I Tried to Depict a Realistic Demon
"Hye-gyeol bullied people back in school?"
Rembrary asked back in astonishment.
Hye-gyeol, hearing who knew what from Jong-woo on the other end of the line, stood pale and silent.
Then he choked up and shouted, "Absolutely not!"
"Right, of course not! I've been so careful my whole life just so I'd never get caught up in something like this! I'm telling you, it's not true!"
Jungseo and Rembrary waited in silence for Hye-gyeol to hang up.
The moment the call ended, Hye-gyeol's lips trembled as he muttered under his breath.
"You okay?"
When Rembrary asked with concern, Hye-gyeol shook his head.
"No. I'm pissed off because I have no idea what's going on."
Jungseo asked a bit more coldly than Rembrary had.
"You're telling me you really don't know anything about this?"
Hye-gyeol furrowed his brow and glared at Jungseo.
"Are you saying I actually did that? That I'm a school bully?"
"I'm asking because I need to be sure."
"No, I'm not! Do I seem like that kind of person to you?!"
"To outsiders, Cathy seems sweet and full of aegyo too. He's just quick with his fists when it's only us around."
"...I really didn't do it."
Having declared it firmly, Hye-gyeol shook his head, cursing under his breath.
"Who the hell is it?"
"First, let's find out who wrote what and how."
Jungseo said this calmly, then sat side by side on the sofa and picked up his phone.
Hye-gyeol and Rembrary picked up their phones too, but Hye-gyeol's mind was elsewhere, and Rembrary, still not used to handling the internet, couldn't manage to find the post in question.
In the end, Jungseo tracked it down and read it aloud.
I know a lot of you won't believe someone writing this now, of all times. You'll think, why didn't you say anything sooner? Staying silent all this time and only speaking up the moment Wild Animal's about to make a name for themselves — aren't you just a spiteful piece of work? Yeah. Correct. My gut is twisted beyond repair, and I swear to god I cannot stand to watch that bastard Yu Hye-gyeol succeed. Back when they were total nobodies, anything I said would've just gotten buried, so I kept my mouth shut. But watching that guy Woo Yeon-woo take the bullets while putting Wild Animal on the map, and seeing Yu Hye-gyeol ride on Yeon-woo's coattails while grinning like some saintly little angel — every single time I see it, my stomach turns inside out. Honestly, if you went to Woongin Middle School, there's nobody who doesn't know the name Yu Hye-gyeol. He hung around with all the delinquent kids, and anyone who looked weak got shaken down and made to run errands, sent on daily snack shop runs, had their gym uniforms borrowed and never returned. He totally groveled to the guys who were a little tougher than him, trying to make a name for himself off them. He was a punk among punks, a bottom-tier thug piece of shit. Hey, Yu Hye-gyeol. I can't stand to watch you make it. Remember when you shoved me down the stairs during summer break and broke my leg? I still limp around to this day, but that son of a bitch is on TV dancing his heart out?
The long wall of text, crammed together without a single line break, bore unmistakable signs of having been written in a white-hot rage.
Jungseo watched Hye-gyeol's expression carefully and asked again.
"That's what it says."
Hye-gyeol muttered softly,
"Ah, that son of a bitch."
"Do you know who it is?"
Jungseo's voice had gone a little colder.
Hye-gyeol seemed to hesitate for a moment, then said flatly,
"I know who wrote it, but it wasn't me."
With that, he rose from the sofa.
"I wasn't one of the delinquents either. No — if anything, kids hated me just because I was a former child model, and I got teased constantly for being short. I never hung out with the popular kids. Honestly, I barely had any friends at all."
Having said his piece with finality, Hye-gyeol walked straight into the bedroom and slammed the door shut.
Watching him go, Jungseo clicked his tongue.
"Is he going to be okay?"
Rembrary asked, unsettled. He had no idea what an iljin was, but he was certain it didn't carry a pleasant connotation.
Jungseo let out a sigh.
"I don't know. True or not, rumors like this are dangerous."
The next day, when Jong-woo arrived to pick up the members, his face was absolutely thunderous.
It had been grim when Rembrary made his slip-up too, but this time the severity was on another level.
