The Fragile Balance
The next day, the five of them gathered early in the practice room, huddled close, and put on Antithese.
Yusu, a five-member girl group, had been famous as a true powerhouse — vocals if it was vocals, dance if it was dance; nothing about them was said to fall short. As the title track of their fourth album, Antithese was a song into which a great deal of care had been poured.
"Wow, it still sounds amazing even now."
Nam Hye-seong, who would have been in kindergarten when the song came out, breathed the words with genuine admiration. Since he'd been the first to recommend it, a proud little glow sat on his face.
"It was a real sensation back then," Lee Jae-jin said, nodding along. He would have been in elementary school, more or less.
Antithese, they said, had hit hard with a moombahton-trap sound that was still fairly unfamiliar at the time. Some even argued that after Antithese, a whole flood of EDM tracks followed — trap beats laid over moombahton rhythms. A song that had led the trend like that was bound to leave a strong impression on a lot of people.
"The original is so good… I hope we don't change it too much," Seo Woo-ri said quietly as he listened, and Woo Cheong-hee nodded in agreement.
He was right. The song was strong enough that there was no need to tear it apart and rebuild from the ground up. Still, men would have to carry a girl group's track — some adjustments were inevitable.
"Should we focus mainly on the lyrics and the choreography?"
The moment the idea of reworking the lyrics and dance came up, Lee Jae-jin took the baton.
"For the dance, I want to push the angles a little harder. It's almost ten years old, so there are parts that don't quite match the current trends. Keep the highlight point choreography, and I think we can change the smaller details. Can I take that part?"
"I'm all for it!" Woo Cheong-hee cheered the second Jae-jin offered to rework the choreography. No one objected. That Jae-jin had come out of a famous dance crew and that he could build choreography well was already common knowledge among the contestants. After the way he'd flown through the first team battle, no one could have missed it.
"Then Jae-jin hyung will handle the choreography. And about the demon concept—"
I laid out, one by one, the things I'd been turning over before sleep the night before. The original was excellent, yes — but simply recreating it as it was would never earn them a strong score. In a test like this, you had to carry the familiar, beautiful parts carefully and still bring something unmistakably new to the table.
"What if we flip the speaker — tell it from the point of view of the man who betrayed the love?"
Lyrics written for a woman betrayed in love. Changing those lyrics felt like the right kind of risk. In the end, they would reshape the structure — lyrics, choreography — just enough, while keeping that particular blend of plaintive and plain, that delicate quality the original carried so well. Two songs, braided into one. Building a new story.
"That's how we become the demons."
The song and the concept had, for all practical purposes, been handed down by the production. So the real key to this team mission was how they would fit that concept into the given track — how they would melt it in until it belonged. Making a new figure, a new song, that stood in perfect opposition to the original speaker — just as the title Antithese suggested — sounded like it could be fun.
"Let's talk it through properly."
The idea must have caught them. Lee Jae-jin and Seo Woo-ri leaned in with serious faces. While I explained what Antithese meant to the two youngest, the five of us put our heads together through the whole morning — how to build the choreography, which moments to make the points.
Once the direction was set, the meeting on how to stage the performance didn't last long. After that, practice flowed as naturally as water.
It looked as if everything were going perfectly. It wasn't. The problem was the number: five.
May 23rd. Mid-evaluation for the second team mission, The Clash of Good and Evil. Standing on the edge of that evaluation, our faces were not especially bright.
And neither were the judges'. Erina, Hui, and Crusoe, appearing for the first time in a while, had not held back their admiration at first — but once the stage was over, their expressions turned troubled.
"This is…"
Crusoe was the first to speak. His mouth moved as if he meant to say something, then stalled. Silence stretched. Hui broke it.
"It's difficult."
A short assessment, but Erina and Crusoe both nodded as if they felt the same.
"I'll start with what deserves praise. You can see how faithful you stayed to the original. You kept the genre and the emotional color, and you made the point choreography land. And yet it still feels new. Like watching a side story."
When Hui finished, Erina picked up the thread.
"Even without being completely new, it feels genuinely fresh. Honestly, I can't find much to fault in the arrangement direction. That alone is worth real praise."
The compliments kept coming, and still neither the people giving them nor the people receiving them looked bright. Everyone knew what would follow. Then Crusoe spoke.
"To be frank, it was an unbalanced stage."
"…"
Nam Hye-seong's head dropped.
"There aren't many of you, so every single movement catches the eye — and the shaky, unfinished parts stand out all the more. One person who wavers draws the whole gaze, and the overall balance collapses with him."
Even Crusoe looked a little pained saying it. The truth was that Nam Hye-seong hadn't performed that badly. By any fair measure, the growth he'd managed in such a short time deserved praise more than scolding.
The judges who had evaluated him in the first round knew perfectly well how much he had grown. And still, they called the balance broken.
"It falls apart even more toward the second half. It looks like you'll need to adjust the volume of his parts."
From ten members down to five. Every part had swollen; the amount each person had to carry had ballooned. Things that had been buried when the group was large were suddenly impossible to hide.
