9. SOMEDAY(2)
I have to meet Sergeant Park, that bastard, again?
Just as I was floundering in inescapable self-loathing, the practice room door burst open and Hajun ran in.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?”
“Ha….”
I didn’t even have the strength to answer.
I had to go to the army again. What kind of bullshit was this?
“What is it? Why is Jihwan like that?”
“I don’t know. Is he crying?”
I could feel the guys grabbing me and shaking me, but the blow was too great for me to keep hold of my senses.
It might be the price for dying and coming back to life, but to think I had to go back there again.
I couldn’t properly hear what the people around me were saying, so for a moment I just let my body be shaken, but eventually I got dizzy and grabbed Hajun’s wrist.
“Hyung, I’m dizzy….”
“What happened to you? Why are you suddenly crying?”
Maybe I had been so wronged that tears had welled up without me realizing it.
My eyes had only gotten a little moist, and I didn’t think anything had actually fallen, but the members’ reactions were unexpectedly intense, so I was puzzled.
I sank down onto the floor for a moment and took deep breaths, trying hard to get myself together. Piecing together what I heard in the meantime, they said that when they saw me through the door, I had been doing a dance move, then suddenly, as if all the strength had drained out of me, I slammed my head into the wall mirror.
Seeing me like that, Hajun and Gyeonghwan had been startled, wondering if I was feeling unwell, and had rushed in to grab me, but since my eyes were damp, everyone seemed to have panicked.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing….”
I was grateful that they were worried, but this was a secret of my own that I couldn’t tell them the truth about. I answered in a choked voice as I swallowed back my tears, but it didn’t seem to clear up the misunderstanding.
Since everyone was needlessly looking at me with serious expressions and choosing their words carefully, I thought I needed to disperse the shock of reenlistment with other things.
And while I was at it, it seemed fine to try using the skill that had activated on its own yesterday.
I couldn’t use it on several people at once, but I figured I could look briefly and turn it off, so I activated the skill….
[A grown man squeezing out tears first thing in the morning, what the hell. Bad luck.]
[He must be having a really hard time too. Phew…. Should I be the one to say we should just quit?]
[Should I tell them to send him to the hospital even now….]
[What do I do? Hyung looks like he’s really struggling. Shit, what do I do?]
[He acted like he was fine, but maybe it was hard because he went out alone. I should pay a little more attention to him after all.]
[He acted fine all last night, but I guess the talk about expulsion really was a big burden on him. Haa… I need to comfort him properly.]
After checking everyone in order—Kim Ubin, Himchan, Gyeonghwan, Sebin, Yeongbin, and Hajun—I took a deep breath in and out, steadying myself.
Their expressions were all full of concern and worry, but the strings of words floating up like speech bubbles told me much more. Based on my previous experience, I kept changing the skill’s target after looking at only one sentence from each person, so I couldn’t know what they had thought in between, but fortunately, aside from one person, no one was cursing me out.
Kim Ubin, that bastard really is consistent.
“I’m sorry. I ruined the mood a little, didn’t I? Starting the morning with tears like this is bad luck, right?”
I was already feeling sunken to rock bottom after remembering something so depressing, and if I didn’t say at least one thing to that human trash bastard, I didn’t think I’d be able to hold back my anger.
“What are you talking about! Don’t say that. People can cry.”
“Are you really okay not going back to the hospital?”
“If someone’s so upset that they cry, anyone who says something about that is human trash.”
As Yeongbin, Gyeonghwan, and Hajun each added a word of comfort, Ubin’s already stiff face twisted, maybe because he felt as if I had seen into his inner thoughts.
Idiot. From the moment all the members entered the practice room, filming had already begun. If he was the only one whose expression changed so obviously like that, there was no way a broadcasting station that loved conflict wouldn’t use it somehow.
Conflict between trainees, an appropriate bit of discord, made good bait for ratings.
In any case, what Himchan had said was so meaningful that it stuck firmly in my head. Was he thinking of quitting trainee life?
“I’m really fine. For a moment, my body didn’t move as well as I thought it would, so I guess I felt frustrated.”
“No, you’ve really improved a lot. Don’t think like that.”
When I made an appropriate excuse and smiled to change the mood, Baek Gyeonghwan, who usually treated everyone so calmly that I couldn’t tell what feelings he had toward ‘me,’ said something unexpected.
Gyeonghwan, even if you don’t show it openly, all the Cotton Balls knew how much you thought about the members….
Before I realized it, my Cotton Ball mindset popped out, and I grabbed Gyeonghwan’s hand.
“…?”
“Gyeonghwan hyung, thank you. For saying that.”
