Not Good at Dancing, Just Good at Memorizing
"Three days?"
"Huh......"
"And the person who receives the best evaluation at the final check, held the day before filming—"
Kang Sejun let the pause hang in the air.
"Will take the center."
The word center jolted even the trainees who'd been half-dead with exhaustion back to life.
"And finally, the top five will receive a bonus item for the signal song shoot."
Before the regression, Kang Yiyul had placed sixth. Off by a single hair's breadth.
Not this time.
Because this time, I'm the one grabbing him by the collar and dragging him up there.
The top five before the regression had been Han Sangyoon, Joo Han, Go Jaeseong, Choi Woonjo, and......
"Hey, move."
Speak of the tiger and it appears, they say. It was Hwang Geonhee, the guy who'd managed to rack up a decent following before getting forced off the show mid-season over a scandal.
"Oh, isn't this the latest model?"
The trainees marveled at the sponsor-provided tablets. Of course, the only things they could actually do were check the choreography video and watch ads.
"Rough. Guess OTT apps are out of the question."
Oh no......
Sadly, that trainee would walk away with nothing from that remark but the nickname OTT-Jwa and an early elimination. Maybe I'd watched too many survival shows, because one look at a face and I could see how the story ended.
Feels like I've become some back-alley fortune teller.
Kang Sejun left the practice room, but the cameras stayed. The little red lights on the cameras mounted around the room kept blinking away, and thanks to them, the trainees' silent war for the best spot on camera raged on.
Keep scowling like that and the second you get caught on camera with a sour expression, you're done.
I swept my gaze across the room, mapping out the camera positions beyond the mirror.
Familiar. Painfully familiar.
Before the regression, I'd rewatched Boys Code dozens of times. No—hundreds. Early on, Kang Yiyul's screen time had been so pitifully small that I'd paused at every single scene, hunting for whatever trace of him I could find.
Doing that over and over, I'd ended up memorizing the camera placements themselves. To catch even the sliver of Kang Yiyul caught in frame, I'd had to check from every possible angle.
He disappears at this angle, and right around here he slips out of frame.
Those memories overlaid themselves perfectly onto the practice room in front of me now.
I walked toward the corner near the door.
On the surface, the worst dead-end spot in the room.
But the real prime real estate was exactly here.
This is the best angle for the wide shot.
I settled into place as casually as I could and took stock of the room.
"......Good grief."
A sigh escaped me on its own.
Kang Yiyul was practicing in the most awkward spot imaginable—wedged into a gap between a crush of other trainees, no less.
Why there, of all places.
How was I supposed to get him over here naturally?
Asking him to teach me the choreography was the safest play.
There was just one problem with that.
I already know all of it.
Down to the smallest detail.
Humans are products of repetition. Watch your favorite's fancam a few hundred times, and at some point the choreography just lives in your head rent-free.
But I hadn't stopped there. That part had been pure, desperate shilling for IMPACTER.
The moment the group started sliding downhill, the company pivoted to milking survival show nostalgia as a marketing strategy. Other idols were doing challenges to their active title tracks—meanwhile, here was a dance challenge to the signal song of a survival show that had ended more than a year ago.
Naturally, nobody cared.
So in the end, I made an account.
Under some concept like 'What if a total dance-illiterate did the Boys Code signal song challenge?', I put on a mask of sorts and posted the signal song choreography.
Every single day.
At first, the comments were nothing but hate—'Doing anything for attention, huh.' I couldn't even argue. I just hoped that attention would land on IMPACTER instead of me.
The early videos were genuinely unbearable to watch. The movements were an abomination.
Still, my clown act turned out to be surprisingly effective at getting IMPACTER's name out there.
Videos that used to scrape together ten-odd comments started pulling in a hundred, then two hundred. Share counts climbed geometrically right along with them.
It was around day 100, I think. The day my videos overtook IMPACTER's music video in view count, I quietly nuked the account.
I didn't want Yiyul finding out about any of this. And I didn't want IMPACTER becoming a laughingstock either.
