I Mean, Of Course I'll Do Well
"Of course I can't······ do it."
Rembrary answered with perfect confidence, but the sudden scramble to switch his tone only made him sound uncertain.
The composer rolled up his sheet of paper, tapped it a few times against his palm, and spoke coldly.
"Try within the limits of what you can actually pull off. If your skill caps at an 8, then you'd better clear it as an 8. Don't shoot for a 10 and limp out with a 4 or a 5."
It was a harsh way to put it, but this composer had been with Wild Animal since their debut.
He knew exactly how well each member could sing.
And the Woo Yeon-woo he knew had been utterly hopeless at it.
Which made it all the more baffling that the song Yeon-woo had proposed to sing this time was staggeringly difficult.
The original track was drenched in narcissism, materialism, and the thoroughly immoral pursuit of other people's lovers.
Yet Yeon-woo had declared he would perform it in the style of a church choir, using a sorrowful, hollow melody and mournful expressions.
The idea was that when people heard the song, they wouldn't take the lyrics at face value but would read them as irony—a sarcastic inversion that would match the choir atmosphere.
It was a decent idea, but one that would turn absolutely ridiculous if even a single element slipped.
So realistically, all he could do was tell him, "This is beyond you."
Yet Rembrary, utterly unoffended by the composer's blunt assessment, answered with perfect composure.
"I can do it."
The composer took his words with more than a grain of salt, but he said, "Fine. Give it a try."
The plan was to let him attempt it, let him feel the difficulty for himself, then tear into him and tell him to quit.
"Yes, sir."
Rembrary nodded, then smoothly extracted his sheet of paper from the composer's hand and unfolded it.
Without a moment's hesitation, he opened his mouth.
The composer lazily closed his eyes.
But the instant Rembrary uttered his very first note—
The composer's eyes flew open, and he stared at Rembrary in astonishment.
The timbre was······ impossibly clean. And it wasn't the kind of clean that came from a boy who hadn't hit puberty. It was unmistakably an adult man's voice, and yet pure as glass.
The composer began listening to Rembrary's song in earnest, and his expression, without his even noticing, grew brighter and brighter.
Eun-seon held her camera up and captured the entire scene.
By the time Rembrary finished singing, the composer's thumb was already thrust skyward.
"Hey, you—you little—what the hell? What's gotten into you all of a sudden? You're good?!"
"I told you I could do it."
"This'll work. This will absolutely work. If you nail it, this stage is going to blow up for real!"
The composer, fired up, turned to Jong-woo and asked, "What about the backing vocals? How many can you get? With something like this, the more the better."
Jong-woo mumbled an "Uh······" and turned to Eun-seon instead.
"Is that something the production can cover?"
"Yes. The PD said they can support up to five people, whether backing vocalists or dancers. You find the people first and invoice the labor costs later."
When Jong-woo relayed to the composer that they could have five, the composer wrote the number 5 on the sheet Rembrary had handed him.
Then he turned to Cathy.
"And you? Got anything prepared?"
With a stiff expression, Cathy laid out the arrangement style he'd been mulling over.
But having just heard Rembrary sing, he couldn't manage to look pleased about any of it.
"Hey, Cathy. In terms of vocal technique, you're actually the better one. Why are you singing worse than usual? Do it properly."
That's how hard Cathy was struggling—the composer had started keeping the beat for him before finally stopping to scold him.
But when Cathy kept fumbling his pitches, the composer let out a long sigh.
"We'll stop here for today."
Cathy muttered with a dark face.
"Thank you for your time."
After the composer left.
The atmosphere turned awkward in an instant.
With Cathy sitting there visibly stony-faced, everyone else couldn't help but tiptoe around him.
In the end, Jong-woo took Cathy outside.
His cameraman hurried after them, apparently determined to film the scolding as well.
Only once the two of them were alone did Eun-seon, her face noticeably lighter, ask Rembrary a question.
"You sing incredibly well—why aren't you the vocalist?"
"I'm the visual member."
"Haha, so you sing great, but your face is even better?"
"That's right."
Whether she took his answer as a joke or not, Eun-seon burst out laughing.
The two of them were still carrying on like that when Cathy came back in, forcing a smile.
Apparently he'd gotten an earful from Jong-woo.
His cameraman, by contrast, strolled in behind him looking rather cheerful, as if he'd bagged some good footage.
Rembrary glanced over at them, then returned his attention to his own practice.
Somewhere along the way, 'Woo Yeon-woo's' native language had come to him naturally, but the foreign language of the lyrics was another matter—he could neither understand it nor read it.
He'd searched the internet, jotted down the meanings, and transcribed the pronunciation as best he could hear it, but memorizing those sounds was the hard part.
Rembrary murmured the syllables under his breath, eyes boring into the paper.
Even after returning to the dorm that evening, Rembrary kept muttering the lyrics to himself, committing them to memory.
He'd been humming the song in the living room for a while when Cathy snapped at him in irritation.
"Ugh, you're practicing alone? Can't you keep it down a little?"
When Rembrary looked up in surprise, Cathy glared back at him with a rigid face, then muttered, "God, seriously," got up, and disappeared into his room.
"Was I very loud?"
When Rembrary asked Jung-seo, who was sitting on the sofa, Jung-seo answered flatly.
"A little."
Then he added, "But Cathy was just as loud."
"······"
Rembrary stared at the door Cathy had disappeared behind, and let out a sigh.
From that point until they left for the practice studio the next day, Cathy kept his distance from Rembrary the entire time.
