Pain Is Temporary
After sending Lee Jae-jin ahead with Nam Hye-seong, whose leg had seized up in a cramp, I stopped by the medical room and loaded myself down with heat packs for compresses.
When I returned to the room with both hands full, Jae-jin was sprawled across the sofa. Seo Woo-ri was there beside him, too.
"You should rest today as well, hyung. Your right shoulder looked like it was bothering you—take one of these."
I handed Jae-jin one of the packs I'd brought and pressed another into Woo-ri's hands.
"Honestly, a half-bath would be better for you, hyung, but hold onto it for now."
The heat packs only needed hot water poured into them, so once you stocked a few, you could pull them out whenever you needed. I made sure each of them had one, then left a few extras in the living room as spares.
While I was at it, I checked Woo-ri's face. There was no spark left in him. Truthfully, he had only made it this far by snatching rest whenever he could; when it came to overdoing it, he was no less guilty than the rest of us. He was staggering around in a state that could only be described as ragged, and at this point a half-bath would serve him better than any compress.
He nodded weakly at the order to wash up and sleep, and I left him behind as I stepped into the double room. Judging by the stiff way he was perched on the bed, Nam Hye-seong looked ready to bolt at any second. It wasn't even practice withdrawal.
"Hyung, I'm really fine…"
"Hye-seong, just go wash up first."
I hauled the restless boy to his feet and steered him into the bathroom. Absolute practice maniacs, the lot of them.
"Don't come straight out after you shower. Fill the tub and soak for at least ten minutes."
What good was a bathtub if they never used it because they thought the time spent sitting in it was a waste? I shook my head. Heat was the right remedy for sore muscles. From now on, I'd have to make them take half-baths on a regular schedule. After chasing Hye-seong into the tub, I approached Woo Cheong-hee, who had been unusually quiet.
"Why so down?"
"Just… I don't know. Just feeling kind of off."
He looked like his mind was crowded with thoughts, and he was keeping his words carefully short. I set a heat pack on his lap. I had no intention of prying it out of him.
"We've finally got time to recharge, so at least let your body rest properly. We have to run hard again starting tomorrow."
Leaving Cheong-hee to fiddle absently with the warm pack, I stepped back out into the living room. Jae-jin was already there—he must have washed up in the meantime—a towel draped around his neck as he rolled his shoulders in slow circles.
"Is our hyung washing up?"
"Yeah. He said he's using the tub."
Only then did I sink onto the sofa. I let myself melt into the backrest and stretched my body out long. The moment I thought of it as free time, the fatigue I'd been burying came rolling in. Still, there was work to do. After only a brief lean, I snapped my heavy eyes open and spoke to Jae-jin beside me.
"Hyung, how should we handle the part distribution?"
Judging by the look on his face, he had been turning over the same problem.
"Hmm…"
We had already done so much thinking and calculating, already locked so many decisions in place, that fresh ideas refused to surface. There was no single main among us; each person had moments where they shone and moments where they supported, and the parts that looked especially difficult had already been claimed by Jae-jin and me.
"Honestly, I'm not sure adjusting the parts even means much. Just because a section isn't yours doesn't mean you get to rest…"
Jae-jin thought it over, then spoke flatly and let out a long sigh.
"Yeah, that's true. Sometimes you're even busier on the sides."
When you stood at the front taking the camera, the focus on facial expression and vocals forced the choreography to simplify. More often than not, it was the people around you who filled in the missing dynamism with something flashy.
"What if we clump Hye-seong's parts toward the front?"
In both verse one and verse two, we had already distributed the parts so that everyone got the spotlight at least once or twice—but for Nam Hye-seong, consolidating them seemed wiser.
"Falling apart in the back half is definitely more of a stamina problem, so that sounds solid. You're relatively less worn out in the first half, too."
If the issue was a trembling voice and collapsing movement as the song wore on, finishing the high-visibility parts while stamina was still intact was a valid approach.
"But I don't know which parts we'd even give up."
Jae-jin's face twisted with the difficulty of it. I felt the same. Changing the distribution would inevitably create confusion.
"My parts or yours…"
"That might be too much…"
I had taken the sections where the singing was hard; Jae-jin had taken the ones where the dancing was hard. Handing either of those off would only pile more pressure onto someone else.
"I think I made the choreography too brutal."
Jae-jin laughed awkwardly. It was true—moving without a single pause until your bones felt ready to snap made for a spectacular show, but for the people actually performing it, the choreography was pure hell. The stamina drain alone was enormous.
"I don't really know where the line is. Maybe my standards are just too high. People used to get on my case about it all the time, and I guess the habit's back. Everyone kept up so well that I got carried away and couldn't rein myself in."
There was a strange shadow in his tone. He had built choreography that artistic, and now he was digging a hole for himself? What was wrong with making something cool? Who was even lecturing him about that? I was a little thrown, but I pressed on with an honest reaction.
"It's hard, sure—but it's that good because it's hard."
How easy was it to craft choreography of this quality? I shook my head as I spoke, and Jae-jin's answering expression was bitter.
"There's some complicated history mixed in, but… anyway. Someone once told me just looking at it kills their motivation. Honestly, there were people who said similar things during the last team battle, too."
His voice sounded as if he were speaking to some faraway place. I didn't fully understand. Difficult, yes—but well-made. And he was the one carrying the hardest sections himself.
"What kind of things?"
"That I turn everyone around me into backup. That I'm just trying to stand out alone. Stuff like that?"
He shrugged playfully, then froze and scrubbed the towel hanging around his neck roughly over his head. The fabric hid his face, but I could imagine the expression underneath.
I had heard, here and there, that there had been some kind of friction in his old crew—I just hadn't known it was for a reason like this. Had he been checked simply for being too good? Famous or not, not everyone in a group was going to be a decent person.
