Chapter 45
...No, wait.
My eyes instinctively darted around.
To the left.
Big Joe stood with a cigar between his lips, arms crossed in satisfaction.
To the right.
Cabin had turned his cap backward and was grinning as he held out a pair of headphones.
Straight ahead.
Countless eyes were fixed on me alone.
And in the middle of it all—
“H-honey!”
Park Seung-ho grabbed his wife’s arm and stamped his feet.
“Our Geon is going to... going to battle Cabin!”
“Calm down, honey.”
“How am I supposed to calm down?! How?!”
Park Yul raised her phone vertically and swallowed hard.
“...Oppa, you know how to do that too?”
In the end, Park Geon slowly reached out.
He accepted the headphones Cabin offered and placed them over one ear.
Waaaaaaah!
“Shotgun accepted!”
“He’s doing it! He’s really doing it!”
“Yo, is this real?! I can’t believe I’m alive to see this!”
Amid the cheers—
Click.
Park Geon heard a familiar sound from somewhere.
...What was that?
Ah.
He realized.
That sound came from inside my head!
The so-called fear-of-death button.
It had just been pressed.
The switch that released his brain’s limiter through the desperate need to survive had turned on once again.
The world seemed to slow to half speed.
The sound of When I Wake Up, still playing through the speakers, began appearing as color.
A deep indigo spreading long through the air.
In the middle of the yard stood a DJ booth set up like a stage.
Two CDJs and one mixer.
“Listen carefully. I’m going to explain the rules.”
“...”
The rules were simple.
One person would play a beat during his turn and step aside.
The other would take his place and continue from there.
But simply taking over was not enough.
He had to raise it one level higher.
If he only copied what the other person had done, he lost.
Cabin stepped into the booth first.
He cracked his knuckles.
“Listen carefully.”
His eyes gleamed beneath the cap.
The moment his hand touched the CDJ—
Boom.
The atmosphere in the yard changed.
A section of old funk began playing.
A seventies soul sample that younger people would not even know by name.
Yet it immediately caught the ear.
“Ohhh, this song! My father used to listen to this!”
“Cabin’s digging is on another level! Where does he even find tracks like this?”
Cabin’s hand danced over the crossfader.
Chk-chk—chk-chk-chka—
The scratches landed perfectly between the beats.
The moment the bassline came around again—
BOOM!
Cabin dropped it.
The entire yard surged.
“That’s insane! This is why he’s a legend!”
“On God, I got chills!”
Dustin was shaking his ass while still holding a pork rib, and even Mama Rose was moving her shoulders while carrying a plate.
Park Seung-ho looked as though he was about to cry.
“Honey, I’m watching this man perform live right in front of me... I didn’t even get to see this during the When I Wake Up stage...”
Cabin dragged across the fader once more.
Chk—chk-chk—
The same sample cut out three times, then exploded on the fourth.
If the timing had been off by even one second, the whole song would have collapsed, but Cabin did it without even blinking.
As expected of Cabin.
Big Joe nodded as he slowly exhaled cigar smoke.
No matter how monstrous Shotgun’s talent is, surpassing Cabin won’t be easy.
Leaving only the bassline running in a loop, Cabin stepped away from the booth.
Then he gestured with his chin toward the empty spot.
“Take it. If you can.”
Park Geon did not answer.
He was listening blankly to the final bassline.
“...”
No.
He was looking at it.
The final note Cabin had left behind.
A murky purple.
...There.
Park Geon stepped into the empty booth.
The purple bassline Cabin had left behind was still looping on one deck.
His fingers touched the mixer.
He left the bassline alone and quietly layered a completely different track over it from the opposite deck.
The keys did not match.
Normally, the two songs should have clashed and grated against the ear.
But then...
Park Geon pulled the pitch fader down by a semitone.
Slide—
The two mismatched colors overlapped in the same place.
Purple and indigo blended together, becoming a depth of color no one had ever seen before.
“...Huh?”
“What just happened? Those two songs... became one song?”
The audience stirred.
No one knew the reason.
But everyone felt the same sensation, as though the ground beneath their feet had dropped by one level.
It was the exact same phenomenon that had made thousands of people shiver at once when he lowered the key by a semitone during the live stage.
“Oh...”
Cabin’s eyebrow twitched.
Park Geon raised a button slightly.
At the same time, the yard erupted.
“A rookie answered Cabin!”
“Nah, he did more than that! He turned Cabin’s track into his own!”
“What the hell are you, Shotgun?! Seriously, what are you?!”