But thanks to that whole saga, I had the signal song's choreography and lyrics down cold. That didn't mean I could dance well, of course. My dancing wasn't in the business of 'dancing well.' It was in the business of 'memorizing well.'
Which means right now, I cannot let that show.
Today, I was a trainee seeing this choreography for the very first time.
Should I pretend to drill it a little longer before asking him?
Or just play bad at it from the start?
I was hammering away at the mental calculator when an irritated voice cut through the room.
"Ugh, come on......!"
"Sorry, it's the cast, so......"
"Then go practice somewhere else. It's cramped enough in here already—"
"......"
Look at this little s***'s attitude.
Without a moment's deliberation, I walked straight over to Kang Yiyul.
"Um......"
When I tapped his shoulder carefully, he turned around with a startled look.
"......Me?"
"Yeah. If you don't mind, could you help me out with something?"
His expression said he wasn't thrilled about it, but he gave a small nod.
Yiyul, that spot is far too small a place for you.
I'll lead you out into a wider world.
The moment Kang Yiyul and I stood side by side, one of the cameras tilted its angle toward us.
Okay, one down.
It was the signal that the production staff had started paying attention. Fair enough—the practice room was a battlefield by now, everyone fighting their own lonely war against the three-day deadline.
This wasn't a team mission to begin with, so in a way it was the natural course of things.
But what gets captured on broadcast isn't individuals—it's relationships with a story behind them. So I'd decided to build Kang Yiyul a teacher persona.
Which would also double as my excuse for suddenly improving later.
"This part—is the arm supposed to extend like this?"
I deliberately flailed the move out awkwardly.
Kang Yiyul glanced over and shook his head.
"No."
Still that clipped, dry voice.
Polite speech really does not suit him. I can't get used to it.
"You rotate inward first, then extend on the next beat."
Wow. So there ARE things our Yiyul can't do!
The explanation was utterly incomprehensible. What was it they said—being good at something and teaching it are two different skills.
It felt like sitting through a professor's mandatory major course back in college. One-way instruction that gave zero consideration to the listener's knowledge or level of understanding.
Maybe because my boy was a genius—he genuinely seemed puzzled as to why the move wouldn't work in the first place.
"Ah, like this~?"
When I copied it roughly, Yiyul's eyebrow rose a fraction.
"That's...... also not it."
"Then like this?"
"No."
He let out a short sigh, then planted himself right in front of me and demonstrated.
"You turn here, extend—"
The explanation was still a disaster, but the movement was flawless.
I copied it once more, as someone learning it for the first time.
"H-how do you do this part?"
"That one's easy. Just think of connecting the joints, linking them together like—"
Wow, so easy. So, so easy, Yiyul.
If the person teaching me had been anyone but Yiyul, the sarcasm would have burst right out of me. This was a move difficult enough to dislocate your shoulder if you dared breathe twice while doing it.
To think I'd be reliving the professor I despised most, while watching my beloved do his impression. Life really was an unending parade of unexpected events.
After that, it was pure repetition. I deliberately flubbed a move or two each round, and Yiyul grew visibly more frustrated.
And then this time—
"......Huh?"
I hadn't gotten it wrong on purpose.
Kang Yiyul's eyes wavered for a split second.
I laughed on the inside.
"......Just do it like you did just now."
Kang Yiyul said quietly.
I shrugged.
"Must be what a great teacher you have, huh?"
This time the silence stretched a little longer.
Just as things were about to turn awkward, Yiyul answered like he was brushing it off.
"......No."
He denied it—but there was the faintest softening at the end of his voice.
Right on cue, another camera drifted our way.
Three.
That was enough.
I layered on the details, nice and natural.
The signal song choreography was vindictively intricate. Obviously a trap the production team had engineered on purpose.
But I had every one of those details memorized perfectly. After getting flayed alive in the comments day after day, I'd learned them through gritted teeth whether I wanted to or not.
Ironically, the better a trainee was, the more easily they missed those details. Pick things up at a glance and you assume you've got it all, then move on to the next section.
