I Hate Luck-Based Games
"Ye-chan, you're really something."
"Excuse me?"
Praise out of nowhere?
Ye-chan fixed Shim Sang-rok with a skeptical look. Sang-rok, who had just zipped his suitcase shut, lifted his head and smiled.
"It's pure admiration, so stop being so wary. We've gotten pretty close, haven't we? I'm a little hurt."
Sang-rok spoke without wiping the smile from his face, as if something about all this was endlessly amusing.
This guy sure finds a lot of things to be hurt about.
That was what he thought, but he had no intention of putting up an obvious wall, so Ye-chan loosened his expression a little.
The cameras that had been installed in the room had been collected by the production staff just moments ago — but didn't they say that words without feet travel a thousand miles?
Not only Sang-rok but Beom Se-hyuk and Woo Hwi-gyum were packing their bags behind them, so he couldn't afford to drop his image management.
Whether he had no desire to press further or not, Sang-rok continued.
"Earlier, when we were practicing with the D-grade trainees — I was pretty surprised seeing how perfectly you put those teams together. You only saw those D-grade trainees once during the first grade evaluation and briefly today, right?"
"Oh, it's nothing. Everyone just worked hard."
Ye-chan answered with modest words as if it were no big deal, and set his suitcase upright.
Apparently Sang-rok had noticed that during the final break of the theme song main filming, Ye-chan had assessed the trainees' abilities and matched those with good chemistry together.
It wasn't someone else's business — Sang-rok himself had been in charge of teaching two D-grade trainees, so anyone with a decent eye would have been able to pick up on it.
"Whoa, so that's what it was? I just thought we had really good chemistry."
Of course, there were also pure-hearted types like Beom Se-hyuk.
Ye-chan pushed Se-hyuk's forehead away as the boy circled around him, asking if he had some kind of supernatural power.
"You memorized all the trainees' names too, right?"
Sang-rok asked as he also set his suitcase upright. Though framed as a question, his tone was closer to certainty.
It wasn't a topic he needed to dodge, so Ye-chan nodded calmly.
That was because of a quest, though.
"You memorized all the names? Ye-chan, your memory is incredible!"
Se-hyuk raised both hands and counted on his fingers, saying he hadn't even managed to memorize ten people during this training camp.
There are more than ten just among the ones who were S-grade. Isn't that a problem in its own right?
Sang-rok looked at Se-hyuk fondly, as if watching a much younger little brother.
That's really not something to look fond about, you know?
"I've been working hard too, but I should learn from Ye-chan. Make sure to watch me next time. See how much I've improved."
Good grief.
Sang-rok had just delivered a line that belonged in a shonen manga.
Crushing down the urge to ask Why me?, Ye-chan held out his hand toward Sang-rok.
"Yes, hyung. I'll be looking forward to it."
Sang-rok smiled good-naturedly and clasped the hand Ye-chan offered.
Status Window.
Status: Feels great favorability toward the Player.
The irresistible cringe-worthiness made goosebumps rise, but ignoring them had been worth it.
Ye-chan slowly read through Sang-rok's status window and released the hand he'd been holding.
It was about time to seriously consider who to put in the remaining six spots, excluding himself, Beom Se-hyuk, and Kang Hae-sol.
He planned to check the status windows of candidate trainees one by one whenever the opportunity arose.
Sang-rok's stats weren't overwhelming like Se-hyuk's, but they were well-balanced.
At this level, he'd probably be top-tier even in overall ranking.
Of course, he had no intention of lining them up by stats and debuting them in order — but Sang-rok's abilities were better than expected, and it was true that he was looking at him a little differently now.
Beating Se-hyuk and me to become the theme song center was probably thanks to Lee Ga-won's influence, but he took losses from that image in the later stages.
Sang-rok's debut rate was roughly fifty percent. In simple terms, fifty-fifty.
What was unusual was that his probability of debuting was higher when he was frequently grouped with underperforming trainees.
Sang-rok was a former trainee of Olympus, currently called one of the three major agencies in the idol industry.
Thanks to that, during the first grade evaluation, he received a tearful call from Lee Ga-won of Jupiter — an Olympus idol and currently the top idol group — who had been under the same company.
When Lee Ga-won, the epitome of the pure male idol, openly acted wistful, the internet communities half-exploded.
The clip of Lee Ga-won smiling with reddened eyes was, without a doubt, the greatest output produced by episode 1 of Choose My Prince.
The production staff weren't fools either, so they naturally anticipated Sang-rok's buzz and pushed him solidly in the early episodes.
Trainees who witnessed their emotional reunion stuck close to Sang-rok, angling for even a scrap of the falling crumbs.
With such blatant push, by the mid-to-late stages when the trainees' popularity had risen across the board, he took solid heat for being a PD pick, or for a former Olympus trainee selling Olympus's name.
Even when silly lists like "trainees overrated relative to skill on Choose My Prince 99" circulated, his name never failed to appear.
Koreans really do love ranking every little thing, don't they.
