Chapter 37
Chapter 37
Among the top six, Baek Gyeonwoo was the only one who managed to defend his name tag to the very end.
I had witnessed a few trainees struggling to haul Baek Gyeonwoo up while he lay there like a stone statue, but judging by the result, he was apparently a lot heavier than he looked.
The right to designate was granted in the order the name tags were obtained, and accordingly, the first microphone fell into Baek Gyeonwoo's hands.
Baek Gyeonwoo didn't even pretend to deliberate and spoke decisively.
"I'll designate trainee Han Neuti."
"Huh?"
Han Neuti, who had been gaping dumbly, soon shuffled forward.
"Next, trainee Hwang Jae-hyeon."
Every time a trainee's name left Baek Gyeonwoo's lips, Han Neuti flinched and glanced my way.
It was driving me insane.......
Oblivious to whatever was going on behind him, Baek Gyeonwoo rattled off the remaining team members in an instant and passed the microphone on.
"Then, trainee Lee Jae-young, please designate your team members."
Lee Jae-young, who received the microphone, met my eyes.
And then he grinned.
......No way?
"I'll pick trainee Seo Cha-gyeom."
"Oh, seriously."
The immediate, irritation-laced response came not from me, but from Ahn Jiwon, who was standing next to Lee Jae-young.
Lee Jae-young laughed, ha ha ha. The air, which had nearly turned frigid, was instantly diluted into a playful atmosphere.
"Looks like there were a lot of competitors aiming for trainee Seo Cha-gyeom. But no fighting, everyone!"
While the MC smoothly glossed over the situation.
I swallowed my questions and stepped forward. Even as I gave a slight nod of thanks for being picked, I was thinking.
'Why?'
This competition wasn't a team battle.
The format was to rank within the team, and give a benefit to the seven trainees who placed first in each team.
In other words, the worse your teammates were, the higher your chances of snagging the benefit.
'There's no advantage to picking me.'
In that moment, it hit me.
That Lee Jae-young was one of the strong pre-selected candidates.
If so, then could it be.
'Because he knows I'm not the pre-selected one?'
Honestly, a benefit was ultimately just a one-time thing, so unless you were a trainee in immediate danger of elimination, it was no different from an honorary title.
In the long run, how much and how you appeared on the broadcast was far more important.
But... if there was a trainee who drew viewers' attention while not stealing screen time.
'I'd pick me too.'
The fact that person was me was lamentable, though.
As I stood behind him, Lee Jae-young smiled and held his fist out. I hid my bitter insides and lightly returned his greeting.
Turning around, Lee Jae-young immediately called out the next trainee.
"I'll pick trainee Choi Jun-bin."
.......
"I'll pick trainee Kim Han-ul."
......Huh?
Before I could even register being on the same team as Choi Jun-bin, whom I'd been avoiding from the start, I began to find Lee Jae-young's thought process maddeningly curious.
Lee Jae-young, Choi Jun-bin, Kim Han-ul.
The three I suspected as strong pre-selected candidates. Calling them candidates was putting it nicely; in reality, I was nearly certain.
'But if the pre-selected members are all on the same team, isn't that a loss?'
They'd have to split the lead-level screen time.
At this stage, with the number of trainees halved, viewer attention wouldn't be that scattered, so there was no reason to desire an ace team.
It would actually be more advantageous to get a solo narrative and climb up.
"Wow, looking forward to working with you!"
"There's a lot of people I'm meeting for the first time."
The trainees called out one by one lined up behind Lee Jae-young.
The atmosphere leaned toward the good side. Because this was a near-ace level team where not a single trainee had to worry about survival.
Since I couldn't be the only one failing to match the mood, I appropriately blended in with the reactions of my teammates, who were highly camera-conscious.
And the moment the focus shifted to the next team, I asked.
"What are we going to do?"
"I......."
The first to react was Choi Jun-bin.
"Since there are a lot of people with a rap position here, I'll follow the rappers' opinions."
"Rap....... Really?"
Were there that many rap positions on this team?
When I glanced over, Lee Jae-young pointed to himself in explanation.
"Yeah, I'm rap. Han-ul and Woo-jin hyung too."
"Ah."
"You didn't know?"
"I forgot for a moment."
"Haha, really?"
To be precise, I had indeed forgotten about Lee Jae-young; the other two I had just learned about for the first time.
There was no reason for me to memorize every trainee's information, so there was nothing particularly to feel guilty about. But since I didn't need to openly show that either, I brushed it off vaguely and pretended to fall into thought.