He's clearly been through a lot of inferiority complexes and jealousy…
The look he had given Seo Woo-ri—who collapsed onto the floor every break the moment he said he was tired—had been strange at the time. Thinking about it now, he seemed to carry a kind of trauma around situations where the people beside him couldn't keep up.
Which meant Nam Hye-seong collapsing after working so hard to follow along might have weighed heavily on Jae-jin, too. The face that had lit up like a child's while we talked over stage direction was gone; his shoulders slumped under the towel covering his face.
"Your choreography actually makes me greedier, hyung. Makes me want to do even better."
"…"
I didn't think of Jae-jin as someone with a dictatorial personality. You could tell that just from the name of the trait he carried.
We Shine When We're Together.
Would someone with a broken trait that boosted not only his own stats but his teammates' really push ahead like a lone wolf just to look good by himself?
That wasn't the Jae-jin I knew. He had his own drive to improve, sure—but he was the type who drew passion from other people. If anything, he would have kept encouraging everyone, trying to bring them along with him.
"I like it better when you expect things from me, hyung. It means you believe I can do it."
Jae-jin was someone who never stopped placing expectations on the people around him. The expectation that they could do better. Some people might feel burdened by that—but it made me happy. It meant he believed in my potential. And it had never been at some absurd, impossible level, either.
Holding onto that hunger to improve, without stopping… how hard is that, really?
And the moment Jae-jin opened his mouth to answer, Nam Hye-seong burst out of the bathroom and raised his voice.
"Me too!"
Steam rose warmly from his body as he appeared, both fists clenched tight.
"I like it better when you expect things from me, too. Um—could we just keep going like this? I'll do better. Please believe in me!"
The look on Hye-seong's face as he swore he would work hard was resolute. I sank into thought.
Would it be all right?
I had told Jae-jin that being believed in made me happy—but honestly, I wasn't without concerns about continuing as we were. The feedback to cut Hye-seong's parts hadn't come because he hadn't been working hard enough. As he himself had said, the absolute shortage of time had been the real problem.
You couldn't pressure someone who was already giving everything to simply "try harder."
"I… honestly, I haven't been able to believe in myself."
Seeing Jae-jin and me stay silent even after his plea to be trusted, Hye-seong dropped his head and went on.
"No matter how much I practiced, it always felt like I was falling short. Once I started thinking I was pathetic, that was all I could think about. I should've started earlier. Then I'd be better off than I am now."
We listened quietly as he spoke, his voice trembling, carefully laying out each thought. We let him say everything he needed to say.
"Regretting the time I'd already lost only made me more anxious, and that's how I wrecked the mid-evaluation, but… still!"
His voice had been dwindling, then found its strength again at the end. Hye-seong jerked his head up and continued in a firmer tone.
"I want to try believing in myself one more time. I'll do this properly."
I exchanged a look with Jae-jin. There was no winning against a declaration like that.
"I won't accept any shortcuts just to save stamina for your own parts. Still okay?"
At Jae-jin's insistence that the stage's finished quality could not be compromised, Hye-seong nodded hard.
"Yes! I'll dance until my body falls apart!"
"That would be a problem…"
I reined in the two of them as their passion started to overheat. What mattered was carefully loosening their muscles every day and keeping practice within a line that didn't break them.
"If you grind your body down now, you'll pay for it later."
I shook my head and stuck a piece of red ginseng in Hye-seong's mouth. He was fifteen—what was he doing trying to destroy himself already? Eat something and go to sleep.
After carefully toweling off the last of the water, Hye-seong went into the room first and propped himself against the bed—and must have tipped over almost immediately, because he was already asleep in an awkward position. I refilled a heat pack from the water dispenser, came back in, and clicked my tongue as I straightened out his folded body.
After practicing until dawn for the mid-evaluation, it was only natural he'd doze off the moment he stopped moving. Outside the window the afternoon was still bright, so I drew the curtains. I shut off the lights in the room, leaving only a lamp, and once the space had dimmed, I roughly settled him into a better position and laid the heat pack over the calf that had cramped. That was when Woo Cheong-hee came out.
"Hyung…"
"What is it?"
His lips moved as if he had something to say, then he shook his head. I watched him for a moment, ruffled his hair, and left the room.
When I stepped into the triple room, I found two people sprawled out in a shape that looked oddly familiar. Lee Jae-jin. Seo Woo-ri. They seemed tired enough to have fallen asleep with only their heads propped up—but I didn't have the energy left to look after the adults, too. I grabbed my toiletries and headed for the bathroom. It had been a while; I might as well take a half-bath myself.
After showering, I leaned back in the tub and worked the warm water through every tight place in my body with my hands. When I used the Producer Exclusive Quest, my senses dulled continuously, so even when I applied real pressure, I barely felt any pain.
I rubbed the back of my neck—where the dulled sensation felt especially strange—and finished my calculations.
One week left until the second team mission. Within that week, I intended to do everything in my power to push the stage's completeness as high as it could go.
Wasn't it time to start using the traits I'd been given a little more aggressively?
They were given to me for exactly this, weren't they?
On top of that, I needed to pay more attention to my own stats. They had been climbing steadily without stopping, but the period when I had thrown everything into raising them had mostly been the early days, when I was still below the baseline. After that, most of the gains had come as a side effect of testing traits.
Something about watching Nam Hye-seong must have sparked it—the hunger for a proper spec-up that I'd set aside in a corner of my mind was seeping back out, bit by bit. Before we went up for the second team stage, I was going to pull a new trait.
Pain was only temporary. The stage lived on forever in the footage.
"Let's go."
I wiped away the water streaming down, finished a rough stretch, and quietly slipped out of the room where only soft snores remained, heading for the practice room.
My steps were light as I walked, humming under my breath.