Mellow Music Awards
The fourth floor of Mellow HQ's main building.
A handful of staff from the planning team, swamped with awards-show prep, had clustered outside the break room. Fatigue stacked higher with every hour, yet the conversation was only heating up.
"Did you hear? That track Muse Family put out?"
"A-il? Yeah… that one's a shot across the bow, right?"
"They never even released the audio, though."
In front of the coffee machine, a team leader in her late thirties cradled a paper cup and clicked her tongue.
"Such stick-in-the-muds. Anyone with eyes can see the discrimination. They had it coming."
"It's going to get loud… Senior, you know that track already passed 1.1 million views on YouTube?"
"1.1 million? Holy crap. It's only been a few days. A-il doesn't even have name recognition. People showed up just because Yeong-il wrote it?"
"It's insane. Their influence just keeps growing."
"……"
A brief silence settled over them.
Another female staffer nearby spoke up carefully.
"Honestly, for an artist of this caliber, I don't understand why they're being treated like this."
"Shh. Keep your voice down."
"It's just us talking. I really don't get it. So what if she's a VTuber? There used to be faceless singers everywhere! We all know the records our Nari—ah, I mean Lunari—has set as a rookie are completely absurd!"
"What can you do? We don't have any power."
They had no choice but to do as they were told from above.
"Ugh, so annoying! It's because of that bald guy, right? Critic, my ass. What a fossil."
"That too, but the director for this year's show is also an incredibly conservative type. The executives signed off, so it's done. Upper management hates complications. They're the kind who prefer to stay thin and long in the domestic market, chipping away little by little."
Among the younger staff, not a single person was happy with Mellow's direction this year.
The female employee staring intently at her crumpled paper cup finally spoke.
"Do we… really have to report that we got called out?"
"If it blows back, they'll pin it on us."
She stepped forward with confidence.
"No? Why would they even care? And right now it's still at conspiracy-theory level. You have to dig deep into the communities to find people piecing together that it's a targeted song. We know there's a restriction on Lunari's broadcast appearances, so we can go 'oh, so that's a diss track'—but the public doesn't know that."
"They're still going to take it out on us, though."
"We're not even the department that monitors reactions. There's no real need to pass it up."
The team leader snorted at the bold reply.
"So… is that a no?"
"Hmm. Well? There's no reason we have to."
"Wait—really?"
"Why are you the one who brought it up and now you're shocked. Upper management made this mess. What more are we supposed to do? Let them take the hit for once."
Jung Soo-bin beamed.
She had once gone to an M-Count comeback stage for an idol she supported and ended up becoming a Lunari fan instead. By now she had switched completely—Lunari's streams were all she watched. Having an internet broadcaster as her main bias was easy on the wallet, and more than anything, she liked the air Lunari gave off. In common terms, that cool-girl energy. Lunari had that kind of charm. A feminine voice paired with an unfussy, easygoing manner. Not crude—cultured, even—yet refreshingly direct. The type of girl who sat in every classroom growing up. The kind of woman more popular with other women than with men. Which was why the posts on Lunari's fan cafe so often suggested a high female ratio. Jung Soo-bin was one of them. As a Mellow employee who couldn't do anything to help, she had been seething—until the team leader's support left her feeling like a weight had lifted off her chest.
"Let's just focus on the awards show. Only do what they tell us."
"Yes!!"
Between the footsteps of the staff filing out of the break room, the fuse of an abandoned bomb burned quietly on.
The underground studio.
I had Lunari × Yui × Iris collab stream up small in one corner of the monitor while working on the Blackcat and Eumnya arrangements. There were points that needed fixing for the MAMA stage, so I had come back to the company studio. The absolute best time to visit was when everyone else was over at the mocap studio.
My mind is at ease. Nothing to get worked up about.
Lunari's demo track spun through my headset, while the stream playing in the side window leaked out at low volume. Today's stream was a three-way collab between Lunari, Kurogami Yui, and the Japanese VTuber Iris. Lunari was suffering through the language barrier, and Yui was stuck doing translation duty. Keeping the sound on made it hard to focus on work, but I wanted to see the three of them together, so I left it on—even if just a little. The work slowed down, sure. But I was a viewer too. I was curious.
"Nari! Iris-nim wants to know the origin story of the song? She already knows you keep working with Yeong-il-nim! Work process? Can you tell her that kind of thing?"
Yui's awkward Korean came through the speakers.
"Ah… ahem. Origin story, umm… I just, you know, received the track. I don't know. If she gets the chance later, maybe she should ask Yeong-il-nim herself… I think."
The moment Lunari finished, Yui turned toward Iris and launched into fluent Japanese.
"(Heeh~ I've known Nari a long time, but it feels like she's hiding something. Look at that! She's dodging with her eyes!)"