If he had to compare, it was a shade worse than the day Cathy's fling had been caught red-handed.
"Hye-gyeol. Tell me it's not true."
The moment Jong-woo walked in, he asked Hye-gyeol point-blank.
"Yeon-woo makes mistakes because he lost his memory. And Cathy dating — as his manager it drives me up the wall, but dating itself isn't a crime. But if this is real, then what you did is a crime. You understand?"
With a face on the verge of tears, Hye-gyeol shouted,
"I'm telling you, it's not!"
Looking at that aggrieved face, Jong-woo sighed and patted Hye-gyeol on the shoulder.
"I don't think you're that kind of person either. But we can't respond properly until we know the facts, so that's why I asked."
And so the whole ride to the agency was steeped in gloom.
After Jong-woo, CEO Im called Hye-gyeol in and asked whether it was true, and once again Hye-gyeol leapt up insisting it absolutely was not.
"God, I hope not. Please."
CEO Im said this with a face about to cry, then confirmed one more time.
"Then it's fine if we go with a hard-line response? First we announce it's false, and then if it doesn't die down even after we wait and see, we'll release a statement saying we're suing for spreading false information. And we really will sue. Are you okay with that?"
"Well, that's..."
When Hye-gyeol hesitated, CEO Im narrowed his eyes.
Hye-gyeol wavered, then said, "I'm okay with it."
And so the meeting about Wild Animal's new album began on the darkest possible note.
The staff who had gathered to select the lyrics kept glancing nervously at Hye-gyeol, while Taein made no effort to hide his sulky expression.
"Alright, alright, enough. Let's start picking the lyrics."
CEO Im asked brightly, deliberately, to freshen up the damp, deflated atmosphere.
"Right. So, have our members finished their lyrics?"
With the highest-ranking person in the room straining to be cheerful, the subordinates could hardly stay slumped in their seats.
The staff made a show of fussing over the lyrics, and the members put on exaggeratedly embarrassed reactions as they handed over what they'd written.
"Someone make copies of these."
Before long, a staff member returned with enough copies for everyone in the conference room, and CEO Im, Jong-woo, the staff, and the members took turns poring over the four sets of lyrics.
For a long while, the room fell quiet, with nothing to be heard but the flutter of turning pages.
Rembrary, too, swiftly skimmed the lyrics the members had written, flicking the pages back one after another.
None of them are any good.
Regrettable as it was, in Rembrary's eyes every single one — his own included — was utterly bizarre.
But then again, the tastes of this other world's people may differ from mine.
"Wow, this one's actually good?"
As expected. A staff member marveled at Taein's lyrics — the very ones Rembrary had flipped past in three seconds flat.
"It almost brings me to tears. It would be incredible if it's sung well."
But the rebuttal came immediately after.
"It's well written, sure, but it's a mile away from the demon-disguised-as-an-angel concept. This is just someone missing their ex."
"It's still good, though."
"Doesn't matter how good it is if it doesn't fit the concept."
"Isn't the one Cathy wrote decent too? It's cute."
"Agh, I'm telling you to think about the concept..."
"There could be such a thing as a cute demon."
"Then you write that when the concept is 'cute demon.' We're doing demon-disguised-as-an-angel — the whole foundation is deception. How is that supposed to be cute?"
Once the first argument broke out, everyone began airing their opinions with sharpened edges.
The lyrics written by the members drew praise in one corner of the room only to be mercilessly torn apart in another.
And then the round of reading came back around to Rembrary's lyrics.
For the first time, the staff members found a united voice.
"This one actually scared me a little."
"I feel like I've heard this in an exorcism movie. That's the sound of a snake slithering, isn't it?"
"Yeon-woo, why on earth did you put in that shh-shh-shhh-shshshshiiiik sound?"
"I don't think I could go to the bathroom if I heard this at night."
Rembrary answered blankly.
"Is that not the concept of a demon's whisper? Which is why I transcribed — that is, wrote down — the words a demon would speak."
"Being cast as a murderer doesn't mean you'd actually murder someone. These lyrics are far too frightening..."
When Rembrary tilted his head, CEO Im clicked his tongue.