He didn't openly rage or snap like he had the night before, but the friendly warmth he'd shown at the start had all but evaporated.
Rembrary, thinking just how little confidence can one man have in himself, to act like this toward me, paid attention to Cathy's singing for the first time at the practice studio.
And Cathy, unexpectedly, was quite good.
Since he'd landed a role in a musical, he was practicing dance too—he picked up the choreography the dance teacher showed him with ease, and his delivery of emotion and lyrics in his singing was rock solid.
"I don't understand why he's so prickly with me when he's that good."
Finally, Rembrary came right out and asked Jung-seo.
It wasn't as if Cathy felt inferior because he lacked skill.
The man was just as talented as anyone, yet he still threw tantrums like that—it didn't sit right.
Jung-seo answered with surprising equanimity.
"He's got the talent, but he makes too many mistakes on stage."
"Everyone makes mistakes. Isn't that just part of being human?"
"His odds of messing up are about equal to his odds of nailing it. His mental is weak."
"His... mental?"
"His nerve. His composure."
"Ah······"
"And that's why he fights with Taein so often, too."
"Ahhh······"
Rembrary nodded along, then murmured with a trace of worry.
"I do wish he wouldn't envy me quite so much."
"!"
The arrangement was finished on Thursday.
Rembrary listened to the completed track, liked it, and nodded his approval.
He had, in truth, described the arrangement with his own world's choir in mind, but since the music itself was unfamiliar, the composer had arranged it in the style of this world's church choirs.
Still, it didn't stray far from the melody he'd imagined, so Rembrary decided to go with it as was.
The competition was on Monday—there simply wasn't time to rework the arrangement.
A couple of hours later, the hired backing vocalists arrived, and Rembrary walked each of them through the feel and the melody he wanted, one by one.
Eun-seon's camera captured all of it, and Jong-woo watched Rembrary with a complicated look on his face.
And then, at last, Monday arrived.
Rembrary headed to the broadcasting station with Cathy for the rehearsal.
Since the votes wouldn't be cast by live text message, the stage was prepared on a set inside the station itself, with access controlled down to the last door.
Even with Eun-seon accompanying them, Rembrary, Jong-woo, and Cathy had to go through a five-minute identity verification at the entrance.
And rather than the recognizable faces of Rembrary and Cathy, it was Jong-woo's verification that proved the most grueling.
"The show hasn't even started yet. Do we really need all this?"
Jong-woo fumed as he pulled his ID out of his wallet and put it back half a dozen times, and when he saw a famous singer and his manager stroll right through with nothing but a bow and a smile, his expression turned positively murderous.
Eun-seon, feeling her own neck shrink at the sight, offered an apologetic word.
"I'm sorry. The investment talks went through so smoothly, and the pre-show response has been good, so······ once the broadcast actually starts, it'll honestly be even tighter than this."
At last, the verification was complete.
Rembrary followed the others inside.
The moment they entered, a waiting staff member came over to show them to their dressing rooms.
"Mr. Cathy, this way, please. Mr. Woo Yeon-woo, you'll be in this one."
As it happened, the two of them had been given separate rooms.
"Huh? We're not sharing?"
Jong-woo hurried after the staff member to ask.
He was the only manager present, so if they were split up, handling any emergency would be that much harder.
The staffer, clearly busy, answered with a furrowed brow.
"That's right. Mr. Cathy has five dancers, and Mr. Yeon-woo has five backing vocalists—there's no way you'd all fit in one room."
Once the staffer hurried off, Jong-woo, resigned despite his misgivings, settled the two of them into their separate rooms.
Since Jong-woo had gone to Cathy's room first, Rembrary entered the waiting room alone and looked the place over.
Did all dressing rooms look alike? The interior was nearly identical in layout to the one he'd seen when he first arrived in this world, all that time ago.
A long sofa, a TV mounted on the wall, some unidentifiable machine tucked into the corner of the ceiling, several makeup tables with enormous mirrors, a cold bare floor, a flat coffee table in front of the sofa, and so on.
As he was taking it all in, the door opened and the five backing vocalists arrived all at once.
They were still exchanging greetings when Jong-woo returned.
But before Jong-woo could get a word out, a voice came from the machine in the ceiling corner.
"Contestants of Sing Survival, please proceed to Zone A2 now."
Rembrary faltered for a moment at the unfamiliar zone name, but thanks to Eun-seon's guidance, he found his way to the announced area without trouble.
Contestants were already trickling in when he arrived, and at the center of them stood PD Kim Mu-rok, holding a small, opaque box.
"Starting from the next competition, we'll be going in reverse ranking order, but since this is the first round, we'll draw lots instead."
Once all the contestants had gathered, PD Kim Mu-rok gave a brief explanation and had them draw, starting with the person standing closest to him.
Which meant Rembrary drew dead last—and his performance slot came at the very end, too.
"Not a great draw······"
Jong-woo muttered, then turned to Cathy, whom he'd brought along to Zone A2.
"What about you?"
"Twelfth."
"Lucky you."
Is going last bad? Rembrary glanced back and forth between Cathy's smirk and Jong-woo's relief, then looked down at the paper slip in his own hand.
The number 20 was written in the center of the slip.
As he was staring at it, Eun-seon asked, "Last slot, huh. Think you'll be okay?"
It sounded like a question asked in genuine concern—yet the camera kept rolling right through it all.
Rembrary glanced at the lens, then answered with a smile.
"I'd say it's a kindness to the other contestants."
"Aww, that's so sweet of you······"
"Yes. Once they've seen me, no one will even remember the other contestants' stages."
"?!"