Purple Team, First Place
I'd spent the weekend finally making the hospital visits I'd been putting off, then filled the rest of the time cycling through idol choreography videos and fancams, memorizing songs as I went. Before I knew it, Monday had arrived.
Vacation's over, huh.
Five days had vanished so fast it was almost shocking. After a quick sweep of the house — nothing really needed touching — I grabbed my suitcase and headed out. Another new beginning.
"Hyung! How have you been?"
The moment I stepped off the intercity bus and into the lodging, Woo Cheong-hee's bright greeting hit me. I returned the hello as I pulled up his status window.
"Me? I've been fine."
His stats had risen evenly across the board — so he really had been working hard. Good kid.
"I watched your stage. You danced well."
"Ah, I was just in unusually good condition that day. Even I was surprised when I saw the footage!"
He laughed, bright and pure, saying he hadn't realized he was the type who thrived on stage. I had a pretty good idea why.
Lee Jae-jin's trait must have landed on him.
We Shine Together (S) — that broken skill that gave a random teammate a random +3 to a stat. Cheong-hee's dancing had stood out so much when they shared a stage that I'd already suspected it. Jae-jin's trait must have hit him, temporarily bumping his dance up into B+ range.
Which means Jae-jin's dance was at 95. No wonder.
No wonder he'd opened the show and set the entire venue on fire. Given the energy in the room that day, Green Team had been a real contender for first out of the ten. A bright, fun song really was the optimal choice if you could pull it off — that melody still stuck with me.
And looking back, their team balance had been solid too. The people he'd picked had all been pretty decent, as far as I remembered.
"Hyung, we're rooming together this time, right? Right?"
"Yeah, let's do that."
I had no idea how the production staff would assign roommates this round, but if I had any say in it, I didn't mind sharing. Come to think of it, Kwon Do-ha had told me to stick with Jae-jin today — had that been about rooming together?
"Where's Jae-jin hyung?"
"Right here."
A sudden weight dropped onto my shoulder as Lee Jae-jin appeared. He really did love a good arm-around-the-shoulder. Somehow he'd already slipped between me and Cheong-hee, draping an arm over each of us, and Cheong-hee yelped.
"Ah, hyung! You're heavy!"
"I'm heavy to you?"
Jae-jin scrubbed roughly at Cheong-hee's hair over the complaining, then finally let go.
"Hyung, hello."
"Hey. I saw your stage. You did well."
"Thank you…"
We exchanged a brief greeting while I checked Jae-jin's status window.
His vocal had gone up by two, and his charm by one.
Still a broken character.
Raising a vocal stat by two was already impressive, but the fact that a charm stat already sitting in the high eighties had climbed again in such a short time was even more startling. He was still growing.
"So, think we'll get to room together this time?"
"Probably, right?"
We traded small talk while changing clothes and fixing our hair, and before long it was time to shoot. Contestants were assigned to waiting rooms in groups of twenty or thirty by order of arrival, so once makeup was done we moved all together. The location was a familiar one — the internal set of the training lodging where the grade announcements and team selections had been held.
I settled into a seat on the right side out of habit, and MC Cheon Tae-rim appeared at center stage. The bustle of crew voices checking the set gradually died down, and filming began.
"All right — the first team mission of the idol survival has ended, and the viewer votes have been tallied. You'll be able to see the results of this vote on the screen, but first!"
Stepping away from the screen setup to one side, Cheon Tae-rim held up a gold envelope in his hand.
"We're going to rank the first team mission — the Rival Match — right now."
Win or loss had already been decided by the studio audience vote and the judges' scores, but the overall ranking, he explained, broke down as audience vote thirty percent, judges' scores twenty percent, and viewer vote fifty percent — half the weight resting on the viewers alone.
"First, fifth place! Ah, what a heartwarming stage that was. Blue Team, Because You're Here!"
Just like during the reaction filming, Han Sang-jin's face filled the monitor. He bowed his head, and applause followed.
"And fourth place — yes! A stage full of fresh, youthful energy. Red Team, Dreaming!"
Song A-seong's face appeared on screen; he smiled prettily and bowed. No matter how many times I saw it, he knew how to use that face.
"Third place, You're My Everything — Indigo Team!"
Kwon Do-ha's team had taken third. Honestly, Indigo Team's stage had been little more than a Kwon Do-ha one-man show, so this result was almost entirely his.
Given who they were up against — and that he chose a style that buried even his own teammates — pulling third is impressive enough.
The team's skill levels had been so uneven it was visible to the naked eye; purely on polish, fourth or fifth might have been more realistic.
"Next up is first place!"
Green Team, with Jae-jin as leader, and Purple Team, with me as leader. One of us was going to take it. They'd said first place would get a benefit, but I wasn't particularly excited about whatever it might be, so I didn't feel much either way. Still, the cameras were on us, so I arranged my expression as carefully as I could. Coincidentally, Jae-jin was sitting right beside me, so both our faces were already framed together on screen.
"The long-awaited first-place team, taking home the benefit, is—!"
The drawn-out pause nearly pulled a yawn out of me; I crushed it down hard.
Why does a yawn have to hit right now…!
Yawning on camera would be a disaster. I drew a quiet breath and forced it down just as the result landed.
"Yes! The stage that felt like a single letter — Purple Team's To Myself! Congratulations!"
Along with the MC's congratulations, Jae-jin and Cheong-hee both stuck out their hands from either side; I high-fived them both at once and bowed. Fighting the yawn so hard had left my eyes a little glassy — a free bonus of unshed tears.
