden’s unstable bargain between livelihood, loyalty, spectacle, and violence.
Identity and Presence
Chen is described as exceptionally tall and muscular, a man whose size impresses even Jungkook, who is not ordinarily afraid of large bodies. In his forties, he still possesses the exuberance of a much younger man, sometimes behaving insolently but knowing when business requires restraint. He is bald, black-eyed, and marked by a piercing gaze that can frighten anyone who crosses his path. This exterior suggests the stereotypical intimidating bouncer or criminal operator, yet the narrative deliberately complicates that first impression: Chen has a big heart and many principles. His appearance becomes a mask whose meaning the plot repeatedly revises, turning physical threat into a contrast with ethical seriousness.
The story places Chen inside a criminalized economy without reducing him to its brutality. Ares Garden presents itself as a bar, and that public identity provides cover for the ring and the many fights held there. Chen has cultivated relationships with police officers who drink at the establishment and sometimes watch the bouts. Their corruption protects the business: they know what occurs there and have no practical interest in exposing it. Chen is therefore not merely a bartender or a sports manager; he is the organizer of a system that depends on secrecy, compromised law enforcement, and the conversion of injured bodies into entertainment and income.
Mentor and Manager of Ares Garden
Chen’s relationship with Jungkook is structured by both affection and transaction. After a fight, he has Jungkook taken from the ring to the changing rooms, praises him for having performed excellently, and tells him to shower before receiving his payment. The scene establishes Chen’s ordinary function: he manages the fighters, oversees the aftermath, and pays them for the danger they have undertaken. His approval carries the authority of a coach, while the promised money reminds the reader that Ares Garden is also a workplace in which combat is labor.
He is particularly alert to Jungkook’s volatility. Chen remembers being impressed, and somewhat unsettled, the first time he saw the younger man because of the fury radiating from him. That fury has not disappeared, but it has become at least partly controlled. Chen’s mentorship therefore does not erase Jungkook’s anger; it gives that anger a set of boundaries, rules, and procedures. The arrangement is precarious because the same qualities that make Jungkook valuable as a fighter also threaten the people around him.
Chen’s concern becomes visible after Shelby encounters trauma in the Ares Garden changing rooms. He is deeply marked by the condition of the young student, even though he has seen similar incidents before. He also notices Jungkook’s unusual attention to her and is surprised by it because Jungkook rarely gives attention to anyone outside himself. Chen understands the younger man as stubborn, insolent, and arrogant, yet he can also recognize a meaningful deviation from that pattern. His observation links Jungkook’s emerging concern for Shelby to the manager’s own capacity to notice vulnerability within a violent environment.
Responses to Trauma and Violence
When Cassiopée Smith approaches Shelby and places both hands on her shoulders, Shelby recoils in pain, cries out, and then remains curled up, clearly refusing to be touched. Chen is not the direct responder in that moment, but his world is implicated in the conditions that have brought Shelby into the changing rooms. Jungkook later finds her trembling and crying beneath the running water, turns the water off, crouches before her, and stays beside her without forcing contact while she tries to calm down. Chen’s importance lies partly in the fact that such care occurs within the same institution he manages: the arena is capable of producing harm, but its members can still choose whether to repeat that harm or interrupt it.
Chen’s own protective instincts become clearest when Jungkook loses control during a fight. Jungkook strikes his opponent repeatedly with extraordinary rage, breaking one of the man’s teeth, while Namjoon Kim and Chen recognize that something is seriously wrong. Namjoon searches Jungkook’s belongings for his phone and calls Shelby, treating her presence as a possible stabilizing connection. Chen then intervenes physically, seizing Jungkook’s right arm and pulling him away before the assault can continue. His action is not a rejection of boxing itself; it is an attempt to preserve the distinction between a fight governed by rules and an attack driven by intoxication and uncontrolled fury.
Chen’s disciplinary judgment is explicit. He bans Jungkook from setting foot in Ares Garden until he has done what is necessary to recover control, warns that the other clubs will be informed, and insists that underground boxing still has rules. Jungkook has violated those rules by using cocaine, fighting while drunk or intoxicated, and striking members of the paying public. Chen also orders him to apologize to Shelby and promises to ensure that the apology occurs. The severity of the response reveals that Chen’s principles are not decorative. He is prepared to sacrifice access to a talented fighter rather than allow the venue’s violence to become arbitrary, drug-fueled, and directed at spectators.
Arrest and Loss of the Arena
Chen’s authority finally collapses under the legal and violent pressures surrounding Ares Garden. When he arrives at the venue and finds a police car outside, he recognizes Jacob, a regular customer, among the officers and immediately fears what is about to happen. The police inspect the premises and discover the ring. Chen is handcuffed and taken into custody, obeying because he sees no other way to respond. The sequence exposes the fragility of the protection he has built: the same police presence that once helped shield the bar can become the mechanism through which the hidden arena is revealed.
His release comes through an ugly exchange of power. Bruce Wilson pays Chen’s substantial bail after signing papers and a release relinquishing his complaint, then leaves quickly with the others. Chen is surprised to encounter Jungkook and Bruce together, though the blood on them does not surprise him. The encounter connects Chen’s legal jeopardy to the continuing cycle of personal violence around Jungkook. Ares Garden is no longer merely a concealed business with corrupt protection; it has become inseparable from confrontations that exceed the ring and draw formal intervention.
After the arrest, Chen is told that he will no longer be allowed to manage Ares Garden. He is given the rest of the day and evening to announce the decision at the establishment and say goodbye. His departure is marked by a sorrowful embrace with Namjoon, a gesture that turns the loss of the venue into a personal bereavement rather than a simple administrative change. Chen has built a community and a livelihood around the arena, but he cannot preserve either once the institution’s violence has become legally and morally untenable.
Return, Surveillance, and Narrative Significance
Chen later reappears at a venue associated with Spencer Jenkins, where Jungkook unexpectedly sees him beside the ring. The setting contains a black-leather VIP area with red neon and tables dark enough to resemble obsidian, a space Jungkook remembers Chen once using for storage. Chen greets Jungkook with a raised hand, but his fear remains invisible; instead, he moves away to call Namjoon and report that Jungkook has resumed fighting. His phone call makes clear that Chen remains watchful even after losing formal control of Ares Garden. He is no longer able to govern Jungkook directly, yet he still treats the younger man’s return to combat as urgent information that must reach someone capable of responding.
Chen’s later presence alongside Spencer also underscores the contradiction in his role. He is attached to the spectacle of combat, understands its organization, and can enjoy watching it, but he has already learned how quickly a fighter’s anger can turn the arena into a site of danger. The return of Jungkook to the ring is therefore not presented as a simple restoration of an old career. Through Chen’s alarm, it becomes a recurrence that carries the memory of cocaine, broken rules, public injury, and the destruction of the former Ares Garden.
Chen functions as a threshold figure between the legitimate and illegitimate worlds of the story. He runs a bar that conceals a criminal enterprise, pays fighters whose bodies are treated as working instruments, and relies on corrupt police while still insisting on rules and responsibility. His apparent hardness contains care, and his authority is strongest when he refuses to let violence become limitless. By protecting Shelby indirectly, stopping Jungkook’s assault, demanding sobriety and an apology, and then losing the arena he controlled, Chen embodies the novel’s recurring tension between survival inside violent systems and the ethical cost of maintaining them.
