The Second Ranking Announcement (2)
“Welcome, everyone, to the second class announcement ceremony of Idol Travel, the journey to find the greatest idol of all!”
Waaah!
The participants clapped and cheered with all their might. Nervous as they were, the cameras had started rolling, and they couldn’t just sit there blinking blankly with stiff faces.
Rain or shine, danger of elimination or not, they had to give their reactions their all.
“How have you all been?”
“Yeees~”
“Participant Ko Un-gu.”
“Huh?! Me?!”
At MC Jeong Ondo’s pointed call, the middle-schooler Ko Un-gu answered in shock, like a student caught daydreaming in class by the teacher.
“After the second competition, did you go out anywhere?”
“Yes…! I went out to eat with my parents!”
“Oh? I’m sure a lot more people recognize you now. Did anyone ask for your autograph while you were eating?”
“Ah…! The staff at the restaurant asked to take a picture with me, and it was really amazing!”
Jeong Ondo tossed light questions to a few other participants as well, drawing out casual conversation. He threw a question at Neoul too, something the fans would be curious about.
“Participant Gal Neoul.”
“Yes.”
“I saw earlier that Participant Gal Neoul has been all over social media. I heard you rode around the subway all the way until dawn to look at the billboards today?”
“Yes. I could not see all of them the last time I went, and I had not yet read all the messages, so I went while there were no people about.”
“I see. Was there any message left by the fans that especially stayed with you?”
“If I were to name one that remained with me….”
Neoul recalled the words from countless notes. There had been lines full of gag humor, lines full of desire, lines overflowing with praise and encouragement, and all manner of meaningless scribbles as well.
Among the notes he had carefully read one by one, he remembered a line written in neat, round handwriting.
Gal Neoul, you appeared like a gift. Thank you for singing for us.
Neoul awkwardly spoke the line he had only read with his eyes.
“Gal Neoul… who appeared like a gift.”
Someone else had called him an unwelcome guest. To be told he was a gift instead filled him with gratitude.
“...Thank you for singing for us.”
And it made him feel sorry. He had only sung to fulfill his own purpose, so why were they thanking him?
If anything, it would not have been enough for Neoul to bow a hundred times in gratitude to them. For voting diligently, cheering him on, promoting him, even putting up advertisements for him….
And yet they were the ones thanking him for singing.
As he returned home after spending the entire night gathering only kind words into tiny pieces and tucking them into square sheets of paper, he had thought to himself,
Do I deserve to receive this?
Just showing them a crooked cat heart or secretly slipping in a reply didn’t seem like nearly enough to repay them. I’ve given them so little, and yet I keep receiving. What am I supposed to do?
“That was the line that stayed with me.”
“Yes, wonderful! It sounds like all of you participants had a good time and received a lot of support. Then, empowered by the support of our viewers and passengers, we’ll need to deliver another great result today, won’t we?”
When Neoul finished speaking, Jeong Ondo clapped and stepped aside.
“All right! From here on, we’ll begin the second class announcement ceremony. Before we reveal the final results of the second competition, we’ll first be announcing the individual popularity rankings!”
A ranking chart made of numbers and blank spaces appeared on the screen above the stage. In front of it were the tiered seats they had seen last time.
The survival seats arranged in stair-step formation numbered only… thirty.
“There are currently fifty-one participants remaining in total. In this ranking announcement, twenty-one participants will be eliminated, and only thirty will survive.”
“Ahhh….”
At the news that twenty-one people would be eliminated, the participants each let out groans or wore anxious expressions.
Some were so tense that the blood had drained from their knuckles, leaving their fingers white, while one participant who had looked round-faced early in the shoot had grown visibly haggard.
Anxiety spread like a contagion, and brows all over the place folded into worried arcs. At a moment like this, smiling looked stranger than not, so long as the participants didn’t go around cursing, even their blunt expressions of dread could be forgiven.
“The individual vote rankings we’ll be revealing first may shift significantly depending on the results of the second competition. As announced during the second competition, the bottom three teams will all be eliminated.”
Jeong Ondo continued his explanation in a calm voice.
“The number of people on each team currently differs, ranging from five to seven. So we’ll first exclude the bottom three teams, then add the winning team’s benefit to the individual vote results, and the altered rankings will determine the thirty survivors.”
Neoul turned his head and looked back at his teammates. In the last individual vote, Park Dahan and Yeo Do-bin had been near the bottom.
Park Dahan had said he’d give up, yet he was still nervously picking at his lips. He had said he’d let it all go, but it seemed he still hadn’t fully managed that.
Yeo Do-bin sat upright with both fists on his knees, staring straight at the stage. He looked like a rookie employee who had come for an interview and frozen in place on arrival.
During the first competition, Park Dahan had ended up riding in the bus of Baek Yuri, the crazy team leader who could somehow do three people’s worth of work by himself.
He had almost been branded a villain for rebelling against the brutal training he was experiencing for the first time, but thanks to showing remorse and earning the label of “has potential for rehabilitation,” he had barely survived in forty-eighth place.
He had been rehabilitated, fortunately enough, but he hadn’t managed to shake off the shock of the hard training and had gone and declared he was quitting idol life.
As for Yeo Do-bin, since he had barely survived last time in fifty-first place after being rescued by Neoul’s Parachute Card, his footing was extremely precarious…. Whether he could survive at all was still very much in doubt. His hands were trembling faintly.
Neoul turned back to face front.
“However…! As with the first ranking announcement, any participant among the eliminated who possesses a Parachute Card may use it to survive. And among the participants who remain within the top thirty, anyone who holds a Parachute Card may, if they wish, rescue one of the eliminated. And….”