There wasn't really anything to think about.
'If there are three rappers, we'll just have to do hip-hop.'
It was actually a good thing. Hip-hop would undoubtedly be the genre where I could naturally weave in rewritten lyrics.
It was a slight miss that the genre overlapped with <Nice Zombie> from the first round, but that was something we could supplement with arrangement.
"I! I have something in mind."
At that moment, Kim Han-ul interjected.
"Let's go completely intense! I want to do a sexy stage."
'Ah.'
The thought that this wouldn't match well surged up furiously.
I shut my mouth immediately and watched the MC's proceedings.
All seven teams were formed, and finally the time came to decide the song selection.
"Can everyone see the roulette wheel in front of you?"
Of course they could. It had just been placed right before their eyes.
"You can each fill one slot on the roulette wheel with a song you want, one per slot. When the roulette is spun, the direction the arrow points will be your song for this round."
Simply put, if all six team members united and filled every slot with the same song, it was a done deal without further consideration.
But that didn't mean the options were infinite. A moment later, the production team dragged in a panel listing the candidate competition songs.
Songs worth doing... I could see them right away.
"Of course we're going with Strong Boy, right?"
"Then we'll go with Lost and Found, yeah?"
What boy?
"Nah, Lost and Found is, um, we have to go with something intense!"
Kim Han-ul, conscious of the cameras, shouted in an exaggerated fashion.
'......Why's he been chanting about intensity since earlier?'
Did his daily fortune today say the word 'intensely' or something?
I stepped one pace back and studied my teammates' expressions. It was to discern whether they were serious or joking.
Because the remark was that hard to believe.
Among the candidate songs the production team had narrowed down, there were only two hip-hop tracks. , the one Kim Han-ul mentioned, was one of them.
But the reason I had excluded it from consideration was.
"I don't know that song well."
The original artist of was a rapper who was the runner-up on another broadcasting station's hip-hop competition program.
First, I hadn't watched that program.
The field was too different to pique my interest. The consumer base for idols and rappers barely overlapped.
Nevertheless, because the song was such a hit on places like Reels and TikTok, I did at least know the hook.
'I got the power... yes I'm strong.......' I think the lyrics went something like that.
Honestly, even if it were a song I was completely unfamiliar with, it wouldn't matter.
The real problem lay elsewhere.
"And I think it's a song that doesn't suit idols."
This was a song where the image gap between how the general public and heavy community users perceived it was enormous.
Because the original artist's remarks and private life... had frequently caused controversy at a level just short of criminal.
But on the grounds that he wasn't a criminal, and that those controversies were issues the general public was numb to, the song still maintained the honor of ranking high on the annual charts.
The production team here and these teammates apparently fell on the numb side, but the majority of idol fans were in the opposing camp.
To be honest, the very act of deliberately choosing this song was at a level that could fall within the scope of controversy for some people.
"Hmm, then."
Kim Han-ul twitched his eyebrows awkwardly and said.
"Do you have a song you want to do?"
"For me, Lost and Found."
I said that earlier, so why was he pretending not to know?
<Lost and Found> was a song where three major rappers spoke of childhood dreams by likening them to lost items.
In a backdrop of survival towards a dream, I thought it would be the most fitting for a creation mission where we wrote our own stories as trainees.
But was this truly only my own thought?
"I don't know that song well."
"Isn't it too subdued, lacking impact?"
"There's a lot of rap, so we should follow the rappers' opinions......."
"No."
I, who had nearly cut them off in that instant, checked the cameras.
A 5 versus 1 situation. Even if I spoke in a roundabout way here, once the production team's editing was done, I'd just be one villain.
'Does it matter?'
I got devil's edited no matter what I did anyway.
Which meant it didn't matter what I did. Let's go a little harder.
"But."
"We can just each write down the song we want, can't we. Is there a need to fight?"
Lee Jae-young, who suddenly piped up, mediated the situation.
"That's true, but still, let's try persuading a bit."
"Chaegyeom."
Lee Jae-young lowered his voice.
"Han-ul is also thinking about the concept, and seems to have a plan in mind. You have at least that much too, right?"
"Yes, I do."
No, actually, I didn't.
It had barely been a minute since I saw the song list, what the hell!
But if I said I didn't here, my right to speak would definitely be revoked, so let's just blurt out anything I could.
"Since it's a creation mission, if we use the story we truly want to tell as the theme, I think the Kes will feel it with more sincerity. Lost and Found suits that aspect better than Strong Boy, and this doubling part here between the highlight rap and vocals would really come to life well with the current combination. It'll be easy to divide the parts too, and also I've thought about the arrangement......."