Whether influenced by those hate comments or not, Sang-rok himself performed less and less convincingly as the episodes progressed, and whether he made the final debut lineup or not swung back and forth with every reset.
Having actually talked with him, Ye-chan wondered if this guy would really be shaken by that level of hate — but human affairs were the kind of thing you never knew until you faced them yourself.
For now, Ye-chan decided not to draw a clear pass-or-fail line on Sang-rok and simply keep watching.
"I hope we're on the same team for the next mission."
Sang-rok said as he released the hand he'd been holding.
That wouldn't happen.
Because the next mission would be split by position, so Ye-chan the vocalist and Sang-rok the rapper could never be together.
Of course, having no intention of spoiling, Ye-chan calmly nodded and answered.
"Me too."
I hate luck-based games.
Having finally been able to shower at his own house and flop onto his bed after three days, Ye-chan stared blankly at the ceiling patterns, counting them one by one as he thought.
Because they're luck-based games.
From the second training camp onward, Choose My Prince 99 recruited a live audience for the performances.
For that, the viewers first needed to know something about the trainees, so the next training camp was scheduled to begin after episode 1 aired.
Roughly make an impression in episode 1, then start the second training camp the day before episode 2 airs…….
Though things would rush along at a frantic pace after that, it meant there was about two weeks of free time until the next camp.
He wanted to spend these two weeks more productively than anyone so he could take it easy during the camp — but unfortunately, the next assignment was an area where Ye-chan couldn't do a thing about it.
The songs, the teams, and the positions would all be decided by lottery, so even the production-favored contestants wouldn't know what they'd be singing and dancing until the day of filming.
Even the order of drawing was decided by rock-paper-scissors.
Just thinking about it was this stifling — he couldn't understand why people liked luck-based games.
Among the Lee:Spirit members before the reset, there had been one slave to character card games, the pure essence of luck-based gaming.
He cursed the developers every time, yet never stopped spending real money whenever new cards dropped — the members used to click their tongues saying that if you pooled all the money he'd spent, you could have built a building in Seoul.
Once, Ye-chan had asked.
If you pour that much money in, what percentage of the cards you want can you collect?
The slave put on an expression of worldly enlightenment the likes of which Ye-chan had never seen and answered.
Choi Seon, Lee:Spirit's sub-rapper, looked like someone who had attained enlightenment as he said this.
But you can't keep pulling until it comes with this draw. Ha, enlightenment my ass. Choi Seon really is useless for life advice.
Cursing his useless former member, Ye-chan typed a song title he remembered into his smartphone's search bar while still lying down.
He couldn't remember the exact part distributions.
Still, knowing what songs would appear in the performances put him in a better position than the other contestants, he consoled himself, nodding.
First, listen to all five vocal songs and predict how the parts will be split…….
Ye-chan left a song playing on iTube, set his smartphone on the side table, and lay back on the bed.
Including Ye-chan, there were thirty-four vocal members on Choose My Prince, and in the second training camp these thirty-four trainees would be assigned seven each to five vocal songs, excluding the last group of five.
No matter which song came up, Ye-chan was confident he could make people say, "This song was made for trainee Ha Ye-chan!"
As long as he didn't receive an absolutely garbage part, that is.
All five songs had terrible part distributions.
There were trainees who received parts so faint you had to dig through your memory going Was he even in that song? — and thanks to that, the viewer boards would heat up after the broadcast.
That invisible position was distributed equally to everyone, so sometimes even top-tier vocal trainees like Woo Hwi-gyum, Park Na-gil, or Yoon Ji-woo would end up in it.
When preparing for anything across his repeated resets, Ye-chan always assumed the worst and acted accordingly, so this time too he decided to assume the scenario of receiving the worst part.
Lying on the bed, he first hummed the least impactful part of the song currently playing.
All of it put together might come to nine seconds.
With bad luck, it was a part where getting even a single solo shot would be difficult.
……Pretty decent, actually?
But for Ye-chan, it was no problem at all.
First of all, the idea of another trainee getting a one-shot while Ye-chan was singing on stage was absurd.
And that wasn't all. He was confident he could steal the camera even during other people's parts.
Against these chicks, it was actually a perfect penalty.
……I could take an absolutely garbage part and still be fine? Not that I actually want the worst part, though.
More than anything, the countless fans who would come would rewatch every one of Ye-chan's stages hundreds and thousands of times — he didn't want them enduring the rest of the time for a mere nine seconds.
I want the people who like me to only see good things, only hear good things, only have good things happen. Ah, the song changed.
As Ye-chan was thinking about the parts of the song that had moved on to the next track, a message notification made him sit up.
"Hmm?"
As Ye-chan listlessly opened the messaging app, his expression gradually grew peculiar.
He moved his eyes up and down, checking the message content and the sender's name over and over.
An involuntary breath of disbelief escaped Ye-chan's mouth.
"This guy? With me? Why?"
No matter how many times he checked, the name of the sender and the message on the screen didn't change.