“What’s with you all of a sudden? Let’s just practice.”
For a moment Gyeonghwan looked at me as if wondering what was wrong with me, but fortunately, he gave a small laugh, patted my shoulder, and moved to take his place.
I also moved to take my position while my mind began spinning rapidly. Overall, the atmosphere toward the current ‘me’ wasn’t particularly sharp.
The sharp atmosphere I had felt yesterday was probably because I had acted out of line at an already sensitive time, making everyone feel resistant. Since I had kept showing that I was reflecting, acted friendly first, cleaned, and even made food, they seemed to have softened a lot.
The company, the broadcasting station, and the viewers all considered the members’ chemistry fairly important. In particular, some fans supported them with a lot of empathy and encouragement when they saw the members getting along and caring for one another.
Even I had been one of the fans who, while watching countless GIFs and videos about Hajun and Yeongbin’s true friendship and the chemistry of Tubin—Yeongbin and Sebin—held the firm belief that the word disbandment would never exist for Unravel.
And so I was able to decide what I should do from now on.
If I used the Giving Tree skill to check the members’ trust in me, and also used the Inner Familiarity skill a little, then even if it was tight, I thought I could create a decent situation over the next week.
After spending a practice session that was intense for a warm-up while my mind spun at full speed, I was catching my breath for a moment. Then, just like I had seen in the video, the practice room door opened and Team Leader Sohyeon entered with an expressionless face.
When I watched it in the video, it had only been one scene that passed by without much thought, but now that I was the one in this place waiting for the team leader to open her mouth, I couldn’t help being nervous.
“Starting today, you’ll be split into teams. You all remember, right?”
“Yes.”
The program was already past the halfway point. The two evaluations that remained, and the confirmation of the debut members, were the final story of this program.
Starting today at last, full-fledged practice for the first evaluation stage would begin.
First, the people divided into teams had to discuss concrete matters such as arranging the song and reorganizing the choreography, then plan their strategy well going forward.
Before that, the most important thing was forming the teams.
When I glanced at the others’ faces, all of them clearly looked tense.
“The teams will be one hundred percent random. Come forward one at a time and draw one of these.”
Inside the small box the team leader held out were neatly folded slips of paper numbered from one to seven, and on the chalkboard she had brought in from outside, there was a huge ladder game drawn on it.
At the very top of the ladder, A and B were written in order. Team A had four people, and Team B had three.
When I recalled the time I had watched Idol Creation, Kim Yeongbin, Kim Ubin, Choe Himchan, and some nameless person who would have been in ‘my’ position had been on Team A. And Team B had been Min Hajun, Baek Gyeonghwan, and Kang Sebin.
I didn’t want to be on the same team as Kim Ubin even if it killed me, but could that really go the way I wanted? Half resigned, I drew a slip, and names began to be written on the chalkboard one by one.
But at the result that unfolded soon after, I had no choice but to doubt my own eyes.
“All right, Group A will be Hajun, Gyeonghwan, Jihwan, and Himchan. Group B will be Yeongbin, Ubin, and Sebin. From deciding on a leader separately to everything else, you’ll be doing it among yourselves.”
What? Why did the result change? Did that thing called luck affect this?
“Everyone, follow me.”
Like ducklings following their mother duck, we trailed after Team Leader Sohyeon and entered different meeting rooms by team.
Now that we were all in the same boat one way or another, we looked at one another and ended up laughing. We had drawn slips at random and played the ladder game, but the way the team members were divided was quite exquisite.
The older hyungs who could provide a center were split between the teams, and the number of members confident in dance or singing also didn’t lean to one side and was well divided.
If there was a difference between Group A and Group B, it was that Hajun and Gyeonghwan were people who rapped, while there was no one in Group B who could rap properly.
“Somehow, I think I can already tell how the vibe of Group A and Group B will differ?”
“Right? I think so too.”
Since the composition of the members had changed like this, I thought the results of the first evaluation might turn out differently from what I had seen, and secretly felt relieved.
A little while later, Team Leader Sohyeon entered the meeting room and grinned as she looked around at us sitting there with stiff faces. Knowing that nothing was ever easy whenever the team leader smiled like that, tension returned to everyone’s faces.
“This time, the team that does a good job drawing help from the A&R team and the choreography team will have a greater chance of winning. The company has already spoken to each team’s team leader in advance. Do your best.”
“Do we have to go and ask them ourselves?”
“Yes. None of you don’t know which song will be the base, right?”
The song we had to prepare was ‘tracker’ by our seniors, Limitless.
And I already knew the most important point of this mission.
Guys, I’ll make us win. Just trust me!