Jungkook's underground boxing career at Ares Garden

Jungkook's underground boxing career at Ares Garden is the clearest arena in which his buried rage becomes visible, profitable, and dangerously difficult to contain. At the Ellensburg venue, he is not simply a student who happens to fight: he is the establishment's emblem, the first name called for combat, and a crowd favorite whose victories are purchased with thrown dollar bills. The fights give form to the darkness he hides elsewhere, but they also expose the cost of turning trauma into a performance.

Ares Garden and Its Illegal Economy

Ares Garden operates behind the respectable cover of a bar. Chen Wu has built the concealment carefully, treating police officers who come to drink and watch the matches so well that they become complicit in the venue's silence. The officers know Chen is dangerous and have no intention of exposing what happens inside. The bar's visible decoration reinforces its double identity: boxing gloves, match photographs, prizes, and diplomas make the public room look like a shrine to the sport, while a large door leads to crowded stands and a prominent ring where fighters compete without gloves.

Jungkook reaches Ares Garden in advance of his matches, driving there with a sports bag and entering as if the building belongs to him. Chen tells him to make himself at home, and Jungkook proceeds upstairs to change before joining the training room. His preparation is physical and ritualized. He removes his black shirt, studies himself in the mirror, notices the piercing in his right eyebrow, and wraps bandages around his hands and wrists. The piercing has survived repeated blows to his face, just as the rest of his body has been made to absorb the consequences of the underground circuit.

Chen's own presence complicates the venue's brutality. He is large, muscular, bald, and intimidating, with black eyes and a penetrating stare, yet he is also described as a man with principles and a generous heart. His appearance invites judgment, but his conduct resists it. He recognizes the fury emanating from Jungkook's body and understands that it has not disappeared; at best, it has been partially controlled. Chen therefore functions both as manager and as a figure who sees the danger beneath Jungkook's usefulness to the ring.

Jungkook as Fighter and Spectacle

On the evening of September 7 at 11:30 p.m., darkness becomes Jungkook's preferred element. It is his hiding place and his chosen terrain, the hour when he can become whoever he wants and release the beast within him. The narration presents the night as revealing rather than concealing his true face: an emotionless, shadowed expression replaces the ordinary student, while his inner demons seem to sit laughing on his shoulders as he prepares his hands for violence.

The crowd treats him as the face of Ares Garden. He enters the ring to cheers, and spectators throw money as though his body were both athlete and entertainment. Jungkook fights until an opponent is unconscious. A death match remains imaginable within the venue's lawless logic, but he does not want another person's death on his conscience. That limit is narrow but significant: even while he approaches lethal force, some awareness of responsibility remains. Namjoon Kim knows this better than anyone, and he is the only person who understands that Jungkook's violence is not merely a talent but the outlet for a destructive anger capable of annihilating those who come too close.

Namjoon waits near the ring, massages Jungkook's shoulders, and urges him to fight through to the end. Jungkook answers that he will do so as usual. After embracing his friend, Namjoon hides between the stands and watches with fear as Jungkook prepares himself like a rabid dog. His anxiety is not caused by uncertainty about Jungkook's skill. It comes from knowing exactly how far that skill can carry the young man once rage replaces restraint, and from knowing that he is the only person who can identify Jungkook as an underground boxer.

The combat itself follows a calculated pattern. A much larger opponent opens with a right hook, but Jungkook evades it perfectly and drives his knee twice into the man's stomach. Rather than immediately seeking a knockout, he increases the force of his attacks while allowing the opponent to tire. His strategy is to cook the other fighter before delivering the decisive blow, a method that turns endurance into a form of control. The spectators demand speed or encourage him according to their appetite for spectacle, but Jungkook dictates the pace.

That control collapses when the opponent insults him. The taunt makes Jungkook's blood turn, and he responds with a sudden series of punches delivered without restraint. The crowd is not shocked by the change, and Namjoon is not surprised either; he is simply far more worried. Jungkook's rage becomes nameless and total, with the imagined demons urging him to strike harder. His blows leave the opponent's face unrecognizable, break bones, and cause the man's muscles to give way. Jungkook raises his fist for what may be a fatal strike before the referee enters the ring and stops him.