That was why, early in the show, watching the frontrunners crack one by one right out of the gate became part of the program's appeal.
But I'm not letting Yiyul take the flak for it.
The angle of the fingers, the direction of the toes. Whenever a point was missing from the moves he was teaching me, I'd fold it in naturally and dance it.
Kang Yiyul, who'd been watching me closely, stopped mid-motion.
"......Hold on."
He grabbed the tablet immediately. Replayed the video.
"......Ah."
A short exhale of realization. When he looked back up at me, there was something different in his eyes.
I played dumb.
"What?"
"......Nothing."
He said that, but his movements had already changed—slightly more precise, now matching the details.
I swallowed a smile. This was more than enough.
Kang Yiyul found Yuseongwoo unsettling.
He'd felt that way from the very first time he saw him.
Street casting. That one phrase explained everything.
Most of them came in brimming with nothing but confidence and vanished within days, unable to survive.
Naturally, he'd assumed Yuseongwoo would be the same.
He wasn't.
Every day, Yuseongwoo stayed in the practice room until the very last. Not just a day or two—consistently.
......What is with him.
It grated on him. He tried not to pay attention, but the guy kept drifting into his field of view.
And then there was the rumor that he'd cried during practice. What on earth was this guy playing at?
Guess he's got some grit, at least.
That was the extent of it. He had no intention of getting tangled up with him.
His own situation was hardly leisurely enough for that.
"Um—"
That was why, when Yuseongwoo asked for his help earlier, he'd planned to refuse. He barely had enough time to practice as it was; where was he supposed to find room to look after someone else?
But then, without thinking, he'd glanced at the mirror. Hair that swayed easily even damp with sweat, a style that satisfied him with nothing more than a casual brush of the hand. Even the flood of praise from the shoot came back to him naturally.
And the person who'd made all of that possible was this hyung right here.
"......Ha."
He hated owing people more than anything.
So the plan was to help him this once and call it even.
......And he regretted it almost instantly.
"Like this?"
"No."
Wrong.
"Or, like this?"
Also wrong.
Making a simple movement complicated was apparently its own special talent.
"Have you...... ever learned dance, by any chance?"
"Nope?"
Right—if he had learned it, that would have made those movements an even bigger problem.
"Oh, got it!"
He wore the face of a man who'd conquered the world because he'd hit a single beat correctly.
Is this guy serious right now?
Frankly, it was exasperating.
What possible frame of mind did he have entering a survival show? Debuting wasn't a joke.
Still, he'd already agreed to help, and backing out halfway felt worse.
"......Let's try it again."
In the end, he kept the lesson going.
But the more he taught, the stranger it got.
Yuseongwoo still couldn't dance. His joints still moved like they belonged to separate people, and he still couldn't absorb an explanation in one pass.
What is this?
And yet, somehow, his movements kept landing closer and closer to correct.
He'd mess up exactly twice, then succeed on the third try.
That pattern was too consistent.
......Why am I indulging him this much?
He should have found it annoying, but instead a strange hunger was creeping in.
Then, in the middle of Yuseongwoo's movements, he glimpsed a detail he himself had been missing.
"......Wait a second."
He rewound the video. And confirmed it.
That just now—he really had missed it.
When he lifted his head, Yuseongwoo was standing there with a face that knew absolutely nothing.
"......What?"
Kang Yiyul couldn't answer.
......It has to be a coincidence.
He tried to brush it off—but on the very next move, it happened again.
And this time, too, Yuseongwoo was the one who had it right.
Kang Yiyul bit his lip.
He couldn't dance—but he never missed the details that anyone else would have sailed right past? That couldn't be chalked up to a good eye alone.
If he'd drilled this one choreography to death, I suppose it's possible.
But that was impossible.
For the first time, he looked at Yuseongwoo properly.
By all rights, Yuseongwoo was the one being helped here.
What is with this hyung?
Strangely, it felt like he was being pulled in, deeper and deeper.