"......."
I didn't even know what I was saying myself.
The five pairs of vacant eyes half-listening to my rambling opinion were like a scene out of a horror movie.
When I finished my long, long persuasion, Lee Jae-young smiled and said.
"Chaegyeom's argument sounds plausible too."
With Lee Jae-young's words, the MC announced the end of the meeting. Which meant the time to fill the roulette with songs had arrived.
The result was.......
"Yes, and so, trainee Lee Jae-young's team's competition song has been decided as !"
A 1 in 6 chance was far too weak.
Amidst my cheering teammates, I thought alone.
This competition round, I was really going to have to endure a lot.
* * *
"Let's decide the concept first."
Lee Jae-young, who had naturally seized the initiative among the teammates sitting gathered in a circle, spoke.
"I think─."
"Me!"
When I opened my mouth, Kim Han-ul intercepted my right to speak.
'He's going to say let's go intense again.'
Just because the song selection was a mess didn't mean the stage had to be too, so I had already prepared a countermeasure for Kim Han-ul's intensity chant in advance.
In a vocal stage, 'intense' naturally meant.
"How about going sexy? Keeping the feel of the original version."
"......The original version?"
Once again, five pairs of eyes turned to me at once.
"You don't know the original version?"
"How old is Chaegyeom?"
Why were they suddenly asking my age?
I bit my lip at the wave of ominousness washing over me, but Choi Jun-bin, sitting to my right, answered for me.
"I saw that Chaegyeom-nim is twenty this year...."
"Then it makes sense he wouldn't know."
"Ah, he was a baby. A baby!"
"......A baby?"
I covered my ears without thinking.
Perhaps seeing it as embarrassment, the trainee sitting next to me said I was cute and pinched my cheek as if tearing it off.
There wasn't even a moment to feel offended. I was appalled.
'I'm a baby.......'
The last time I was treated like a child was years ago. At Mary, titles were determined by years of experience.
In this industry, wasn't twenty roughly the age where you were 'an adult who knows everything worth knowing'? The age where you couldn't even use youth as an excuse for mistakes.
More than that, wait.
'Then am I the youngest here?'
I immediately poked the thigh of Choi Jun-bin, who was sitting beside me.
"Uh, what's your age, by any chance......?"
"Huh? Ah, I'm... twenty-one."
No way.
'I naturally assumed he was a minor.'
Not just his face, but everything he showed on the broadcast was... not befitting of someone older than me. No. Let's refrain from harsh words.
Having barely suppressed my astonishment, I steered the main point, which had flown off to the mountains, back on course.
"So, um, so what's the original version you're talking about?"
At my question, the three aside from Choi Jun-bin and Lee Jae-young faced each other and giggled.
Then, murmuring, they searched for something on a tablet.
"Do we need adult verification? Oh, no. It shows up."
Soon, the tablet with the song's lyrics pulled up was thrust in front of me.
I read the lyrics with both eyes, line by line.
And then I said.
"What are you doing?"
"Huh?"
"You said let's have a meeting."
The original version they spoke of meant the sample demo the original artist had pre-released on a free music site before the official release.
The demo version of , which ordinary people would hardly know, had lyrics filled to the brim with the cringeworthy elements of hip-hop: sexual metaphors, profanity, and self-praise.
A level that could never even be mentioned on a program like this.
So this was just.
"Ah, our idol-nim was shocked."
"It's a joke. A joke. You're getting way too serious."
Their goal was probably to get on my nerves.
'Why are they acting like that?'
My mouth fell open in disbelief. I manually shut it with my hand, then immediately turned off the tablet's screen.
It was clear this wouldn't air anyway, so I intended to move on as if nothing had happened.
But there was someone who intervened.
"Guys, that's enough. Let's focus."
It was Lee Jae-young.
"Anyway... I'll jot down 'sexy' for the concept then."
"What?"
"Okay!"
"Let's call it here for today and rest."
And then we were disbanded before I even had a chance to grab them by the hems of their pants and cling on.
Left alone with the tablet in the suddenly empty space, I held my forehead blankly. In case I was developing a fever.
Fortunately, it wasn't hot. Rather, it was cold.
'These guys, right now.......'
The suspicion that had been budding since earlier finally formed a clear sentence.
Anyone would think this, looking at that state of them working hand-in-glove.
'They came here with their stories aligned in advance.'