A Song That Pretends to Be Easy

The main theme of Idol Survival, Sunlight, was a classic dance track with a catchy hook that drilled straight into your ears.

Because that hook held the center of the song, the section had been built easy to sing along to and easy to dance to—but it was also a double-edged piece. To even reach that point, you had to survive a stretch of choreography and melody that was anything but simple.

Only the hook was easy.

In short, it was a difficult song pretending to be easy. You could half-sing it, half-dance it—but then the finished product looked completely different. Watch long enough and you could see exactly where someone was cutting corners.

Either way, pulling off the vocals and the dance at the same ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠time meant you had to be thoroughly polished. Complex choreography was packed into every spare corner of the track, with barely a breath to spare.

For now, just the choreography. Verse one through the dance break.

I peeled off the padding I’d been pressing down over myself and took the last spot at the end of the line.

Last row, last place. I pulled my mask off, stuffed it in my pocket, and looked straight ahead—at a field of tense napes.

These were the contestants I would have to knock down if I wanted to climb.

I shook out the top that had gotten a little crumpled under the padding and drew a deep breath. This was it.

From the very first phrase, my hands and feet moved in sharp time with the beat that snapped in and took over.

Cutting cleanly while still linking soft—saying it out loud made it sound like nonsense, but anyway, I had drilled this one sequence hundreds of times until it was carved into my body, all so I could hit it exactly right.

It was a section that already demanded careful control of the voice, flipping between chest and head register—and on top of that, the choreography forced the lower body to stay rhythmic while the upper body stayed soft. Frustrating enough to curse over.

How many times had I torn my muscles apart trying to claw back the flexibility I’d lost just for this?

While I was raising my dance stat, I’d also been practically remodeling my body under a trainer’s direction. Enduring the pain had paid off: the movement flowed out of me now, nothing like when I’d first learned it. I finally looked like someone who had actually danced before.

Compared to the earlier choreography, where every beat had been sliced and moved through one by one, the hook stretched out on a longer breath.

The moves were simple, which meant detail and line mattered more. I kept them clean and straight. The lyrics could have been played seductive, but overdoing it would only feel heavy.

I’m nineteen, after all.

I cut it clean and understated—but I couldn’t afford to drop the delicacy. Get it wrong and the whole thing would look dull. I watched my face, too. With the choreography relatively quiet here, this was a place they could grab a close-up, so expression and eye work mattered.

My read on the song was sunlight and a cat. That feeling of unhideable satisfaction leaking out of a cat sprawled under warm sun, soaking up a lazy day.

“Hhh—hoo—hh—”

Some bizarre breathing noise came from beside me. I ignored it.

The easy tempo kept rolling, but I had to keep my center of gravity locked. Right after the spin, the dance break slammed in.

This is the part that actually made me want to throw up.

Plenty of people would look at the hook alone, decide the song was easy, and then wipe out right here. The choreography was seriously powerful. For nearly two weeks, this section had been the main culprit draining my stamina.

Big, fast, precise. And between each hit, balance had to stay clean, or it would look like flailing. Lean on rebound because your strength ran short, and you’d lose control of your own body—you’d look like the dance was dragging you around.

So in the end, Sunlight demanded disciplined, flexible, soft, and powerful movement all at once—an absolutely vicious piece of choreography—and yet,

“Yes, well done. The passer from group one hundred is contestant number three thousand.”

I had danced it well enough to be satisfied.

At this level, even if a behind-the-scenes clip goes up later, I shouldn’t get dragged for it.

I decided to take the first step as good enough. From here on, I just had to do better than this.

I still had a long way to go.

“Huh…”

“Whoa, damn…”

“….”

By the time the last group had gone down for evaluation and only the passers were left, the waiting area had sunk into silence. The person on the display board was, well—anyway. Like that.

“There was someone like that…?”

Black hair, black tee, black pants, black canvas shoes.

He was covered head to toe in black, and yet the skin tone and the way the clothes sat on him made the whole thing look like one complete outfit. No accessories, no flashy dye job—and still, a person who simply stood out.

“That face is art…”

Camera one had locked onto a single shot from the start, so every movement came through clear. When the mask came down and the face underneath showed, people forgot how to breathe—and watching him dance, they really did forget.

Honestly, I couldn’t say the technique was outrageous. The skills he used for the dance were mostly basic, textbook stuff.

But even if someone better than number three thousand were standing right next to him, I didn’t think they could pull people in this hard.

It was hard to put into words, but one realization landed solid: this was the kind of person who became a star.

