The Dancer

By the standards of the previous series, this was a dance-specialized UR who'd blow past the debut cutoff on the spot….

At twenty-one, he wasn't exactly young for an idol, but he was already so close to complete that fretting over age felt pointless.

And this trait….

It was a random stat, sure—but a buff that hit not only himself but his teammates? At a glance, that was an absurdly broken trait. Not a random increase either: a fixed +3. Satisfy the on-stage condition and it raised stats completely independent of any hard caps—a top-tier trait if there ever was one.

Did traits like this even exist? Isn't this past OP and into ridiculous?

Apparently Step Up had mixed in more than a few ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠traits I'd never seen before. Still—boosting his teammates' stats along with his own? That felt like overkill. On top of everything, his total was already 259, which put a second trait draw right around the corner. At this point it was almost frightening. With even a decent second trait, he had the potential to become the ace of nearly any party.

Main vocal and main dancer slots were limited, but at this level he was more than enough as a party's main dancer. Factoring in his trait and his caps, there was every reason to keep investing in dance.

It would take an absurd amount of grinding, but he'd still have it better than most.

In his case, the singing cap sat at a modest 89—which, put another way, meant dance received preferential weighting. He'd hit his singing ceiling quickly, and every scrap of experience that might have bled into singing would funnel straight into dance instead, letting him grow faster than any hybrid.

Of course, that's pure system logic. How it actually plays out in reality is another question.

Bottom line: pour everything into dance, and he had every chance of becoming something extraordinary. And that trait was broken.

He's going to debut.

"Hi. Lee Jae-jin. Twenty-one."

"Lee Han-hee… I'm nineteen, so please, talk however you like."

"Yeah? Then I won't hold back."

I'd offered a little social grace toward a status window that felt like I'd be seeing a lot of it, and Lee Jae-jin dropped the formalities without a second thought, planting himself in the seat beside me—Cheong-hee's old spot. Passing the baton, I supposed.

"You talk easy too. Call me hyung if you want."

"…Yes, hyung. I'll ease into the informal speech."

Maybe it was all those part-time jobs, but polite speech still felt more comfortable with strangers. It cut down on slip-ups, too. Calling a twenty-one-year-old "hyung" sat a little oddly against my twenty-four-year-old sense of self, but refusing felt stranger still. Outwardly I was clearly the younger one. I needed to start getting used to being nineteen.

Whether I looked awkward or not, Jae-jin launched in as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"We're competitors, so I figured you were being pretty nice."

"It wasn't anything that impressive."

Honestly, thanks to Woo Cheong-hee I'd managed to wake up on time—so if anything, I'd received the bigger favor. But that probably wasn't why he'd come over. I glanced up from under my cap, and sure enough, after a few bits of small talk, his real reason surfaced.

"Hmm. Anyway, I wanted to ask—did you used to do street performances around XX University?"

"Ah, yes. That's right."

So he'd seen me busking near campus. There had been a lot of people then, true enough.

University street performances had been a necessity—hospital gigs alone weren't going to fill a hundred hours of performance time in twenty days. Still, thanks to the hospital volunteering I'd started at B0, so the quality had been decent enough to listen to.

"Recognized you from that white long padding. Though tomorrow's already April and you're still in a puffer—you really hate the cold, huh?"

"A little. I just don't like being cold."

The padding was a preference. Yes, I ran cold, but it was also useful for covering my body in more ways than one. Worked as a sleeping bag, too.

This year the abnormal weather had stretched winter out longer than usual, so I probably wasn't the only one still wearing a puffer. At least what I had on underneath was light.

"Yeah. Kind of like a penguin."

"…."

It didn't sound like he was picking a fight—just oddly familiar. We'd never met, so why did the face looking back at me radiate such easy intimacy?

Suddenly I remembered my first year of university. People kept talking about MBTI, so out of curiosity I'd taken the test. The results shifted a little depending on the day, but one thing never changed no matter how many times I tried.

"Seeing you up close for the first time—the vibe's better than I expected. Looking forward to this."

"Uh, thank you…?"

Personality tests always labeled me an introvert. Translation: situations like this drained me dry. Facing his faintly excited expression, I managed an awkward smile. So why was he so happy about this, exactly?

"You came out almost every day for about a month. People around me wouldn't shut up about it, so I went to watch too. And every single time, your skill jumped. Like a bean sprout shooting up."

He must have noticed my discomfort, because Jae-jin eased back a step and gave me space. Sharp guy.

I was piecing it together on my own. So he'd been one of the regulars who kept coming to watch. That was how the one-sided familiarity had built up? The cap had narrowed my field of vision to the people right in front of me, so his face hadn't stuck—but I was grateful all the same.

Crowds meant the stat gains from campus busking had been something else. This was someone who'd helped push my numbers up.

The stats climbed faster than I expected.

