See You in Two Weeks
"Huh?"
Rembrary had a toothbrush dangling from his mouth and was reaching to pour sparkling water into a cup when a startled voice came from behind him. He turned his head.
Jungseo stood there, a toothbrush in one hand and his phone in the other.
"What is it?"
When Rembrary asked, pulling the toothbrush from his mouth, Jungseo simply said, "Reverse run."
"Reverse run? What is that?"
"It's when a song climbs back up the charts from the bottom."
Looking rather fascinated, Jungseo chuckled and came over to show him the phone screen. "See?"
Next to the song title was an upward-pointing arrow, along with the number 66.
"Your seventh-round contest track. The ASMR one everyone trash-talked—it's reverse-running right now."
Rembrary went to the bathroom, spat out the foam, and quickly rinsed his mouth with water. Then he took Jungseo's phone in earnest and examined it.
His contest song, which had ranked the lowest of all the seventh-round tracks, had shot all the way up the charts.
Number five on the real-time rankings.
Rembrary stared blankly at the screen. By the time Jungseo returned from rinsing his own mouth, he was muttering as he scrolled through the album reviews.
"People are saying they lay down to sleep, but your rap keeps playing in their heads."
"My rap?"
"Yeah. Someone called it eardrum heroin."
Jong-woo, who had come to collect the members, had no idea about the chart climb yet. He wore an expression that was half distracted and half cheerful, but when Jungseo told him the news, his eyes went wide as grapes and he practically jumped out of his skin.
"Seriously?"
Jong-woo hurriedly checked his own phone, then broke into a satisfied laugh. "That's right! This is it!"
He kept grinning to himself the entire way to the agency. He couldn't help it. Taken narrowly, Rembrary's ASMR rap was nothing more than a seventh-round contest assignment—but viewed broadly, it tied directly into the new solo track. The concept of Rembrary's solo song was the Devil's Whisper.
Of course, Rembrary wouldn't be rapping in the new song, but the concept of singing in a whisper was similar enough that anyone who heard the solo track might think back to the seventh-round song.
And if the seventh-round track had won people over? The odds that the solo song would land just as well had grown that much higher.
"We really have to nail this."
Jong-woo murmured under his breath.
"Very well."
Rembrary wasn't as delighted as Jong-woo, but he could accept it as a good thing and let it go. The sooner he became famous, the sooner he could start rooting out Maeng Woo-shin's cult, after all.
"Oh, and the review results for your song came back. And the showcase date for the new album."
The members, who had been nodding off and yawning, all snapped their eyes open at once and looked at Jong-woo.
"When is it?"
"Next Thursday. Sounds like a decent number of reporters are coming this time, so you'd better practice like your lives depend on it."
The car filled with tension in an instant.
This album was the one that had received the most attention of anything Wild Animal had produced since their debut. Even if it flopped, Rembrary's own buzz wouldn't disappear—but people might start writing them off with the excuse that Wild Animal never took off because they lacked star quality.
If they couldn't shake their has-been image even with this opportunity, then no matter how good a song they brought out, climbing any higher could prove impossible.
If that happened, Rembrary's individual fans would feel that the group was holding him back, and cracks might form within the already small handful of devoted followers. Jong-woo nervously rubbed his palms against his knees.
Only Rembrary remained perfectly calm, gazing out the window, his mind elsewhere.
"Yeon-woo?"
"What is it."
"What are you thinking about?"
"Must I tell you?"
"Yes. It's scary when you go off into your own head like that."
"Nothing much. I was thinking of horseback riding."
"You said something like that back when we talked about ideal types too. You do know how to ride a horse, right?"
"I ride well. Very well indeed. If they saw me on horseback, all would raise their banners and cheer."
At Rembrary's composed answer, Jong-woo tilted his head. Had there ever actually been an opportunity for Rembrary to ride a horse?
But he soon let it go. He must have ridden as a kid. The "very well indeed" part was probably a bit of bravado.
At last the car pulled up in front of the agency. Jong-woo herded the members into the practice room, stamped in for his own attendance, then went to his desk, booted up his computer, and opened the LLL Entertainment homepage.
He needed to mark the showcase date on the Wild Animal calendar.
"You should watch closely too. You might end up doing this yourself someday."
Sa Gam-jae observed from beside Jong-woo as he entered the schedule. "Other idol groups have fan clubs, do they not? Does Yeon-woo not have one?"
"Not yet—hey, wait, Gamjae. Aren't you fussing over Yeon-woo a little too much?"
"I am not."
"Then watch your word choice. It might not seem like much, but if you said that in front of the other kids, it'd hurt their feelings."
"Understood."
Jong-woo had been clacking away at the keyboard for a good while when it happened. A song by a rival agency's girl group rang out from his pocket. He scrambled to answer, wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder.
"Hello, this is Lee Jong-woo, manager of Wild Animal."
Sa Gam-jae stood motionless at Jong-woo's side, staring at the Wild Animal schedule calendar, still mostly empty.
"Yes. Yes, yes, that's right. Yes, Yeon-woo. Yes. Yees. Yes?"
The call went on far longer than expected. And whatever they were discussing, Jong-woo's expression cycled through bright, flustered, grim, and bright again. Only after a long while did he hang up and mutter, "We've got a problem."
"What is the matter?"
"Well... ah, I need to check with the CEO about this first."
"Son of a..."
Sprawled across the dorm sofa, Oh Jung-shin clicked his tongue over and over as he scrolled through the news on his tablet.
"Woo Yeon-woo, you little bastard. Seriously."
Sometimes he swore at the screen, too.
One of his groupmates clicked his tongue and tossed the small ball Yeon-woo had been toting around two days ago straight at him. "Idiot, that's what you get for pulling a stunt you couldn't handle. Your true colors are out in the open now, aren't they?"