Park Seung-ho stood frozen with his mouth hanging open.
“H-honey... Geon took the track Cabin laid down. He took it.”
“Please stay still.”
When Park Geon stepped aside, Cabin took his place.
He adjusted the headphones.
“Well, look at this. You didn’t just get lucky once, did you?”
There was playfulness in his grin.
“Then try taking this.”
Cabin’s hand began moving across the crossfader like lightning.
Chk-chka—chka—chk-ka-ka—
He chopped a single sound into tiny pieces and scattered them across the rhythm.
The same sound came out at a different length every time.
Scratching.
(Translator’s Note:Scratching — A DJ technique in which recorded sound is moved backward and forward rhythmically while a mixer’s crossfader is manipulated, creating new percussive and rhythmic patterns.)
Pure hand technique driven by wrist snaps.
“Look at that wrist!”
“Cabin’s scratching is the textbook!”
“Damn, it looks like he’s dancing!”
Cabin cut off the final scratch sharply and jerked his chin.
“Scratch.”
...Scratch?
Park Geon screamed internally.
Scratching depended on the wrist.
It was not something a person could learn in a day or two.
Even with training, it would take at least three years to become competent.
And Park Geon’s wrist had less than a year of DJing experience.
Then...
Once again, he arrived at the same conclusion.
First, survive.
He stepped into the place Cabin had vacated.
Park Geon pressed the loop button.
After trapping the sample Cabin had been scratching inside a loop, he layered the same note four times, each shifted by a semitone.
Park Geon transformed the rhythm created by scratching into harmony.
Cabin had carved the sound apart.
Park Geon answered by stacking it.
“...Huh?”
“W-what is this?!”
Cabin snorted with laughter.
“You’re good at dodging around, you bastard.”
Though he said that, his eyes were growing increasingly serious.
When Park Geon stepped away, Cabin returned to the booth.
“Fine. Then—”
This time, all eight of Cabin’s fingers moved over the hot cues at once.
Tap-tap-tap—tap-tap-tap—
He began manually slicing apart the same one-bar drum loop.
One beat into two.
Two into four.
A rhythm that did not exist in the original song was created on the spot.
Beat juggling.
The art of DJing, requiring the hands and ears to operate completely independently.
“WHAT?!”
“I can’t see his hands! I can’t see Cabin’s hands!”
“Are those even human hands?!”
The yard erupted.
Cabin looped the chopped groove exactly as it was and stepped away from the booth.
Then he looked at Park Geon.
“Your turn.”
“...”
“You can give up.”
...How am I supposed to answer that?
Despite thinking that, by the time Park Geon came to his senses, he was already standing in the booth.
Both hands rested on the decks.
On the left deck was the drum loop Cabin had left behind.
On the right was the melody of a completely unrelated song Park Geon had selected on the spot.
The problem was that their BPMs differed by fourteen.
If combined normally, the rhythms would collapse against each other.
Ah, I feel like I can connect the tempos with a bridge somehow...
Park Geon’s hands spun the pitch controls like mad.
He raised one side and lowered the other.
The two songs met at a single exact point somewhere in the middle.
BOOM—
Then he dropped them simultaneously.
A double drop.
(Translator’s Note:Double Drop — A DJ technique in which the climactic drop sections of two different tracks are synchronized to hit at the same moment, combining their impact.)
The drops of two completely different songs exploded on the same beat at the same moment.
“...”
“...”
For a moment, the yard fell silent.
The neighbors thought the party had finally ended and poked their heads out of their windows.
That was right.
When the shock was too great, even the cheers came a beat late.
“AAAAAAAH!”
“Holy shit, that was fucking incredible!”
“That was insane!”
The delayed roar erupted.
“Two songs?! On the same beat?!”
“With BPMs that far apart?!”
“Was that even possible?!”
Park Seung-ho’s legs finally gave out, and he collapsed into a chair.
“...Honey. I think I never knew our son at all.”
Big Joe, cigar between his lips, was thinking the same thing.
...Shotgun. Maybe I never knew you either. You were an even bigger monster than I thought.
Cabin remained silent for a long time.
The playful energy in him had disappeared.
He took off his cap and ran a hand through his hair.
“...Jesus.”
The word escaped quietly.
“I was holding back too much.”
The yard stirred.
“He’s getting serious.”
“Cabin’s getting serious!”
“Now it really starts!”
Cabin returned to the booth.
This time, there were no jokes or games.
He inserted a USB drive into the slot.