I'd been so fired up that, at the peak of my second Guide mission, I'd split my days between pediatric ward music volunteering at lunch and campus busking in the afternoon, packing every waking hour. On heavy busking days I ran three sets and logged as many as seven hours.

After trying it once, though, I locked it at around five.

One day of that and I realized it ended far too late. By the time I got home, the sky was pitch black.

"Later on you started showing up less. That was for the audition prep, huh?"

"Yes. My dancing still had a long way to go…."

After finishing the second Guide mission with those steady five-hour sets, I couldn't keep pouring time into busking the same way. Two hours a day at most.

"With all the practicing, I just didn't have the time I used to."

Lessons in the morning, the hospital at lunch, busking in the afternoon, then more lessons and practice from evening straight through to dawn.

Closing the gap between stats and real skill inside a time limit, while still climbing those numbers against a debut cutoff that might already be rising—I couldn't drop either one. My days spun by in a blur.

I all but lived sealed inside the practice room from sunset to sunrise. Once the sun went down, burying myself indoors had become so automatic that going home felt awkward, so my routine became snatching a nap in the practice room and diving straight back in.

It was a hell made possible only because CEO Heo Jeong-in had helped me rent a private practice space. A hell I was grateful for, if that made any sense.

When you're blessed with an environment where hard work actually produces results, slacking off isn't really an option.

That was the System's doing. Being blackmailed with my own life made it hard to feel pure gratitude.

"And disappearing after the first theme song choreography drop—that was practice too?"

"Yes. The choreography was pretty tough for me."

Truthfully, by mid-March my dance stat had crossed into B0 territory earlier than expected. The choreography was hard, but with stat correction and a little sleight of hand I could have put on a fairly convincing showing without practicing myself half to death. For the sections that felt impossible, I could blur them into "artistic choices," simplify the moves, and cover the rest with facial expression.

But that kind of thing always showed, eventually, if you kept doing it.

It would have felt like fraud, too.

Between the skill correction from my stats and the charm-stat glitch, I was already sitting on an overwhelmingly advantageous position compared to every other contestant—and none of that was earned. It had simply been handed to me. To everyone else, it would look like talent.

Layering tricks on top of that and painting myself as a lazy genius who didn't need to try felt like a terrible choice.

Take the easy road and you collapse.

People who delivered results without visible effort inspired envy more than affection. They bred misunderstanding instead of understanding—sometimes deprivation, even resentment.

I thought back to the scene I'd walked into at the audition hall. Contestant 2157's face, leaving the heated debate among the other participants with all the fight gone out of him, was still vivid.

The expression people wear when effort betrays them.

He'd been crushing his ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠feelings down hard, and still couldn't hide the red in his eyes. That said everything.

One way or another, I had to debut through this program—and that meant I would inevitably knock someone else out. At the very least, I wanted the people who fell because of me to be able to accept it. I couldn't coast on a face and a set of stats and paper over the rest with shortcuts.

I didn't want anyone to feel betrayed by their own hard work. That particular kind of deprivation hollows a person out.

If I'm going to win, I do it with everything I have—with skill no one can argue with.

If I had to take someone else's hard-won opportunity without that, then even if I couldn't pour in the exact same hours, the least I owed was to give every last bit of what I could. It was almost a compulsion. Being given so much meant I couldn't afford to look insufficient.

"By the way—you look thinner than when I saw you in February. Or is that just because I'm this close?"

Following his gaze, I glanced down. Sitting like this had hiked my pant legs, and even I had to admit my ankles looked skinny.

"Mm. The schedule's been rough, so I've lost some weight. I'm trying to put it back on."

Forty-four days. A short stretch, but I'd wrung every drop out of this body—and the nonexistent fat I'd had to begin with had melted right off along with my stamina. I'd probably dropped nearly four kilograms. I'd already weighed less than I had at twenty-four; now there was barely any flesh left on me at all.

"Now that I'm close, the pain-patch smell is intense too. Aren't you overdoing practice? You'll wreck your muscles."

"I'm being careful in my own way…."

I answered sheepishly. Once there was no fat left to lose, the muscle started going with it. To hold on to what was leaving, I'd piled on a careful diet plus every supplement I could get my hands on. Without that, my body simply wouldn't have held.

Still, it had kept up better than expected. Even when exhaustion from my pitiful stamina made my body try to heave, I forced the protein down and endured. I'd learned a bit about training before I died, so I had the tricks for situations like this—it was almost bearable. Moments like these made me think that everything, in the end, was experience.

"I kept thinking your skill was jumping day by day. You really put the work in."

Jae-jin said it with a crooked grin, but my feelings were more complicated. Regardless of my mindset or the process I'd gone through, what other people saw was growth that might as well have been a cheat. Even I thought it looked like a cheat.

Thanks to the trait, in the roughly fifty days since I'd started busking in earnest, singing had gone up by three and dance by five. Calling that anything but a cheat would have been a stretch.

