Not a Dance, But a Circus
Jeong Ui-tak and… the one sitting across from him is Bae Sae-byeok.
Normally the whole team came to eat together, so Ye-chan had no idea why only the two of them were left.
He excused himself from his own members, tray in hand, and headed straight for Jeong Ui-tak.
“Hey.”
“Ugh, Ye-chan hyung.”
“Hello.”
The moment Ye-chan set his tray down beside them, Jeong Ui-tak made no effort to hide his displeasure, while Bae Sae-byeok simply bowed his head in quiet greeting.
Short on time and seeing no point in beating around the bush, Ye-chan went straight for the heart of it.
“Why are you two eating alone?”
“……Is it a problem if we eat by ourselves?”
“It’s weird if it’s just the two of you.”
“Ugh……”
Realizing that half-hearted excuses wouldn’t work on this particular person, Jeong Ui-tak let out a pained groan. Ye-chan turned his gaze to Bae Sae-byeok sitting opposite him.
“Is it hard to talk about?”
“No, not really for me. Ui-tak hyung, is it okay if I tell him?”
Jeong Ui-tak heaved a heavy sigh, as if he had no choice.
“I’m telling you this in advance. This is our team’s problem, so don’t even think about sticking your nose in. You’re just listening, got it?”
“We’ll go with that for now. Just talk.”
“‘For now,’ he says…… Ha, fine. So here’s the thing.”
The story Jeong Ui-tak began to spill was nothing short of shocking.
Ye-chan pointed at Bae Sae-byeok with an expression of pure disbelief.
“So you’re saying…… the other members are freezing him out because they’re pissed he got the center position?”
Jeong Ui-tak quickly scanned their surroundings.
“Keep your voice down! What if someone hears?”
“The ones who shouldn’t hear this are the other three in your team.”
He’d thought it was convenient that the cameras never rolled during meals, but right now he desperately wished one were rolling.
Even though the conversation was about him, Bae Sae-byeok remained completely unfazed, focused solely on peeling open the jelly that had come with dessert.
Ye-chan’s head was spinning.
For this round, trainees had first been sorted into concept teams by vote. The trainee who received the most votes within each concept automatically became the team’s center.
Jeong Ui-tak ranked higher overall, yet the center of their team was Bae Sae-byeok.
If the votes had simply split across different concepts, it would have made sense—but the remaining three members clearly saw things differently.
They had pulled Jeong Ui-tak out into the hallway and spun a full-blown conspiracy theory: that a trainee with almost no training period, who barely spoke and barely registered on anyone’s radar, and who had only scraped a C in the first grade evaluation, somehow receiving the most votes was suspicious.
It was painfully obvious their fragile pride had been wounded.
Jeong Ui-tak, thoroughly fed up, had told them to cut the crap—and promptly found himself frozen out right alongside Bae Sae-byeok.
It was a delusion so absurd it defied belief.
Bae Sae-byeok’s training period might have been short, but both his dancing and singing ranked near the top within Chumaf. He didn’t talk much, yet his face did all the work; fans waited for face-compilation posts every time an episode aired.
And the real point wasn’t that he’d gotten a C in the first evaluation—it was that he’d rocketed straight up to A-Grade in the second.
Who even is on their team again……
Ye-chan dug through his memory, pressing hard on his temples.
“You’ve got Kim Dae-young hyung on your team, right? The twenty-seven-year-old……”
“That hyung started it first.”
Jeong Ui-tak pouted. Ye-chan was genuinely speechless.
A guy old enough to know better had started this?
He saw what happened with Kim Su-young and still pulls this? Is that thing on his shoulders just a decoration?
On top of everything, they were rejecting a result the fans themselves had chosen—making the offense even worse.
That these blockheads had survived all the way to the second ranking ceremony made Ye-chan feel like Chumaf’s entire reputation was tanking right along with them.
He studied Bae Sae-byeok’s face, still entirely absorbed in his meal.
The kid was far too young for this.
How old is he that they’re jealous of a kid like this……
He was a seventeen-year-old brat who hadn’t even been in high school a full month yet. The idea that guys anywhere from three to ten years older were orchestrating a freeze-out against a baby who still smelled of milk was beyond galling.
Ye-chan cut off Jeong Ui-tak, who was trying to look intimidating while warning him never to breathe a word of this to anyone.
“Did you tell the production staff?”
“It’s fine. We’ll handle it ourselves, so don’t worry about it.”
Ye-chan stared at him with a face that clearly said he was anything but fine with that. Jeong Ui-tak let out a long sigh and shoved Ye-chan’s spoon into his hand.
“If you came to eat, then just eat and leave, old man.”
“If it gets hard, tell me anytime.”
“Thanks for the words, at least.”
Jeong Ui-tak clearly had no intention of actually asking for help and took the offer as empty courtesy.
With a lingering sense of unease, Ye-chan shoveled the food on his tray into his mouth and left. Not long after, the rest of his own team filed out of the cafeteria as well.
“Did the talk go well?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
Seonwoo I-gyeong—the only one among them who could even remotely be called sociable—sidled up. Ye-chan gave a vague nod.
“Judging by your face, it didn’t go well.”
“It went fine.”
He answered firmly to Seonwoo I-gyeong’s probing.
Ye-chan started walking first; Seonwoo I-gyeong, undeterred, fell into step beside him again.
“I’m not gonna ask what happened, so quit being so guarded. Anyway, whatever problem they’ve got over there, don’t sweat it too much. They’re our competition, right?”
Seonwoo I-gyeong playfully jabbed Ye-chan in the side and grinned. Ye-chan nodded vaguely once more, but inwardly he scoffed.
Under ordinary circumstances, Seonwoo I-gyeong would have been right.