The referee declares Jungkook the winner, but the victory is inseparable from the condition of the defeated fighter. The opponent is removed unconscious and near respiratory distress, while Chen takes Jungkook from the ring and leads him to the changing rooms. Chen praises him for performing like a champion, tells him to shower, and prepares to pay him. The scene therefore closes the immediate conflict with money and recognition, yet those rewards arrive beside evidence that Jungkook's success depends on bringing another body to the edge of collapse.

The Secret Seen by Shelby Anderson Barnum

Shelby Anderson Barnum discovers Ares Garden without initially understanding what it is. She enters the bar for a soda, notices its boxing-themed interior, and recalls watching boxing and wrestling with Connor Barnum as a child. Her father had allowed her to imitate the athletes' impressive movements gently, taking the falls himself so that she would not be hurt. This memory makes the venue appear familiar before its hidden function becomes clear.

When the customers suddenly hurry toward the large door, Shelby waits for them to pass and follows out of curiosity. She finds packed stands surrounding a ring and approaches despite being intimidated by one of the imposing men nearby. Her heart races with an unexpectedly pleasant sensation resembling adrenaline. Then Jungkook climbs into the ring, smiling proudly at the audience and winking to the delight of the women watching him.

Shelby studies him in a way ordinary encounters have not allowed. The full coverage of tattoos on his arms becomes visible, and she is fascinated by the markings partly because Connor also has many tattoos, though she has never been able to examine Jungkook's in such detail. The fascination is immediately complicated by sadness. The body she had previously encountered in fragments now appears as a complete surface marked by an identity he exposes only under the cover of the ring.

When Jungkook's opponent enters and the fight begins without gloves, Shelby realizes that the location is not legal. The bar is no longer merely a bar; it is the front room of an underground operation. She has never attended such a fight in person. She is not simply frightened, however. The blows impress her, her body jolts when Jungkook unleashes himself, and she cannot hide both surprise and fear at the obvious anger and pride in his movements. His gaze is too dark for the spectacle to remain entertaining. Ares Garden gives Shelby her first direct view of the contradiction at the center of Jungkook: charisma before the crowd, and a frightening interior life made visible through violence.

Violence, Trauma, and Learned Survival

Jungkook's relationship with violence predates Ares Garden. In a house in Gangnam, Seoul, he was an eight-year-old child trapped in the atmosphere of his parents' violent arguments. Ye-jun Jeon held him tightly to stop him from entering the kitchen and placing himself in danger, but Jungkook struggled free when the shouting intensified. His anger was already directed toward the adults who made the home unsafe, and his childhood distress was expressed through an impulse to intervene rather than retreat. The underground ring later gives that same impulse a different shape: instead of trying to stop violence between others, Jungkook becomes the person who controls its force.

Sunmi Eun remembers another stage in that progression. When Jungkook was young, he returned to her home with his face badly injured and claimed that he had fought at school. She initially believed the explanation that Namjoon Kim had rescued him, but later understood that Dong-hyun Jeon had beaten him. At sixteen, Jungkook fled his home and took refuge with Sunmi, whose open welcome became a rare source of safety. Even after he settled into her household without disrespect, she remained frightened by the darkness surrounding him and by Namjoon's reports of his behavior outside her home. Jungkook had already encountered substances that a sixteen-year-old should never have touched. Ares Garden is therefore not the origin of his destructiveness; it is the organized environment in which an older pattern of fear, rage, and self-endangerment becomes socially rewarded.

The ring also reveals the limits of Jungkook's self-control. He can choose a tactical pace, evade a larger fighter, and preserve a narrow boundary against killing, yet an insult is enough to transform calculated combat into uncontrolled punishment. The change is witnessed repeatedly by Namjoon, who knows that the rage can destroy people who come too close. Jungkook's violence is consequently both learned and reinforced: family conflict supplies an early model of force, the underground venue supplies an audience and payment, and each victory confirms that his most dangerous state can also make him valuable.

The Network Around the Fights

Namjoon Kim occupies the closest position to Jungkook within the Ares Garden network. He is not merely a friend who appears before a match. He massages Jungkook's shoulders, encourages him, watches from between the stands, and understands the private condition beneath the public performance. His support contains fear rather than eliminating it. He can stand beside Jungkook and recognize his capacity, but he cannot reliably restrain the fury once the fight has begun. Their friendship is therefore built around a painful form of knowledge: Namjoon knows the secret of the underground boxer and also knows how dangerous it is to remain the person closest to him.