"(Hmm—now I'm even more curious.)"
The two Japanese women whispered and teased Lunari playfully. Watching Yui be the one on the attack was a fresh enough picture to be entertaining.
Entertaining, but……
"……That voice."
The volume was low, yet that tone drove itself clearly into my ear. When Yui spoke Korean I hadn't noticed, but the instant she switched to Japanese, my eyes snapped wide open.
Déjà vu. Not for the first time—that same sense of familiarity I'd felt before swept through my head. A familiar tone, and Japanese I'd heard somewhere before.
"(Nari bullies me every day! Help me, Iris!!)"
My fingers fidgeted anxiously along the armrest; my eyes trembled in tiny shivers.
Here, in this underground studio. The little girl who had held out a sandwich bag. That student who had spoken to me in Japanese—I'd been wondering where I'd heard that voice.
"It was Yui?"
That would explain why she had been at our company back then. It also matched the description of Yui that Yu Nari had given me before. Small, and so young-looking it was startling. No—I hadn't expected it to be this extreme. You could believe she was a middle schooler.
Circumstantially, there was no room for doubt. That little kid had been Yui.
Only one thing snagged.
"But why did she speak Japanese to me?"
I clearly knew she was good at Korean, so what was the reason? I kept turning my phone screen on and off for no good reason. Had she been trying to mess with me? If it was an act, it was polished enough to put a veteran actress to shame. If I'd met her on the street, I would have believed she was a foreigner on a family trip who'd gotten separated from her group. So it probably hadn't been meant as a prank. Maybe Yui simply hadn't recognized me either.
I barely said anything myself.
I'd stammered and mixed in broken foreign words that didn't work, so we hardly exchanged a few lines. It would have been more surprising if she'd figured out I was Yeong-il. And did she use Japanese outside, too? Why? To hide her identity?
I turned Yui over carefully in my mind—and belatedly, a chill ran down my spine. I'd let my guard down because of that young-looking face, but Yui was twenty-four. A full-grown adult. Something in a corner of my heart felt strange.
Is appearance really that important?
If an adult woman had just walked up to me out of nowhere, I would have fainted on the spot. Because she looked young, I had barely trembled in front of Yui at all. Was this the skeleton-genre effect? If I could equip this mindset properly, maybe I could stay normal in front of other people too. Just think of everyone I meet from now on as a little kid.
"Oh. This might actually work."
I sent a silent word of thanks to Yui for the excellent idea. Not that I could say it out loud.
Still, this is a problem.
A line Yu Nari had tossed out once, laughing her head off, floated back up.
—Unnie Yui hates being treated like a kid. She gets so mad.
And I had treated her like a complete child…… Kindly pressing candy into her hand, enunciating every foreign word I barely knew one by one, keeping my tone as bright as possible—exactly the way you talk to little kids. Maybe the reason Yui had stuttered was anger. She'd been swallowing it down.
How do I even apologize.
If I dredged up something that had already passed, she might hate it even more. Yui still didn't seem to know my identity—maybe it was better to just pretend nothing happened and move on.
"Uuugh."
This was hard. Hard. I was actually worrying about interpersonal relationships. Look how absurdly I'd grown. I couldn't land on a sharp answer, so I decided to let it go for now. Who even knew when we'd meet again. We might never see each other for the rest of our lives. If we did, I'd figure it out then.
I adjusted my headset and tried to sink back into the arrangement—but my hands kept stopping. Because of the stream I'd left on, I stayed half-aware of it, and the work wouldn't settle. So why not just turn it off? Easy to say. Then I wouldn't know when the stream ended. I needed to get home before they came back to the office.
Time flowed on like that. I poked at the track halfheartedly, neither here nor there.
"Aish. Let's just go home."
The stream ended before I could finish, so I headed home with the work unfinished. I'd have to come back another day.
I'd been pushing hard on MAMA stage prep, but today we were taking a break—because it was the day of the Mellow Music Awards ceremony. At Yu Nari's suggestion, we were watching it together on a call.
"Wow, I'm actually winning an award?! Over that stacked lineup?"
"Right? Feels like a dream."
We watched performances from all kinds of artists. We were viewers. We were winning awards, but we didn't have a stage, and we couldn't go up and accept them in person either. An invitation had come for Yeong-il asking if I'd attend, but if I went there I'd probably pass out on the spot. Obviously I declined.
Difficulty way too high. Still a bit much for me.
Once the performances wrapped, the main MC formally announced the start of the awards.
"Oh, it's starting."
"I'm so nervous! I can win, right?"
"So-yeong-nim said Rookie of the Year and the Top 10 are locked in. You already sent over the proxy acceptance speech."