“This isn’t a track I play just anywhere.”
His finger pressed a hot cue.
The first note flowed out.
Park Geon’s eyes widened behind his sunglasses.
Wait, this?
It was the very song that had made Cabin a legend.
The track Park Geon had played until it wore out, the one that had made Cabin his role model.
And now Cabin himself was dismantling the original right in front of him.
In other words, he was taking apart the masterpiece he had created with his own hands and rebuilding it anew with those same hands.
“You couldn’t pay to see this.”
“Record it! Record everything!”
As the song raced toward its climax—
Cabin looped a single bar and stepped away from the booth.
Then he looked back at Park Geon.
“Take it.”
The atmosphere was completely different from before.
Even his voice was lower.
“If you can take this song.”
Everyone held their breath.
This carried more weight than an ordinary battle.
He was being asked to answer a legendary track right there in front of everyone.
“...”
But Park Geon silently walked toward the booth.
The countless gazes fixed on him were filled with awe, but the truth was...
Fuck.
His heart was pounding wildly.
A masterpiece made by his idol.
If even one note went wrong, it would be an insult to the song.
Cabin was in front of him.
Big Joe was behind him.
If he made a mistake, he would die musically and physically.
Fear rose all the way to his throat.
And that fear released Park Geon’s brain to its final stage.
The world slowed until it almost seemed to stop.
Every note in Cabin’s track spread out before him as color.
The gaps in the song.
The spaces hidden inside them.
He could see them all at once.
...Here. There’s space here, here, and here.
Cabin’s legendary track was still looping on one deck.
On the opposite deck, Park Geon loaded the sixteen-bar intro of When I Wake Up.
Then, over Cabin’s looping track, he slowly layered those sixteen bars.
The very sixteen bars Little K had hummed twenty years ago.
The sixteen bars Cabin had never managed to complete.
They settled perfectly over Cabin’s masterpiece.
As though they had been one song from the very beginning.
The two broken melodies finally connected here in this yard.
“...”
Cabin, who had been watching from one step back, froze in place.
No one in the yard could speak.
What flowed from the speakers was the sound of Cabin’s masterpiece and Little K’s final work becoming one.
Two pieces of music created twenty years apart were holding hands on the same beat.
Big Joe slowly rose from his seat.
Mama Rose covered her mouth with both hands.
Park Seung-ho’s eyes were now filling with tears.
“Honey... why am I crying?”
“Please be quiet.”
Park Geon laid down the final note and slowly removed his hands.
The sound from the speakers faded.
Silence.
Then—
“...Ha.”
The person who broke the silence was Cabin.
“...Ha. Hahahahaha!”
Cabin bent at the waist and began laughing.
“What kind of crazy bastard does that? You put When I Wake Up over my track?”
He threw his cap onto the ground and stared straight into Park Geon’s sunglasses.
“What the hell is inside your head?”
Park Geon remained silent with a blank expression.
“...Right. The real ones don’t talk. All right, everyone saw that, right?!”
Without even using a microphone, he shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Now do you understand why I called this bastard a legend?!”
At the same time, gang members climbed onto chairs, someone hugged one of the line-array speakers and cried, and Dustin threw his pork rib into the air with a roar.
Then it fell right back into his mouth.
“Ow, my back.”
Cabin picked up the cap he had thrown on the ground.
Then he pulled it firmly onto Park Geon’s head.
“Keep this.”
The chanting continued throughout the yard.
Before long, even the neighbors were joining in.
They had been secretly watching the whole thing.
“SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN! SHOTGUN!”
Park Seung-ho also shot to his feet with both fists clenched and screamed until his voice cracked.
“That’s my son! That’s my son!”
“Honey, you’re going to lose your voice!”
Park Yul recorded everything with trembling hands and muttered without realizing it.
“...Oppa, seriously, what are you?”
In one corner of the yard, Jamal watched the scene with the Squirtle sticker stuck beneath his eye.
“...Fuck, Shotgun. You really are insane.”
Meanwhile, Park Geon maintained his expressionless face until the very end.
...I survived.
Only then did he sigh in relief.
The release of Last Mile, the song he had made with Delivery Man, was just around the corner.
But before that...
There was one thing that absolutely had to be resolved.
And the key to it was none other than—
Ha. I can’t believe I’m going to see Big Joe directly. I really hoped the legal-advisor proposal would be the last time.
...Big Joe.
Knock, knock.
“Who is it?”
The voice of death came through the door.
Park Geon swallowed hard and opened it.
“...It’s me.”