"Oh, shut up! What about my personality!"
"Why'd you even bring up the dog thing? You could've just made him do the slave penalty like normal."
"Then it'd look like I was copying him!"
"Copying him would've been the safe play."
Oh Jung-shin glared at his groupmate, who was already in front of the fridge pulling out a juice. Jung-shin threw the ball right back at the back of his head, then glowered at the tablet again.
On the tablet were two brand-new entries in his hall of shame. What made it even more infuriating was that his own fans, for whatever reason, found it hilarious—turning his fights with Yeon-woo into reaction images and playing with them.
"Ugh... I'm so stressed. My liege lords, you call him a son of a bitch, so why do you keep making memes of him hanging around me? Practice what you preach, I'm begging you..."
His groupmate watched Oh Jung-shin poking and prodding at Yeon-woo's face on the tablet while chanting the fandom name like a lunatic, and looked at him the way one looks at a madman.
Just then, their manager appeared, arms laden with cooked food. The groupmate set down his juice and hurried to take the bags, laying them out on the table. Meanwhile, the manager walked over to Oh Jung-shin and clicked his tongue.
"You could've stopped when I told you to stop."
"Hyung, don't stress me out. I'm this close to a total mental breakdown over that psychotic bastard as it is."
Oh Jung-shin pressed a hand to his forehead, groaning and grinding his teeth. "If I get tangled up with that psycho one more time, I'm going to lose it."
The manager looked at him and said, with what sounded like genuine pity, "Then you'd better start grinding your teeth down."
"What?"
Oh Jung-shin's hand dropped from his forehead. "What are you talking about? Don't tell me I'm tangled up with that psycho again?"
"You two got a cosmetics CF offer."
"What the hell did you just say?"
Oh Jung-shin leapt up in horror. "You want me to sit face-to-face with that psycho, smiling under studio lights?"
"What are you on about?"
"Every couple's cosmetics CF is like that!"
"Not this one. That's exactly the problem."
The manager sighed. "They love your rival chemistry. They want to shoot the whole campaign around that concept."
At the word chemistry, Oh Jung-shin spewed out a string of curses. The manager let it wash over him, then spoke again once Jung-shin had calmed down a little.
"Madeleine is launching a men's BB cream and a sunscreen this time. You and Yeon-woo each take one, and the direction is you competing against each other. One's a Black BB with the motto 'flawless, perfect skin,' the other's an All-In White sunscreen with the motto 'natural, practical skin correction—finish it in one step.' The whole concept is the two products going head to head."
Oh Jung-shin scowled. "It's gross, sure, but it's not exactly a problem, is it?"
"That's not where it ends."
"Then what?"
"They run a trial sales period, and whichever product doesn't sell enough gets discontinued."
"Are they insane?"
Oh Jung-shin shouted, dumbfounded. "You're joking, right?"
"It's real. The model of whichever one gets discontinued is done after this contract. The other one gets renewed and keeps working with them. That's the whole concept—all of it. A concept that'll be made public to viewers, too."
The groupmate, who'd been rummaging through the food bags, clicked his tongue from behind. "So they're outright picking a fight between our fans and Yeon-woo's fans. Whoever planned this is genuinely rotten."
Oh Jung-shin's mouth hung open. What was this, if not a blatant declaration of war?
And whichever side—his or Yeon-woo's—got trampled in the middle of it? The plan couldn't have cared less. It was a scheme to line their own pockets, plain and simple.
At the very least, Oh Jung-shin's fans would rather curse out the company than lose to the likes of Woo Yeon-woo—so they'd buy the product anyway.
And Yeon-woo's fans, few as they were, would presumably scrape together every last coin to fight back.
The manager asked, "So, are you doing it? You've always said you wanted a cosmetics CF."
He did want to. Just not a cutthroat one like this.
Oh Jung-shin shut his mouth and went glum. He had no illusions about losing to Yeon-woo, and Madeleine surely hadn't designed this plan expecting Yeon-woo's fans to bury him. What they'd really wanted was Oh Jung-shin's fans' hostility toward Yeon-woo.
But once he signed on as a model for the same product line at the same company, it meant shooting the CF together, attending product promotions together, maybe even doing photo shoots together.
In other words, it meant seeing that lunatic Woo Yeon-woo often.
Oh Jung-shin hated that more than anything. He genuinely did not want to be entangled with a psycho like Yeon-woo. Not because he was scared of him—because he was disgusting.
"Do I really have to?"
But no matter how big a star Oh Jung-shin was, he had no right to pick and choose his advertisers.
"Yep. The CEO insists. He's still furious about that whole dog business, by the way."
"..."
"The fee's substantial, too. And once you do a cosmetics CF, the pretty-boy image gets layered on top of everything else."
"Still, Yeon-woo, of all people..."
"The CEO's slotting you into an experience variety show two weeks from now. You'll fit right in—then play it safe, and when the timing's right, spin this whole thing into a funny story. Make absolutely sure you say the dog role wasn't your idea, it was a script. The writers already know. They'll package it well for you. Since it's a temple stay, act all serene and peaceful, then come home."
Oh Jung-shin let out a long sigh and gave in. "Fine."
Two hours later, Rembrary heard a similar story from Jong-woo—though with a slightly different twist.
"One is a cosmetics CF, and the other is an experience variety show? The CF I can accept, but what is an experience variety show?"
"It's a show where you try out different things. The one in two weeks is a temple stay, and they want you on as a guest. Your image is the total opposite of a temple, so they thought having you there would be funny. Isn't this a good thing? You said you wanted to be a monk, remember."
"A temple is a temple?"
Rembrary's face lit up.
"Then I shall go. Most gladly."
"Oh, and there's one more guest coming besides you, but they wouldn't say who."