She'd mentioned a few more awards, but I only remembered the names of the ones we could actually win. Rookie and Top 10 would come mid-to-late, so we could watch easy…
…or so I thought, right before—
"This is the Hot Trend Award of the Year! This award is presented to the artist who proposed the most novel musical trend of the year and achieved meaningful results on the music charts."
"This year, a truly unexpected wind blew in. A single breath that began on an online broadcasting platform cut straight through the music charts and even crossed the border into Japan."
"Huh?"
"Eh?"
The second we heard the host's lines, Nari and I made noise at the same time. Anyone listening could tell it was about Lunari. There was an award like this?
"The protagonist of the year who rewrote the boundaries of popular music. The winner of the Mellow Music Awards Hot Trend Award is—! Lu-nari!"
On screen, applause swelled as Lunari's pink beastkin character flashed for the briefest instant—and vanished. What the camera caught next was Shin Se-young stepping up onto the stage.
"……Is she really accepting all of them?"
"Yep. Our company's a total outcast club. Nobody's attending, hahaha. So Se-young unnie, who's close with CEO Kim Hye-min, agreed to take everything. Unnie still looks so pretty~"
The order had been unexpected, so Shin Se-young had to scramble out to accept the award. Watching a top-tier singer clean up after us felt extremely surreal, but what could we do—she'd said she would.
She must be really close with the CEO.
I was busy people-watching the celebrities when Rookie of the Year came around, and I watched the screen without much tension. The metrics gap was so large that Lunari was already locked. Once again, Lunari's image appeared on screen for only a blink and disappeared. They hadn't even taken an acceptance-speech video. Wasn't this a bit much? She barely got a few seconds. The music industry wasn't easy. The gatekeeping was brutal.
Lunari's name was called, and Shin Se-young walked to the podium for the proxy acceptance.
"Hello. This is Lunari. Thank you so much for the Rookie Award. This past year has been a continuous string of miracle-like days for me——to Muse Family, who ran alongside me, my beloved family, and every fan who always comes to the streams. Thank you to everyone who loved my songs. And… to my soul partner. Composer Yeong-il—I want to offer my sincere gratitude."
The proxy speech Yu Nari had prepared wrapped up, and Shin Se-young stepped down.
"Do-yoon-ah, did you hear? Thank you. Really, really. Heehee."
"No, nuna did well."
This was getting awkward. Her earnest thanks, packed full of laughter, made the back of my neck itch.
"When else am I going to say this kind of thing. I might have used up all my luck just meeting you. Thank you. At MAMA, I'll say it with my own mouth."
"……H-hm. That much, huh."
"Heh, you're embarrassed."
How does she say things like that so casually… so mortifying.
I deliberately ignored Nari's words and focused harder on the broadcast. As expected, she took the Top 10 award too. Shin Se-young collected her own Top 10 trophy along with Lunari's and returned to her seat. Every time she went back and forth, I felt oddly self-conscious even though I wasn't sitting next to her.
It would have been nice if it had ended there.
"Best OST Award! Spotlight—! Kurogami Yui-nim!"
"This year's Best Producer Award is a joint win! Kim Hye-min, Yeong-il!"
There were more unexpected awards.
Whoa. I got an award too.
"Wowow! Do-yoon-ah, you're Best Producer!! That's insane!"
"Right? Didn't they say I wouldn't win?"
"Every song you wrote this year blew up. That's probably why? Wow, crazy!"
Han So-yeong had clearly said it wouldn't be easy before. She said the twenty percent fan vote would sink it more than the judges' scores—so what was this?
"But did you send an acceptance speech?"
"No way. I thought being a nominee was the end of it, so I didn't. Never even crossed my mind."
"Eh? Really? That's a shame."
I hadn't expected the OST award either, so by now Yui was probably cheering somewhere. Shin Se-young finished the proxy acceptance with a note she'd received from Kim Hye-min, then briefly mentioned she hadn't been given my speech before stepping down. Because she was accepting every single one of our company's awards on top of winning her own, she became the person who went up and down the podium the most tonight.
On the screen, I stared blankly at the trophy of mine in Shin Se-young's hands. When awards came under Lunari's name I hadn't felt it, but the moment my composer name was called, my heart started doing cartwheels.
That's mine?
Best Producer Award. My mouth kept twitching. I held it down hard, afraid the smile would carry over the call. I was so happy I could float into the sky, and yet until I actually held that trophy, it didn't feel real at all. Didn't this mean I had one foot in that shining place too? They said my seat was there. Just like those people in suits.
I tried picturing myself sitting there for a second.
"Ugh."
No way. Absolutely not.
I barely managed to hang onto my racing heart, and Nari and I traded congratulations late into the night.
.
.
.