Jeong Ondo added one more explanation.
“If the Parachute Card is not used during this second ranking announcement, it will disappear entirely.”
“……!”
“From the next, third ranking announcement onward, you will no longer be able to use the Parachute Card.”
The participants murmured among themselves.
In truth, it was only natural for the Parachute Card to vanish. If it could guarantee survival no matter what, wasn’t that far too broken an item?
After this ranking announcement, there would only be two competitions left: the third competition and the final. Since this was a survival program decided by viewer votes, it made sense for the Parachute Card to disappear at this point.
“All right, so many of you participated in the voting. Once again, we’d like to thank our passengers for watching our program and voting despite their busy schedules. Then we’ll begin announcing this round’s individual vote rankings, starting immediately with the participant in thirtieth place!”
Since the ranking would still shift according to the second competition’s team vote results, Jeong Ondo started straight at thirtieth place.
“And in thirtieth place is…! Trainee Park Dahan!”
“Eek! Huh? Me? Really?”
Park Dahan, startled, pointed at himself as if checking whether he had heard wrong. When the MC and the teammates around him all nodded to say yes, he sprang up and hurried down in excitement.
“Participant Park Dahan. How do you feel about surviving?”
“They say if you want to live, you die, and if you want to die, you live. Haaah….”
At the dazed exclamation packed into Park Dahan’s voice, Jeong Ondo covered his mouth with a fist and laughed.
“Thank you so much!”
Park Dahan greeted them in a booming voice, then headed to his seat. What had happened to the man who’d said idol life was absolutely impossible for him? Once he actually survived, he couldn’t hide his grin.
The lower rankings were announced one after another, and they moved into the middle ranks.
“And in seventeenth place! Participant Ko Un-gu!”
Ko Un-gu, who had been twenty-ninth in the previous ranking, made a high leap up to seventeenth. Kamae Daiki, who had survived in twenty-sixth place, also shed the overly exaggerated, burdensome air that often came with Japanese idol styling and performed the stage more naturally than before, climbing to sixteenth.
Baek Gi-yeom surged five whole ranks in the increasingly fierce competition for the upper tier and landed in tenth place. And Neoul….
“Yes! Now we have the participant in third place! A contestant drawing attention with unpredictable moves and an outstanding tone color! The participant who took third in the individual vote is none other than…!”
“…….”
“Participant Gal Neoul!”
He retained the same rank as in the first announcement and held onto his First Class seat.
Neoul sat once again in the soft chair he had tried before and watched the proceedings. After all the overall rankings were revealed, he glanced around at the participants seated nearby.
6th Woo Cheong
5th Myeong I-dam
4th Lee Gal-chae
3rd Gal Neoul
2nd Baek Yuri
There were a few changes, but they were not all that different from the names he had seen in the previous rankings.
Aside from the handful of participants who had made dramatic leaps upward, the gap in skill and popularity between the mid-rank, lower-rank, and upper-rank contestants had grown more and more pronounced.
Then who would claim the long-awaited first place?
1st Ha On-ha
“Thank you~”
There were no surprises. But Neoul’s attention was on the votes, not the ranking.
The gap between first, second, and third place, which had once been wide, had narrowed compared to before. The wall that had seemed impossible to cross now stood at a height that, with a little effort, might actually be leapt.
But then….
“…….”
Yeo Do-bin’s name was not called.
Neoul knew that climbing from fifty-first place into the top thirty would be an enormous leap, but…. He had thought it wasn’t impossible. This wasn’t because Do-bin lacked talent and had fallen in the rankings.
Neoul looked down at Yeo Do-bin, who seemed on the verge of crumpling.
He kept fidgeting with his shoulders and collar, as though he wanted to pull a hood over his head and retreat into a hermit-crab state, but had no hood to hide beneath, so he wore down his clothes with his anxious hands instead.
Do humans have eyes on the backs of their heads…?
No matter how Neoul looked at it, Yeo Do-bin was far better than the contestants in the twenties and thirties. He couldn’t make sense of it. He knew rankings were based on popularity, not skill, but wasn’t skill supposed to translate directly into popularity?
Of course, during the first competition, Yeo Do-bin hadn’t shown his abilities properly. He had only sung a single line, and he had been emotionally shaken because of his conflict with the other team members. Aside from the conflict scenes, his screen time had basically vanished.
But while preparing for the second competition’s stage, Yeo Do-bin had clearly shown his true worth. The idea of using paint to make the concept stand out clearly, and of using different materials for each team member, had all come from him.
He had also played a huge role in the fine-tuning and revisions when conveying the arrangement direction.
Neoul had even wondered, What on earth did the team members do in the first round to turn such a capable guy into a crumpled, crying hermit crab in hiding?
All they had to do was listen to him, and Yeo Do-bin would happily start spouting good ideas one after another, taking the lead and benefiting the whole team in every way.
And on top of that, he even had the madness to enjoy Baek Yuri’s high-intensity training while smiling the whole time. In the end, he had completed the stage brilliantly.
Maybe humans just don’t like faces that look like great white sharks? Neoul wondered in confusion, but that wasn’t actually the case.
Yeo Do-bin’s fancams were quite popular, though not at the level of Baek Yuri’s, Gal Neoul’s, or Lee Gal-chae’s.
Even with all that shouting, he was still outside the top thirty.
Neoul let his eyes wander this way and that as he sank into thought.
It was then.
“But it’s not over until it’s over.”
Lowering his voice to draw everyone’s attention, Jeong Ondo flipped over the cue sheet. The most important announcement was still ahead.