I'm Your Hero
I’m your hero. The OST from Garden of Memory, the melodrama that had racked up tens of millions of viewers and become a massive hit.
“I’ve seen that movie so many times…”
“I must’ve watched it more than three times myself.”
I’d only ever heard the song, so I didn’t really know what the film was about. But when Jo Min-jun announced he was a fan and had seen it multiple times, Yu Min-seong picked up the thread as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Fair enough—a melodrama that had broken the ten-million mark was bound to be famous.
I just happened not to know it.
Yu Min-seong said he’d enjoyed it too and asked what I thought, but I couldn’t come up with an answer right away. He looked at me, puzzled.
“Han-hee, you haven’t seen it?”
“Yeah. Never have.”
When I answered the pointed question honestly, Yu Min-seong murmured almost to himself.
“Huh? Don’t they show this movie at school all the time?”
“So you don’t know the plot at all, Han-hee hyung?”
“Mm… what’s it about?”
Yu Min-seong tilted his head as if he found it strange that someone could have missed something so well-known. Beside him, Jo Min-jun’s face lit up and he jumped in at once, words tumbling out.
“Okay, so the story goes like this…”
He clearly wanted to explain, so I simply listened.
Piecing together the flood of details he poured out as if he’d been waiting for the chance, it was about an ordinary protagonist who loses his sight after an accident. Before the remaining vision is gone completely, he wanders in search of beautiful things so he can remember more of them.
They gushed that the cinematography and acting still held up even now, that they cried every time they watched it, and they recommended it hard. I nodded along. Listening to the song alone, bright as it was, I never would have guessed the movie was that sad.
“Uh… so about that. Won’t the movie’s image stuck to the song be too strong?”
Because the lyrics were basically the letter the male lead wrote of everything he wanted to say to the heroine, fans treated the OST as inseparable from the film itself. That was Jo Min-jun’s concern. Song A-seong answered him.
“The image is solid, sure—but that also means the impact when we twist it properly will be huge, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think the concept we’ve landed on is anything fans would reject.”
Min Ho-su backed Song A-seong’s point enthusiastically and added that it might even deliver a fresh shock.
I nodded. This time I had no intention of taking the lead; I planned to follow the team’s opinion. Watching everything click into place without me having to push at all, I simply stared off a little blankly.
Truth was, I had no room to spare.
“Hah!”
I opened my eyes again in the dead of night and squinted against the orange flash flooding my vision. My chest hammered uneasily from sitting up too fast. When I got out of bed and checked the time, it was, as always, four in the morning.
And just like always, the moment I was fully awake the frantic heartbeat slowly settled. It wasn’t even an alarm clock. The system only screamed danger at this hour, and the second I got up it acted as if nothing had happened.
Ever heard of the boy who cried wolf?
I left the bed, splashed cold water on my face to wake myself properly, and headed out—straight to the practice room. Once I was up I was going to spend the hours wide-eyed anyway, so I might as well fill them with practice. Midterm evaluation was coming; counting it as an early session wouldn’t hurt.
I stepped into the dark room, flipped on the lights, and started stretching. If I didn’t loosen everything carefully before practice, I’d only invite injury.
“Hoo…”
Working the stiffness out of my shoulders, I thought back over the past week. This was already the fourth time I’d woken at dawn. The pattern of jolting awake at nearly the same hour had felt so wrong that I’d once pulled an all-nighter in the practice room—and that night it had slipped past in ghostly silence.
What the hell is it for?
A warning that only rang when I was asleep kept gnawing at me. Danger signs with no real evidence or context behind them. The more they came, the less I trusted them. Too much information is poison—someone had said that, and it fit perfectly.
I stared hard at the little OFF indicator. Should I just shut the whole thing down?
“Huh? Hyung, you’re already up?”
“…You’re early too, Seong-min.”
I was finishing the stretch while turning over the same old worries when Kim Seong-min appeared in the practice room not long after. He gave a crooked little smile.
Around four-thirty in the morning. Showing up at the practice room this early made him one hell of a hard case himself.
“You feeling okay? It’s awfully early.”
“Mm, coming from the hyung who got here before me, that doesn’t sound very convincing, does it?”
“….”
I had titles and the red-ginseng daily-mission rewards and all the other little system boosts padding my stamina; he didn’t.
I wondered if he was pushing too hard, but I swallowed the words. Come to think of it, my own sleep had been running about three hours lately.
Telling him not to overdo it…
Outwardly it would just look like the pot calling the kettle black. Zero persuasive power.
“I’m sleeping plenty during the hours that help you grow, so I’m fine.”
Kim Seong-min answered casually and started warming up. Sixteen years old, third year of middle school—right in the middle of a growth spurt, so of course he paid attention to height. His stats were almost unbelievable for sixteen, yet there was no sign of him coasting.
The raw practice volume alone is already high.
His standards were so elevated that he tended to dismiss other people easily, but he seemed just as strict with himself. Pride looked high too.
And that pride was backed by real skill. Among the teammates, the consensus was that you could hand Kim Seong-min any part and he wouldn’t look burdened—and that was exactly how it played out.
“Still, take care of your body. You’ve got an important role.”
This selection put heavy weight on vocals. Without Kim Seong-min I would have had to carry a lot more of it alone. There were simply too many sections that needed a solid under-layer of support to keep the pitch steady; one person couldn’t cover them all.
“Must be rough having to carry the people who can’t sing, huh?”
Kim Seong-min whispered it with a little shrug of his shoulders.