Especially dragging dance from C0 all the way to B0 in that short a span was almost absurd. Look at it carefully and it was practically creation from nothing.

Drilling fundamentals, learning two cover dances a day while prepping for busking at the same time—I'd felt that grinding-my-lifespan-to-dust sensation again, right up against death's door.

But the fact remained: I'd reaped more than the effort alone should have produced. Without I Grow by Eating Love (R), it would have been impossible.

In the end, every scrap of that effort and growth had only been possible because the stats were there to back it up. Without the dance stat the trait and the System had stacked for me, no amount of grinding would have meant a thing.

In-game, meeting that condition had always been awkward. In reality, it was more intuitive.

I'd never loved anyone in my previous life, and never been loved either, so the word itself had always left me skeptical. But as my stats climbed through this trait, that skepticism slowly loosened its grip.

When people look at you with eyes that bright, it's hard not to feel the affection.

I thought of the gazes that had clung to every movement during those street performances.

Performing in the same place at the same times, I'd started recognizing regulars—and whenever our eyes met under the brim of my cap, the way they looked at me was so full of fondness it left me completely flustered. Facing people who poured out that much affection made me grateful for their passion and effort, and a little awed, too.

It looked almost magnificent… and when someone loves you like that, you start wanting to give something back.

Jae-jin kept going on about his impressions of the busking, and as we traded replies, a familiar topic surfaced.

"By the way—back then and now, you're still covering your face. Ah, if it's something hard to talk about, I wasn't trying to dig."

He added, seriously, that if it was something like a scar, he was sorry for asking.

"No, it's nothing like that."

I was always proactive about using a cap or a mask, so curiosity was fair enough. I'd heard the same question constantly while busking near campus—practically once after every song, then again after the next.

But from my side, covering my face wasn't optional. I was well aware that my looks drew attention.

I still didn't fully understand the mechanism behind how the charm stat worked, but one thing was obvious: as a civilian, it was excessive.

In early February, finishing a busking set often meant detouring all the way home just to shake people following me—and that had been the mild version. Later, when I headed for the practice room near campus, there were people waiting nearby even after the morning sun was up.

That happened even with my face covered, so I'd grown more careful. I also had no idea how I'd handle things if a real problem ever came up.

There are good people in the world, sure—but that doesn't mean there are no bad ones.

For now, preventing anything that might go wrong was the best option.

I could invent any number of other reasons for walking around with my face hidden, but the most fundamental problem was family. If I went around showing my face and my family—especially my father—found out I was clawing my way toward becoming an idol, there was a real chance I'd get dragged home.

I still don't know the details of this world's family situation, but either way, I'm a minor right now.

Pulling a resident registration or family-relation certificate had confirmed they were at least alive. Three months of radio silence since I'd gone ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠independent told me most of what I needed to know—but you never really knew. Family topics always snagged at my ankles.

"There are… various reasons."

In the end, I'd covered up because I was afraid of ending up in a situation I couldn't handle. Safety. Family.

"I had reasons to hide my face."

Once this program aired on TV, they'd find out then.

I'd always wondered, honestly—when someone with a face that looked like Mother's became famous, how would Father react?

"But it's fine now. I've come this far; I'm not planning to hide anymore."

"Yeah. That's good to hear."

Depending on the subject, Jae-jin's tone went light, then heavy, then light again. He was remarkably good at reading a room—steering me toward only what I wanted to say, measuring the line with precision. Not many people his age managed that. For twenty-one, he seemed to have a lot of real-world experience.

"More importantly—you're already group ninety. Not much time left. You sure you don't need to practice?"

"What about you, hyung? There might be a second audition. Shouldn't you be preparing?"

"Eh, I've built up what I've built up. If I have to, I will."

I envied that ease. I had to thrash through practice just to barely hit the standards I set for myself.

But the difference was natural, in a way.

A dance stat of 92 built with no one's help but his own—versus a seventy-five-day idol hopeful still grinding his way up on the game system's crutches.

If I was a game character whose skill had been inflated by traits and stats, he would have real know-how, earned through long practice and experience. The status window simply didn't display those hours of effort.

Our mindsets would be different.

"That's impressive."

"Ah—did that come off too cocky?"

I'd meant it as genuine admiration for the composure built through hard work, but Jae-jin added the disclaimer in a hurry, looking faintly uncomfortable.

Did he think I'd write him off as full of himself?

Still, there was no need for him to undercut himself like that.

"If you're actually that good, it's not cockiness—it's just being good, right?"

"Oh…."

The face that grinned full of mischief was handsome. If he debuted, the fans would love him. The world really was full of talented people.

"I should get going first. Time to start preparing."

"Yeah. See you again."

His voice carried none of the caution of someone bracing to fail—easy and unselfconscious. Of course, I didn't think I'd fail here either. Not after all the people who'd cheered me on.

I ignored the Guide window blocking my vision and strode toward the audition hall. Then I took my place in front of the stage.