“If he’d gone in the middle, my mental would’ve shattered. I would’ve bombed for sure.”

“Whoa, damn—ah, damn…”

Through the people who could barely string a sentence together, Lee Jae-jin thought: this was fate.

The more Lee Jae-jin looked at Lee Han-hee, the harder it got to hold down the hunger blooming in him.

I want to dance with him.

In truth, Jae-jin had stopped going out to watch street performances a long time ago. When he was busy, he had no time. When he finally had free time, he had no passion left for it.

After leaving the dance crew he’d been part of for years, motivation simply wouldn’t come. The passion that used to burn so hard it nearly choked him had guttered out in an instant, and he was even going through a bit of a slump—dreams of a teammate’s voice saying, I’m tired because of you.

He’d left the crew. He’d spent almost his whole life dancing, and now he was stuck wondering what he was even supposed to do next—when he heard his classmates hyping someone up. There was this one famous kid at the university lately; they told him to come watch.

And he saw a figure rolled up like a kimbap in a white long padding. It was not an outfit built for dancing. The kid mostly seemed to be singing.

From a distance he watched him hold a mic, chug water, talk to the crowd—then interest dropped, and he turned to leave. That was when the song started.

He’d never really paid attention to lyrics when he listened to pop songs, but that day every word came through too clearly.

A person who’d been hurt and lost their drive reaching out a hand, taking help, moving forward—cliché, idealistic lyrics like that.

But it wasn’t vague bravado about saving everyone. The lyrics landed as if the singer already knew the people listening would be the ones to save him—and somehow that hit harder.

Strange that a voice shouting hurry up and come save me would sit better in the heart, but it did.

It was more comforting that way.

So he went back a few more times, and before he knew it he was stamping attendance every single day. After about three weeks of that, he finally saw the kid peel off the tightly wrapped padding and dance.

It was a gift he hadn’t expected. Because he was singing alone, dance took a smaller share of the set, and there were rough edges—but even so, Jae-jin’s heart kept pounding the whole time he watched.

He hadn’t felt anything like that once since leaving the crew, and that was strange too. He couldn’t explain why the kid pulled the eye so hard, but once you started watching, you sank in.

And every time he came back, the body work was visibly better—and for the first time in a while, motivation surged hard.

There had been a time when he felt himself change day by day like that. A time when he wanted to dance better, wanted to build a more perfect stage.

There was a time when it was that fun for me, too.

And now he was feeling the thrill again.

He’d figured the kid might show up at this audition, but he never expected to see him same day, same place. And the full stage in front of him now was definitely more than he’d hoped for.

“Now I get why he hid his face.”

He hadn’t wanted the performance buried under it. Even when he could have pulled more attention, he’d deliberately shoved a hat down and bet on voice and dance line instead of looks. Lee Han-hee was far more serious about building a stage—and far more passionate—than even he seemed to realize.

Lee Jae-jin felt the dead passion and drive to improve start to breathe again.

Wait—why is this…?

After finishing evaluation and moving to the waiting room, I couldn’t stop the confusion.

He’d clearly been ace material—and then Greed had popped up.

“Why on earth…”

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“Hm?”

“No. It’s nothing…”

It wasn’t like I could protest that the person I’d already marked as the team’s main dancer had somehow picked up a trait this rotten.

No. This isn’t Beginning—it’s Step Up, right? And Greed is random, so maybe it’s fine?

But among random traits, Greed (R) showed up relatively often and did absolutely nothing useful in-game—a trash trait with a thoroughly verified bad name in Beginning.

What if “random” didn’t mean always good, and the tier swung wildly depending on conditions?

No, no. Maybe the whole random tier got buffed across the board? It might not be purely bad.

I hoped that Greed, the poster child of garbage traits, had at least gotten a friendly patch. Jae-jin’s vocal stat was relatively low at 80, so if things went well, it could turn into a blessing in disguise the way mine had.

“Alright. Let’s do great from here.”

A hand thrust out suddenly. When I took it, he shook hard, face bright. Looking at that expression, I wondered if I’d been thinking too calculated.

“Yes, hyung. Looking forward to working with you.”

Right. If the person himself was happy, that was enough. So what if the trait was good or bad? How was anyone supposed to live life chasing nothing but efficiency?

Calculating efficiency for my own life is more than enough. Who am I to drag someone else’s into it?

Anyway, Jae-jin’s trait was already set, and it wasn’t my place to argue about it.