Rough, huh…
Jo Min-jun and Yu Min-seong’s stats leaned more toward dance than vocals, so they struggled to fully sell their sung parts. Both of them had enough pitch wobble that giving them solo lines made the audience nervous. For the stage to hold together you needed a vocal foundation anchoring everything underneath—and that was why Seong-min and I had been added in.
So in the end we were doing extra work we wouldn’t have needed to do, and Seong-min’s wording wasn’t entirely wrong. Still, it wasn’t something that needed to be said out loud.
“….”
He didn’t seem to be waiting for a reply, so I said nothing and moved into checking the choreography. For a while the only sound filling the room was the slap of shoe soles against the practice-room floor. The choreography overall felt clean and sharp, but the fine details were dense; I focused on nailing every one of them.
“Hyung, why do you want to be an idol?”
I was going through each section in the mirror when Kim Seong-min suddenly spoke. Why did I want to be an idol.
“…What about you?”
No answer came easily, so I turned the question back on him. His reply flew out without a second’s hesitation.
“Because I like being the center of attention. It feels good watching people get worked up over me.”
Not a shred of falsehood in it. He laid the fact out calmly, then pulled a deliberately cute face.
“I’m going to be a star.”
There was a firmness in the words that didn’t leave room for even a flicker of doubt. Thirst for attention and the spotlight wasn’t something to be tabooed. He was putting in the work to match it, after all.
“Then you’d better practice hard. I’ll be rooting for you.”
I nodded. From everything I’d seen so far, Kim Seong-min’s personality hadn’t exactly struck me as likable, but I had no intention of cursing a kid who was grinding.
Personally I believe personality adapts to environment. Seong-min might be a little short on consideration for others right now, but depending on what he learned as he grew, that could change anytime. Consideration is learned too.
“…Honestly, hyung, I wish you’d stick with better people. Not the low-level ones.”
He blurred the last part, but it was clear enough. Level. I turned the word he’d chosen over in my mind and shook my head. Then I spoke quietly.
“Don’t divide people up like that so much.”
Ranking human beings into tiers was a bad habit. Looking down on anyone you decided was beneath you was, too.
“You might regret it later.”
Once you start looking down on people, no matter how hard you try to hide it, it leaks out. If you want the public’s attention, it’s something to avoid.
“….”
I’d meant the advice sincerely, but Kim Seong-min’s face said he simply couldn’t understand. He looked like someone who’d been told all his life that people came in ranks, the way you talk about meals.
I shook my head. I never expected a single sentence to change anything. This kind of thing only shifts when the person themselves has a realization.
I just hadn’t expected that realization to arrive so soon.
The school-violence issue. A post that had gone up on an anonymous site drew attention so fast it was turned into articles and spread through every community before anyone had time to blink.
Hello, I’m a middle-school student currently attending S Middle School.
The reason I’m writing this is simple: I can’t stand watching Kim XX, the person who ruined my school life, appear on TV and brazenly do well for himself.
Kim XX, who’s been gaining popularity on the idol survival show, spent the entire time he was in middle school subjecting me and my friends to repeated verbal abuse. When a theft happened in our class he framed me as the thief with fake evidence, and he created a bullying atmosphere throughout the class.
During lunch he would trip me in the cafeteria so my tray went flying; in PE class he would hit me in the head with the ball. Because Kim XX led the isolation, I had to endure relentless harassment from the entire class all through second year of middle school. I can still hear the voices laughing at me when I walked back into the classroom soaked after being doused with water in the bathroom.
Every time I see Kim XX smiling on TV, the memories of being bullied come flooding back and it hurts too much. Is this really how it’s supposed to be—the perpetrator smiling while the victim cries?
“Is this real?”
“If it’s a middle-schooler…”
Even though phones were banned, outside issues still found their way among the contestants somehow. Middle-schooler. Surname Kim. With only forty-two contestants left, pinning it down was easy.
I looked at Kim Seong-min, who had gone deathly pale. It hadn’t even been half a day since our conversation.
“…It’s not true. I barely went to school, and I never even ate lunch there to begin with…”
While living as a trainee he’d usually only attended morning classes, so he hadn’t been close enough with his classmates to lead anything, he said. His face still looked uneasy.
“Anyone come to mind who might’ve written it?”
“….”
Putting the circulating details together, certain things kept overlapping. S Middle School. Same class in second year. Bullying. Thief. The keywords were too solid to dismiss as pure invention.
Kim Seong-min couldn’t open his mouth easily. From the look on his face, it didn’t seem he was completely free of something that pricked his conscience either.
“I just need a second…”
Lunchtime. Startled by the sudden explosion of the school-violence controversy, Kim Seong-min couldn’t finish the sentence. He stood up and bolted out of the room, away from everyone’s eyes.
My appetite vanished. I dragged a hand down my face. Whether the story was true or not, if it was handled badly we would end up putting the stage together with six people and no Kim Seong-min.
It’s too late to hand his parts off to someone else—the load’s too heavy.
I pressed my temple hard and stood. Then I headed for the dorm room. I wanted to check the phone I’d powered off and locked in the drawer during work hours.
Halfway there, hurrying along, a loud crash erupted from inside a practice room and I reflexively tracked the sound.
Kwon Do-ha and Lee Jae-jin were glaring at each other like they were one second from throwing down, while the rest of Team Violet hovered beside them in obvious panic.
What a mess.
It was the kind of moment that dragged a hollow laugh right out of you.