"All right, shall we reveal the rest of the scores?"
While I prayed for my face to leave the screen as soon as possible, the team scores from first through tenth went up. Ours sat at roughly three hundred thousand points; tenth place hadn't even cracked thirty thousand, so the gap was substantial. The difference with second was only about twenty thousand, though.
"Teams that won their match in the first stage will have these team scores reflected in their individual scores!"
Team score added to personal score. That meant the cascade of points from three hundred thousand down to a hundred eighty thousand — first through fifth — would be tacked onto every member of those teams.
As long as nothing weird happens, the five winning teams probably won't see any eliminations.
I didn't know how the personal vote tallies would break down, but the team scores were clearly too big to ignore.
"We'll come back to the first-place team's benefit in a moment. Now for the individual scores. From first to seventieth place in this vote — anyone who falls outside that range will no longer appear on the idol survival."
As the ranking announcement rolled straight into that, contestants' faces grew complicated. Twenty-eight of us were going home.
"Individual scores are the sum of every vote received across the seventeen-day voting period from April twenty-ninth to May fifteenth."
On the website, each person could vote for five contestants a day. You had to pick exactly five, with no duplicates allowed, so once people locked in their favorites, the leftover slots turned into open season — any post asking who to fill the remaining votes with would draw every kind of campaigning imaginable.
"All right, we'll start from fiftieth place!"
Cutting the list cleanly in half again produced a chorus of hard swallows around the room. I was listening just as carefully as anyone else. Unlike the first grade announcement, which had been based on internal evaluation alone, viewer votes were in play now — which meant the results were genuinely unpredictable.
"Yes, fiftieth place — congratulations. Contestant Go Ju-ha!"
"…! Thank you!"
The moment his name was called, Go Ju-ha started to bolt forward, then spun and ran straight toward me instead. He threw his hand out wide, and I met it on instinct. I was used to this by now.
He beamed his way down, bowed, and moved over to the seats on the left, drawing a few envious murmurs from the people around him.
"Wasn't he originally around seventieth or eightieth?"
"He got a solid buff and climbed a bunch of ranks. Lucky."
The voices were quiet, but close enough that I heard them clearly. I ignored the talk behind me and watched the names being called. Every former teammate who got announced made a beeline for me with a hand out, and I spent the stretch busy meeting each one.
Every Purple Team member called so far had risen from their previous rank, so the faces settling on the other side were bright.
"All right — twelfth place is Contestant Woo Cheong-hee!"
We'd already reached the top ten range when Cheong-hee's name came up. He'd been seventeenth last time; that was a five-place jump. He greeted Jae-jin and me with a shining face, headed down first, and then eleventh was called.
"Eleventh place is Contestant Lee Won-yeong!"
He'd climbed five places too. I'd half expected Won-yeong not to come over even if his rank improved, but that wasn't the case. He trudged over and held out his palm, so I smacked it with a solid clap.
"Thanks."
With that clear, earnest greeting from Won-yeong, Purple Team's standings looked roughly like this: eleventh Lee Won-yeong, twenty-third Yu Sang-hyeon, twenty-eighth Choi An-seong, thirty-fifth Lee Tae-su, thirty-eighth Jeong Han-seo, fiftieth Go Ju-ha.
Bronze-grade Kim Jin-su and Iron-grade Nam Hye-seong still haven't been called, so they're below this…
Even so, this counted as a successful group project. I was smiling with quiet pride as I listened to the rest of the announcements when a stir ran through the room.
"Ah, ninth place is… Contestant An Do-hyeon!"
The first former Platinum-grade name of the day. He'd dropped three places from his original sixth, so after promising to work even harder, An Do-hyeon moved over looking a little subdued.
"Next, eighth place… Contestant Cha Ji-heon!"
"I'll show you an even harder-working side of myself. Thank you so much to everyone who supported me."
Right after him came Cha Ji-heon. He'd been fifth; now he was eighth. My eyes met Kim Yo-han's — he still hadn't been called. He clearly hadn't expected to climb this high; his eyes were already huge.
"Seventh place, Contestant Kim Yo-han! Congratulations!"
"Han-hee!"
From eleventh to seventh. The surprise at the jump barely had time to register before Yo-han came barreling through the half-empty seats and threw his arms around me.
He's really that happy, huh.
I patted his back a reasonable amount. I was glad for him, but did it have to be a full hug?
"Thank you."
I was still trailing that slightly dry thought when I heard a voice gone thick with tears. Was he actually crying? With a personality that sunny, I never would have expected to see him cry — a surprising side of him.
Once Yo-han finished his thank-yous with reddened eyes and headed down, roughly half the seats had shifted to the left. Setting aside the lower half, the people still remaining were basically me, Lee Jae-jin, Kwon Do-ha, Song A-seong, Han Sang-jin, and Han Min-hyeok.
"Yes, sixth place is Contestant Han Min-hyeok! Congratulations!"
Min-hyeok had climbed quite a bit this round too. The effect of Love the Camera! (S) was hard to ignore.
Looking at it this far, team scores were clearly landing with real weight even in the upper ranks. Cha Ji-heon and An Do-hyeon, both from losing teams, had dropped, while Min-hyeok and Yo-han had climbed hard.
Come to think of it, sixth and seventh are both twenty-four — same age.
Twenty-four. A number that felt oddly familiar. I'd originally been twenty-four myself.
"All right — here, we'll announce third place first!"
Skipping over fourth and fifth to call third, an unexpected name came out.
"Third place is Contestant Kwon Do-ha!"
Do-ha was already out?