K

The following article contains HEAVY SPOILERS! Read on at your own caution!

K (Ｋ, K) is the major antagonist in The Boxer. He is a legendary boxing trainer, having raised 5 boxing world champions.^[1] his status in currently unkown after Yu's match with J

Appearance

K is an older man with pure white hair with a slightly receding hairline, thick white eyebrows, blue eyes and a wrinkled face. He generally wears a stern expression on his face, but during the times where his interest has been piqued or he is excited, he can sport very devious devilish grins. He has a well defined body, befitting his position as a boxing trainer.

Image Gallery

Personality

K has a strong personality and he relies extensively on his instinct and gut feelings to guide his decisions, noting himself that he has always lived in such a way.^[2] That said, his intuition regarding others is usually correct. K has an underlying child-like streak, such as his immense excitement when things go his way. At one point, he was so keen for Yu to join him, K genuinely thought about kidnapping the student and taking him with him.^[3]

Plot

K's past, where he was a promising boxer but decides to pursue a career as a soldier, where he quickly stands out. In his first mission, he manages to rescue a civilian and among them there is a boy who is impressed by K and promises to be a great soldier like him when he grows up.

Years later, K is still a soldier and participating in various missions (including the one in which he rescued Carmen), and it is seen that he has a wife and young son. On a mission in which he has to eliminate a target, K meets the boy he rescued on his first mission, now as an enemy. In a moment of killing or being assassinated, he ends up killing him with a shot in the head so that it would be a painless death, but that scene remains fixed in his memory and is the beginning of the trauma, questioning how both the reality of the war and the peaceful daily life coexist together.

Back home, he has nightmares about the boy he killed on his last mission and overlaps him with his son. He talks about it with his wife and she feels sorry for him since he is the type who keeps things to himself and does not reflect much that pain he feels, in addition to her fear that the next time he leaves he will not be able to return. They talk about him doing one last mission with his group as a farewell and then retiring. It is during this mission that they inform him that his wife and his son died in a traffic accident hit by a truck that failed their brakes at a junction. The driver was sentenced to probation and in K's words "something changed inside him."

In the end he kidnaps the guy and threatens to give him a painless or torturous death depending on how he answers his questions, and if he did something stupid he would kill him and his family.  He asks why he ran over his wife and son, considering that he was able to turn to the other side, although in the process he ran over another larger group. According to the driver, that he apologized and prayed for his life, that he simply chose where he would be least affected by the accident. Although K questions him why he had to choose his family, he said that he would have made the same choice if he were in a similar situation (his team of him over the boy he saved and was now his enemy in back then).

After killing the guy responsible for the death of his family, K returns to the army, although his colleagues and superiors are concerned about K's mental situation. That is why they subject him to psychological tests, which he approves, implying that K is fine (although deep down they are concerned that the tests turned out too well, as if K knew what to respond to to manipulate the results and make it look good).

During a mission in which they were surrounded by the enemy, K receives an epiphany: "The value of life is an illusion that humans want to believe, but there is no reason for it. If life ends up fading without any meaning anyway, we should live it fully. The powerful should enjoy their superiority with all their hearts before they die. And the weak should writhe in their misery before they die." After that, he launched into a suicide attack.

In the midst of his onslaught, K reflects that the highest form of supremacy for living beings is to be able to take the life of another creature, the omnipotence to determine the life and death of others.  After that he meets an enemy soldier and he forces him to face him using boxing. It is here that K comes to the realization that boxing is where the purest form of supremacy lies, a place where there are no aids or weapons, a fight between two beings to prove their supremacy, a direct collision between life and death.

At the end the guy keeps apologizing and begging her to let him live so he can see his family, while K points a gun at his head and says, "It's true ... Everyone dies saying the same thing." In a boxing gym in South Korea, K observed the performance of a young boxer named Ryu Baeksan, the person he'd been told about by his acquaintance, Kim Tae-Pung, the director of the boxing gym. Noting that Ryu was toying with his opponent, K asked for him to fight the strongest person in the gym. With Steel being summoned to the ring, the pro-boxer and Ryu began sparring. With K observing Ryu's natural talent dominating the professional boxer, after the sparring between the two ended, he told Tae-Pung that Ryu Baeksan had the potential and everything else required to become a world champion in boxing. Just then, his attention was grabbed by the scene of a student being bullied outside. With how the kid was reacting to being hit catching his eye, K rushed down to intervene.

While the gym director disciplined the bullies, K spoke to the kid asking why he didn't dodge their punches. With the kid replying that he couldn't be bothered and then turning to leave, K mused that he had to find out whether his intuition was correct or not. Trusting his gut, K then called out to the kid while throwing a one-hit kill punch at him. However, the kid easily dodged the blow. Satisfied, K asked him if he wanted to learn how to box and the kid responded by asking if hitting people was fun. K grinned and told him that obviously it was, before saying that proving one's dominance and seeing how far one could go was what it meant to be alive. He then showed the kid how to do the one-two combo before telling the kid that he had one month to come and see him at the gym.

Afterwards, Tae-Pung asked K if he knew who the student was was. Thinking deeply, K asked the gym director what he thought about instincts. Confused, K went on to explain the gut feeling he got every time he met an athlete that he would go on to train, adding that he felt the same thing from Ryu Baeksan. However, he revealed that when he met the student he felt something unfamiliar instead: he felt bloodcurdling fear...K continued by saying that he couldn't stop trembling when he saw this kid, adding that it seemed like the kid had been waiting for the punch to land at the time. With Tae-Pung making a skeptical response, K affirmed his words before bringing the gym director to the shocking confirmation: this student had indeed been able to easily avoid his one-hit kill punch. With K explaining the seemingly superhuman capabilities that this kid possessed, he told Tae-Pung that although he had seen many geniuses til now, he had never seen someone like this kid. In short, this kid wasn't a genius, but a monster that surpassed the capabilities of humans.

Abilities

Instincts: K has the instincts of years training boxers.  K can tell just by looking when a person has the potential to be a boxing champion, in Yu's case he felt immense fear coming from him considering him a true monster.

Master Boxer: K is a legendary boxing coach with years of experience managing to successfully coach 5 world champions, several boxers ask him for advice on improving their skills but he refuses because he only trains champions.

Tactical Analysis: Thanks to his years of boxing experience, he is able to accurately assess a boxer's skills by knowing his fighting skills and weaknesses just by watching the video of his fights or analyzing them closely for his physical anatomy.

Notes & Trivia

• His real name is currently unknown.
• K runs the Lions Boxing Club boxing gym. The gym is reputed enough to be considered sacred for boxers, featuring the world's finest features. Despite being K's gym, only a few boxers in the gym have been directly selected by him.^[4]
• He considers Aaron Tide to be his masterpiece out of the 5 world champion boxers he has trained.^[4]

References

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