"Enough. Yeon-woo's memory is still fuzzy, so he's got no sense of moral standards."
Rembrary raised an eyebrow.
It wasn't that he lacked moral standards — the whole point was that it was a demon's whisper, written with morality deliberately stripped out.
But being ganged up on like that stung his pride.
"You all told me to write it frightening, so I wrote it frightening, and now everyone speaks thus. How disheartening."
"'O hypocrite, O saint with a knife clenched in your teeth, may a curse fall upon three generations of your line, may your descendants chew the soil of your grave as they laugh, and may those descendants spit upon your grave as they mock you...' — no, seriously, was he possessed by an actual demon when he wrote this? What is this content?"
"Is it strange?"
"It gives me goosebumps. And if you sang this as-is, it'd get slapped with a full broadcast ban, Yeon-woo."
"What is a broadcast ban?"
"Broadcasts can be seen by little kids, so you have to keep things within limits. Nothing too violent or too explicit."
"Ah, I see."
Rembrary nodded.
The back-and-forth continued for a long while after that, but in the end the meeting broke up without any satisfactory answer.
CEO Im gathered up the members' lyrics and said,
"I'll have the staff vote on them with the names hidden. Whoever gets the most votes, we go with their lyrics. That's the safest bet."
Right after the meeting, dance practice for the next round of the competition began.
But only Cathy and Rembrary were going into dance practice — today Taein and Hye-gyeol headed off to vocal training, and Jungseo left for his acting class, each of them scattering in different directions.
Rembrary dragged himself down to the practice room, dreading the memory of yesterday's dance lesson.
Must I perform that mortifying dance yet again?
But when he arrived at the practice room, a woman he'd never seen before was standing there.
She was dressed in comfortable training clothes, her forehead glistening with sweat as though she'd been dancing just moments before, and she seemed to know the dance teacher, standing face to face with him in conversation.
When Rembrary approached awkwardly, the dance teacher said, "There you are," and quickly introduced the woman to him.
"This is Yu Ri-hye. She'll be matching your breathing in the second half."
The second half? Matching breathing?
Come to think of it, the dance teacher had mentioned yesterday that the last thirty seconds or so of the sexy dance would be performed together with a female dancer.
Could she be the one dancing that part with him?
Rembrary stared at Yu Ri-hye in flustered surprise.
But Rembrary was the only one caught off guard. Yu Ri-hye, perfectly composed, extended her hand for a handshake.
"Hello. I'm a fan."
"Well met."
When Rembrary greeted her back in a daze, Yu Ri-hye tossed out a few thinly-smeared compliments about how he looked even better in person, then got straight to business.
"I only have about two hours, so let's jump right in."
It seemed he had no say in the matter.
"For now, just practice the parts where you sync up with Yu Ri-hye. We'll work on the earlier sections after she leaves."
Having said this, the dance teacher immediately played the pre-cut second half of the track.
The music started from a strange point.
"I threw together a rough version with the dance teacher earlier. Watch."
After telling Rembrary to observe closely, Yu Ri-hye immediately began dancing with the teacher.
No wonder her forehead had been soaked with sweat — she'd apparently been choreographing this whole time.
Rembrary watched blankly as the teacher and Yu Ri-hye danced.
The teacher danced alone, and Yu Ri-hye closed in fast.
Once she'd closed the distance, Yu Ri-hye wrapped her hands around the teacher's neck as if cradling it, and the teacher turned his back to catch her as she bent backward, her body on the verge of falling.
From then on, while Yu Ri-hye danced alone, swift and graceful as a swallow, the teacher worked his expression into something both self-assured and sexy, occasionally letting his hand brush against hers — almost touching, never quite.
And then, at almost the very end of the dance.
Yu Ri-hye lifted one leg, folded at the knee, and arched her back far behind her, and the teacher caught her waist with one hand while reaching his other hand toward the empty air.
At the same instant, the music cut off with a bang!
One more movement followed after the music stopped, and Yu Ri-hye fell completely into the teacher's arms.
If this was the final pose, then after steadying his breath for a couple of seconds, the teacher released Yu Ri-hye and turned to ask Rembrary,
"So? What do you think?"
"It is magnificent!"