What I needed to focus on was surviving this survival audition. Seeing someone like Jae-jin here made it clear the level was higher than expected. I couldn’t let my guard down.

I don’t even know how many people will debut.

With no information, all I could do was give everything I had to whatever was put in front of me.

In that sense, the second audition that opened right after the first was—well—cold-blooded.

Is this what they call the way of adults?

The instructions were simple enough, on the surface: go up alone onto a stage so wide it looked almost desolate, show the best performance you could to burn your own name into people in the time given, then come down.

Same as the earlier stages, the time allotted was a little over two minutes. How you filled that stage in that window was entirely up to you.

But there was no rehearsal, and no chance to fix a mistake—only a single take, which would be handed to the judges as video for evaluation. That part was cruel.

They still had another hundred stages to shoot in the remaining time, so I understood they couldn’t wait around—but I couldn’t help thinking they could have built a little more slack into the schedule to begin with.

They’re demanding way too much from kids.

The time given before the second audition started was a mere one hour.

Faces pale from nerves and half-eaten meals filled the room. Being able to eat a lunchbox at all was lucky; contestants assigned earlier slots hadn’t even opened the lids, too busy choosing songs and practicing.

Even those who’d settled on a song were tripping over the two-minute limit—groans rose from every direction.

Who would’ve expected to face both the first and second rounds in a single day?

Hands clamped around phones were visibly shaking. Most of the contestants here were teenage boys, so of course the pressure hit hard.

Plenty of them would be standing on a stage for the first time in their lives—and now they were being told to go out alone, free theme, zero mistakes, and deliver a two-minute performance. Even for a survival audition, it was shameless.

Aren’t they asking for finished products a little too hard?

They’d only released the first-round choreography two weeks ago as it was. Not giving contestants much practice time seemed to be part of the production concept.

I didn’t believe shoving people into unpredictable situations was the only way to see real skill. If anything, someone could mess up and never get to show what they actually had.

The very first person on stage already looked like he’d panicking.

He’d been chosen as one of thirty with pride—but singing and dancing like nothing was wrong, without a proper rehearsal, under the eyes of hundreds of contestants and staff, was never going to be easy.

And the fact that some people still crush it anyway is what really stings.

When they demand absurd results and someone just delivers, any protest you make only highlights that you weren’t good enough.

In that sense, Jae-jin going second feels like production intention mixed in.

They claimed the order for both first and second rounds was random. I didn’t fully buy it.

On stage, Lee Jae-jin looked openly thrilled. I’d only checked his stats before—this was the first time I’d actually seen him dance—and a dance stat of 92 was every bit as impressive as it sounded.

An A0 was already the level of someone who’d debuted and put in years, the kind of skill where building a real career wouldn’t look strange at all.

On top of that, whether the random +3 from the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠trait had landed on vocals or not, his singing was pretty stable too. He kept moving nonstop through an extremely fast beat and still punched the lyrics in clean.

Did his vocal stat go up already?

He was that good. For someone else, that level might be a career high.

Jae-jin’s still a long way from actually hitting his career high, though.

He was already strong, and his ceiling looked endless—every bit the future main dancer. Whether we’d end up in the same group was another question.

Alright. So what do I do?

Whether production had stacked the deck or it was pure coincidence, I was last again for the second audition after the first, which meant I had plenty of time to prepare.

I watched the people ahead of me and sorted my thoughts at an easy pace.

Despite the free theme, the vast majority of contestants chose the official first-round theme song, Sunlight. So far, aside from Jae-jin, you could almost say all of them.

In this situation, a ready-made MR suddenly popping out would actually be weirder.

Jae-jin looked like he had stage experience, so he was the exception—but what about people without stage experience and without a prepared song?

Of course Sunlight poured out all day. It was the track they’d practiced hardest recently.

And with the same two-minute limit as the first round, there was no need to cut the MR either.

The difference was that the first round had judged dance alone to evaluate thirty people at once, while the second put you fully alone—so they looked at dance and vocals together.

Here and there I could hear people who’d drilled choreography to death scrambling to memorize lyrics they hadn’t fully learned yet.

Still—if they were going to ask for Sunlight, they could have just said so. The fact that they bothered to give a free theme means there’s an advantage to picking something else, right?

Then there was no reason to throw that advantage away. As a seventy-five-day idol hopeful, I naturally had songs prepared.

It had been a short stretch, but my stage experience wasn’t small. Two months tempered by busking. The only real question left was which stage to choose if I wanted to leave the strongest impression.