Chen Wu controls the commercial structure that turns this danger into an enterprise. He maintains the bar's cover, manages the fighters, oversees the training space, and pays Jungkook after each match. His praise treats Jungkook's performance as professional achievement, even when the opponent leaves unconscious and near respiratory distress. Yet Chen is not presented as a simple sadist. His intimidating body and threatening reputation coexist with principles and a large heart, producing an uneasy mixture of protection, exploitation, and recognition. He sees Jungkook's fury clearly enough to know that it has only been partly mastered, but he still places that fury inside a system that profits from its release.

The venue's police connections expand the circle of complicity. Officers come to the bar to drink and sometimes watch the fights; Chen treats them well enough that they become corrupt participants in the silence surrounding the ring. Ares Garden thus exists through more than the fighters and spectators. Its illegal character is sustained by a social arrangement in which law enforcement is present but declines to enforce the law, while the crowd's money and approval make bodily damage appear legitimate for the duration of the spectacle.

Consequences and Personal Reorientation

Ares Garden repeatedly places Jungkook's concealed life in collision with his relationships outside it. Namjoon later tells Sunmi that Jungkook has caused trouble again and has relapsed into the destructive behavior from which he refuses help. The report confirms that the fights are not an isolated hobby that can be neatly separated from his emotional life. His underground career affects the people who care for him, reactivates their fear, and turns his refusal of assistance into a recurring source of conflict.

At the same time, Jungkook's connection with Shelby Anderson Barnum begins to disturb the closed circuit of rage, secrecy, and reward. Namjoon observes that the two lost souls have formed a close bond and remain together despite the turmoil surrounding them. Shelby's presence does not erase Jungkook's violence, but it gives his actions a witness who is not part of the Ares Garden audience. She sees the body, the tattoos, the charisma, and the darkness in the same encounter. That total view matters because the ring depends on dividing Jungkook into a spectacle for spectators and a hidden danger known only to those closest to him.

Shelby's later recovery also changes how Jungkook's influence is understood. Cassiopée Smith notices that Shelby becomes more open and less cold, and she credits the change above all to Jungkook and to Sunmi's psychological help. Jungkook modestly rejects the role of principal agent, attributing Shelby's progress primarily to her therapist, but the exchange shows that he can participate in care as well as violence. His capacity to protect and encourage does not cancel the brutality of Ares Garden; it establishes the contrast through which his possible transformation becomes legible.

That contrast extends into his adult identity. At graduation, Jungkook adjusts his tie, wears a gown and mortarboard, and complains that he wants the ceremony to end. Later, after beginning work at N's Ink, he tells Shelby that his installation was quick because Noah had reserved a place for him, that he met his colleagues, and that he worked on a flash book for clients. These scenes place formal education and skilled creative labor beside the underground career. The tattoo work uses his knowledge of bodies and markings in a lawful professional setting, while the graduation and employment scenes suggest that his abilities need not remain tied to a venue where pain is sold as entertainment.

Narrative Significance

Jungkook's underground boxing career is the book's most concentrated image of a life lived in an exception to ordinary rules. Ares Garden presents itself as a bar, but behind its door the law is suspended, fighters compete bare-knuckled, spectators pay for incapacitation, and police officers protect the arrangement through silence. Jungkook is included in this economy precisely by being exposed to its violence. He receives recognition, money, and status, yet those rewards depend on the venue treating his body and his rage as usable property.

The career also gives physical form to the recurring opposition between darkness and care. Night allows Jungkook to hide and to become the version of himself the ring celebrates; it is simultaneously the setting in which his most frightening impulses become visible. Namjoon watches with apprehension, Sunmi remembers the abused child beneath the fighter, and Shelby encounters the spectacle before she can understand the person. Each relationship contests the idea that Jungkook is only the violent figure Ares Garden has made famous.

Ultimately, the underground fights matter because they establish both the severity of Jungkook's damage and the possibility of change. The same young man who once tried to stop violence in his family, who survived paternal abuse, and who fled to Sunmi's home becomes a fighter praised for nearly rendering an opponent unable to breathe. Yet he also forms bonds, accepts forms of responsibility, completes university, enters tattoo work, and remains capable of being gentle toward Shelby. Ares Garden is therefore not merely a setting for action. It is the institution that converts his trauma into spectacle, the network that conceals and rewards his rage, and the dark measure against which his later movement toward care and an ordinary future can be understood.