But Ye-chan’s goal wasn’t simply to debut by ranking in the top nine of Chumaf.
He had to gather the exact nine members he wanted into a team, so he couldn’t afford to look away.
Jeong Ui-tak and Bae Sae-byeok are two of them. I’m not about to watch them get dragged down by three idiots.
Once practice wrapped for the day, he would pay a visit to Jeong Ui-tak’s room. Decision made, Ye-chan quickened his pace toward the practice room.
“All right, let’s get back to practice!”
Even right after lunch, not a single member complained of post-meal drowsiness.
If anything, their passion was overflowing—erupting like a volcano.
Ye-chan tore his eyes away from the choreography group, who seemed to be egging each other on into increasingly ridiculous stunts.
Finishing the lyrics he’d left incomplete before the meal came first.
……That should about do it.
Satisfied that it was presentable enough to show others, Ye-chan called the choreography group over.
“I roughly cleaned up the lyrics—want to take a look together?”
The four who had practically become one with the floor all turned their heads at once.
A bad premonition slid down Ye-chan’s spine.
……Just what kind of choreography are they putting together?
Seonwoo I-gyeong, bangs damp with sweat, strode over first.
“Oh, faster than I expected?”
“Good work.”
Kang Hae-sol, following right behind, offered a brief word as well.
While the others huddled over the lyrics, Ye-chan examined the choreography sketches Woo Hwi-gyum had brought over.
……Which end is the head?
They were supposedly drawings of the key moves on memo paper, yet he couldn’t make out a single thing.
Judging by the scrawled handwriting beside them, Seonwoo I-gyeong had drawn them. The writing was bad enough; the art was even worse.
While Ye-chan was busy deciphering first the handwriting cipher and then the picture cipher, Kang Hae-sol finished reviewing the lyrics and nodded in satisfaction.
“This is good enough to use as is.”
“Really?”
Coming from a perfectionist like Kang Hae-sol, the words were more than welcome.
Apparently Ye-chan’s delight showed too clearly on his face; Kang Hae-sol rolled his eyes without a word and subtly put more distance between them.
Ha, that guy and his social anxiety.
Following Kang Hae-sol’s lead, the remaining three began heaping praise on Ye-chan as well.
“Wow, you actually managed both speed and quality—I’m impressed~”
“You kept the original feel of my part while connecting it naturally.”
“You worked hard.”
The atmosphere was so warm it almost made him embarrassed for ever having thought of this as hellish group work.
“Then let’s try singing it with these lyrics first, and change anything that feels awkward later. We’ll also run the choreography continuously up to wherever we’ve got it. Ye-chan, cue the track for us.”
“Got it. I’ll count to three and hit play.”
Even as the four of them—everyone except Ye-chan—lined up in formation at Kang Hae-sol’s words, the mood was still good.
Ye-chan counted to three and pressed play.
As the dance began and he watched, trying to gauge roughly where his own parts would fit, Ye-chan’s expression gradually hardened.
They had apparently choreographed only through the first chorus; the four of them stopped mid-motion. Ye-chan silently paused the track.
Seonwoo I-gyeong, cheeks flushed red, caught his breath and asked,
“So? How is it?”
The other three’s faces looked much the same.
Ye-chan met each of their expectant, shining eyes in turn, then spoke.
“This isn’t dancing—it’s acrobatics.”
He’d told these lunatics to dance, and they’d gone and put on a full circus act.
At his cold verdict, all four pairs of pupils trembled faintly.
Ye-chan swallowed a sigh and held out the tablet that had recorded their movements.
“I can tell you all worked hard. But this isn’t just ‘putting spirit into it.’”
Exactly as he’d said, the four on the screen were stringing together high-difficulty moves like performers in some freak-show spectacle.
What made it even more absurd was how skillfully they kept slightly concealing Woo Hwi-gyum and Lee Seung-heon, whose skills lagged a bit behind the others.
Don’t go showing off your talent on something like this……
That they’d built and locked in choreography this precise in less than half a day was impressive, but this was not something that could be called dancing.
Seonwoo I-gyeong, staring blankly at the screen, let out a groan.
“……Ugh, you’re right. Everyone was keeping up so well that I must’ve lost my mind for a second, thinking I had to show them something even more amazing. Sorry.”
“It’s not just you, hyung. I think I also got carried away wanting to show off that moves like these even exist.”
Kang Hae-sol shook his head at Seonwoo I-gyeong’s apology.
Woo Hwi-gyum and Lee Seung-heon were still watching the footage of themselves flying every which way as if observing some bizarre phenomenon.
But that wasn’t the only problem.
Because the desire to showcase difficult moves had come first, the transitions between them were a complete mess.
Too many cooks spoil the broth…… They just shoved in every cool-looking move they could find, and this is what you get.
Seonwoo I-gyeong seemed to realize it before Ye-chan even pointed it out; he roughly raked his hands through his hair and apologized again.
Normally his feet barely seemed to touch the ground, yet when it came to work he was always serious.
“The moves are all over the place too. I didn’t check properly.”
Kang Hae-sol shook his head once more.
“It’s our first time putting it together, so it can happen. More importantly, throwing out everything we’ve made so far feels like a waste—is there any way we can refine it and still use it?”
“Right? Maybe if we just fix the connecting parts it’ll be okay?”
“You two.”
Ye-chan cut into the conversation of the two older members who were still missing the most important point.
Seonwoo I-gyeong and Kang Hae-sol both looked at him.
“You’re already out of breath after only dancing the first verse. Do you really think you can keep this up for over three minutes?”
“……!”
Seeing the two of them look as if they’d just been cracked over the head with a hammer, Ye-chan swallowed the sigh that tried to escape.