Work Text
There once was a King named JYP. His kingdom was vast and prosperous as it was protected by many different groups of knights that the King had personally hand picked and trained. But all was not perfect as the king ruled with an iron fist.One day the King heard of a rebellious faction rising in popularity within his kingdom that disagreed with his way or ruling and threatened to start a rebellion. This faction was called 3RACHA and was quickly gathering more powerful allies and attention. The King was faced with a dilemma of how to stop the rebellion swiftly.He feared that if he outright wiped them out it would only incite more rage towards him from the peasants and that the rebellion would strike again, more powerful. If, on the other hand, he banished the faction they may just gather support from another country and return.In the end he came up with a cunning, calculating scheme to quietly do away with the group: he would invite them to become knights for him under the guise of helping him towards changing the kingdom for the better. Then he could break their will within the castle walls.3RACHA, not knowing the full extent of the King’s tyranny accepted his offer and named themselves the ‘Stray Knights’. There were nine of them in total. As soon as they arrived at the castle for their training at the Kings hand to become knights worthy of the kingdom they experienced great hardship:They worked from morning to night with little sleep or food practicing their swordsmanship and within only 3 weeks of arriving were to demonstrate their skill to the king with a showcase.Their instructors were harsh and they told them their current fighting style was unacceptable as it came from the streets, it was not at all the poised graceful fighting expected of a Kings knights.The King was particularly harsh with the leader of the group, Chan, giving him extra tasks as he believed should he be able to break the leaders will, the rest would crumble too.The King came to observe their demonstration after the 3 weeks were over expecting the knights to all be in bad form or ready to quit but instead found they had gone above and beyond what he had asked of them while doing it all with a smile. They had taken in all they had been taught and applied it perfectly. Even the instructors he had ordered to break their will complimented them.The King criticised each of them harshly in anger and left feeling infinitely frustrated.As his plot had yet to work the King decided to change his angle and target the members of the troop individually. Even if they had survived because they found camaraderie with each other he would obliterate that so that they would all suffer. The King was so humiliated by the Stray Knights that he began to make his wanting to get rid of them personal.He decided to target one of their oldest and strongest fighters called Minho. If he could humiliate him the others would see they had no chance. The King kept a close eye on him and scrutinised his every move until he too began to doubt himself and his movements. Even the words of his fellow knights could not console him. Soon another month had passed and the King ordered another evaluation. His efforts bore fruits as the Minho boy fumbled his footsteps and fell. He felt himself grin as he stood up and making a big scene out of it for all the other knights to see declared that Minho was clearly not fit for the life of a knight and ordered him to leave the castle and return to ordinary life.The other knights clearly wanted to argue but couldn’t do so as Minho had messed up for all to see. The King left the evaluation this time in high spirits and he foresaw it being only weeks, maybe even days before the Stray Knights disbanded. To ensure it even further he organised an exhibition match with the neighbouring kingdoms rising knights. “HA” he thought, “that would crush their spirits even further as their pride was destroyed when they failed in front of important officials”. It would also dissuade them from attempting any more uprisings after JYP crushed them, their pride would be too wounded to try and ally with neighbouring kingdoms knowing they were a laughing stock.The King himself attended the exhibition fight under the pretence of tracking the progress of his new fledgling knights, he supposed that was true in a way. But the disaster he looked forward to never came. The Stray Knights completely overwhelmed YG kingdoms knights by combining the royal style of fighting they had learned over the past months with their street style of brawling. It resulted in the YG knights being caught off guard and quickly losing. JYP had to fume in silence as the King of YG praised his knights highly for their unique style. He responded with a tight lipped smile before forcefully complimenting the Stray Knights.Over the next weeks he increased the knights training tenfold even if he knew it would do nothing to deter them. He paced back and forth in his study wondering why getting rid of Minho hadn’t worked when he overheard a conversation between two of the knights (Woojin and Seungmin he thoughtb their names were) below his window.“How do you think Minho is now?”“You know him, strong as an oak tree. He’ll have bounced right back, don’t you worry”JYP then understood. It wasn’t the strongest knight he needed to break but the weakest one that the knights cared for the most . . . yes, that would certainly work.He began to target the youngest of the knights, Jeongin with the same attention he had given to Minho.Before he could take it as far as he had done with Minho though, a small skirmish started up at the southern border. He sent several knight troops including the Strays, Got7, Day6, and 2pm. Just another excuse to overwork them and maybe even scare them away. Many knights had quit after their first experience in a real fight as it proved to be too much. He tasked the other knight troops to also keep an eye on the Strays and report anything ‘strange’ back to him.They returned victorious, he expected no less, and with much to say.He sat silently stewing as again there was nothing but praises for the boys from Got7 and Day6. But 2pm brought an interesting piece of news: when a boy in the group named Felix fumbled all the other members immediately moved to help him.JYP grinned, it seemed he had been targeting the wrong boy. While Jeongin was the youngest he wasn’t the most fragile of the knights. After doing some research JYP discovered that Felix was actually from a different, far off kingdom and had struggled in the kingdom to get by and understand the language, for that reason he was babied by all the rest of the knight troop. It was time to change targets.And so too Felix left the castle in disgrace. and the negative effect it had on the Knights didn’t go unnoticed by JYP, surely this time they would give up and leave in shame.But again they didn’t. And once again JYP was mad at first until after sitting in his study window and looking at the Stray Knights practice for 12 hours straight unsupervised he had an epiphany. They weren’t practicing because he told them to, they weren’t doing it because a supervisor was watching their every move. They truly wanted change for the kingdom and were working to achieve it unlike him. He had been spending his time pettily teasing some kids who were proving to be more mature than him.JYP came to realise this group of knights could overcome members leaving and anything else because they believed in their cause and wanted to achieve their goals together. He reflected on how he had treated them, how he had treated all of his knights as toys in his game and treated the people outside of his court within his whole kingdom. Perhaps instead of being his enemy they could work together and become his strongest asset . . . He pondered it for many days and many nights and decided to give the knights an ultimatum, participate in the upcoming kingdom wide tournament with Felix and Minho as well, come out the undisputed victors and he would make them the highest level of knights. That was all a cover though. What he really wanted to see was how the people reacted to them. Each of them came from lower class backgrounds and before he had plucked 3RACHA from the streets many of their supporters had been peasants. He wanted to see if they could truly assist in bridging the gap he had come to notice between the ruling and lower class in his kingdom.They performed the best they ever had in hopes of getting Minho and Felix back, not realising the true goal of the experiment. Of course they could not win against the most veteran of knights in the kingdom even with their impressive unique fighting style. The stood in front of the King with their heads hung low in shame when he told them to lift them.“you are not perfect but no real thing is, that’s why it’s beautiful and I have only just come to realise this. I have ignored the less fortunate people in my kingdom for years because they did not appear perfect to me. I chose instead to polish the jewels that were already in my court but people cannot be happy this way. . . congratulations. You are all knights of the highest order and I look forward to hearing your ideas about reform”.and so they went on to do greater things in a shorter period than any other troop of knights had and they succeeded in uniting JYP’s kingdom with people it had never included before.