After Erina's final note — rework the part distribution — we returned to the practice room and took a short rest. Silence sat heavy; no one could easily open their mouth. I checked Nam Hye-seong's stats.
Compared to a week ago — 78, 80, 76 — he had clearly grown in a short span. The problem was the company he was keeping.
The other four all sat at B0 or higher.
Just looking at Woo Cheong-hee…
84, 84, 83. The first time I'd seen him at the audition site, his stats had been 83, 82, 81. They had climbed a great deal since then.
Even a week ago he had still been at 84, 83, 82 — but while practicing Antithese, I'd leaned hard into the Producer trait, and his dance and charm had already pulled further ahead.
And Lee Jae-jin goes without saying.
Jae-jin's singing had climbed again in the meantime. Considering that his singing had been C+ when I first met him, the Greed (R) trait was clearly doing its share of the work.
Either way, that pull turned out to be a success.
The compatibility was so good I couldn't even tell whether the recent rise in his singing came from my Producer trait or from his Greed.
In any case, even Seo Woo-ri — who could be called the lowest among the four excluding Nam Hye-seong — sat at 82, 81, 81. All of them B0 or above.
I'd hoped that by the mid-evaluation he'd push either singing or dance up to B0. Instead, only his charm…
In the end, over the past week Nam Hye-seong's charm had risen by three and his singing by one. Leaving him at 79, 80, 79.
One more point from 80 and dance would be B0 — and watching that stubborn dance stat refuse to move filled me with a tight frustration. At this rate, not using the Producer trait at all would have been better. In the first round, even without it, he had raised his own singing and dance by a fair amount.
I was still turning over what had changed since then when Nam Hye-seong suddenly spoke.
"I'm so pathetic…"
His thin, trembling voice was already thick and wet.
"I keep thinking I should have started preparing to be an idol earlier. I feel so stupid for not beginning sooner…"
Just as he'd said before about starting late, his trainee career wasn't long. The truth was that growing this much in so little time was already remarkable — but he seemed to regret every hour already lost. At only fifteen.
"Everyone else practiced for years, so of course I'm still not enough even if I work hard now. There's no way a little extra effort could catch me up… Why am I crying. I guess I want too much."
Watching the tears fall one by one, I couldn't feel easy. Maybe it was because I hadn't practiced for years either, the way he said — something kept pricking at my chest.
Coming from someone who was himself an error, a walking privilege, sitting still and listening to that made my conscience sting. And still I had nothing to offer him. What more could a man who had faked his way through practice possibly say?
"Time matters, but I think density matters too."
Seo Woo-ri, who had been sitting quietly in the still practice room, blinking, opened his mouth.
"Honestly, I'm not that good myself, so it might sound a little funny coming from me — but this is just what I really think. I feel like I've learned more from being on this show once than from years of company training."
His calm, unhurried words carried comfort in them. There were things you only learned by breaking and colliding head-on.
"Whatever the result of this program ends up being, it'll definitely be a good experience — so I hope you don't take it too hard. You're still young."
"…Yes! Thank you, Woo-ri hyung! Ah — then let's rework the part distribution right now!"
Midway through Seo Woo-ri's comfort, Nam Hye-seong had scrubbed hard at his eyes, forced a smile, and then shot to his feet. And crumpled. Looking carefully at the legs of the boy who had collapsed into a heap, I could see the muscles trembling hard.
"Huh."
His dazed face made it clear he hadn't even realized his own legs were shaking. The moment he went down, Jae-jin and I were already on our feet, our eyes meeting. I had been careless.
Even the ones wearing stamina-boost titles are struggling. There's no way a fifteen-year-old's body could keep up with all of that.
Seo Woo-ri sprawled out the second any break arrived, but Nam Hye-seong never did. I should have recognized earlier that that wasn't a good sign. Driven by the anxiety of starting later and having less practice time than everyone else, he had simply been overdoing it. When I felt his legs and shoulders, they were knotted hard. He was going to need heat packs.
No wonder his dance stat wouldn't climb, practicing like this.
Of course. After a full month of the first training camp, five days off, and then the second camp starting immediately — filming, practice, a packed schedule on top of fatigue that had never fully cleared from the first round. His body had hit its limit.
"We pushed too hard just because the mid-evaluation was right in front of us. The more urgent it is, the more carefully we should have taken the long way around."
Jae-jin's face was dark as he carefully worked the cramping out of Nam Hye-seong's legs. He must have realized it too. For a fifteen-year-old, the schedule had been too much.
The way the boy had grown quieter and quieter over time finally made sense. Everyone was exhausted; he couldn't be the only one complaining, so he had swallowed it alone. No one had said a word.
"Rest in your room for the day."
For now, I switched Nam Hye-seong's title to For Teamwork — a title that increased the rate of stamina recovery.
He was so anxious I'd put on a title that raised his odds of winning the contest…
From now on, it seemed better to lock his title on For Teamwork. Maybe feed him some red ginseng too. It should be fine to give some to the others as well, right?
When he shook his head hard at being told to rest for a day, I smoothed his hair gently. Just as Jae-jin had said — the more urgent it was, the longer road we would take. A short rest.