NOVEL NEXT chapter 38 - Group Battle Mission & Vacation
Hyeryeong thought back to the first time she had met contestant Lee Sion.
At the Entrance Ceremony stage, when she had chosen and sung Pink Spell, Lee Sion had been an absolute mess.
It had been blatantly obvious that she had never once in her life practiced dance or singing.
But by the time of F class’s mid-check stage, although she was clumsy, Lee Sion had grown to the point she could at least keep in step with the other trainees.
And in this Group Battle Mission, she had taken yet another step up from there; now, excluding the A-grade contestants, there wasn’t really anyone who came to mind that Hyeryeong thought was better than Lee Sion.
At this point, Lee Sion’s growth speed was at a level you could no longer describe as merely having talent.
Her talent was certainly at a level Hyeryeong had never seen before, but even so, putting on a stage like this would have been impossible without practicing day and night.
Talent and effort.
Hyeryeong thought that what Lee Sion had shown now was the kind of result that could only come out when someone with innate talent shed blood and sweat and worked hard.
In particular, she felt like she would never forget the sight of Lee Sion at the end of this Lucid Dive A team stage.
Even when you wake you won’t forget
Into this night, dive
Lee Sion had held her hand out toward the audience as she sang the final lyrics.
And in that moment, the audience members sitting in the stands simply stared blankly at the hand she held out, as if hypnotized by something.
The audience, who had looked like the people possessed by a devil in the Bible, and the expression of Lee Sion smiling at them—no matter what anyone said, that was an idol itself.
***
92/94/95.
When I saw the scores up on the electronic display, that was when it finally hit me that the stage was over.
"Unni!"
My teammates called out to me as they threw themselves into my arms.
I pulled them in too and tipped my head back, staring up at the ceiling of the stage.
‘Damn··· this is embarrassing.’
We had done well on stage, and just like our original goal, we had beaten our opponents, Park Soyeon’s team, so I should have been jumping for joy, but for some reason I felt like I was going to cry.
"Uuugh hic··· sniff."
Maybe it was because I’d already seen Lee Gahyeon bawling with tears and snot running down her face?
I clenched my teeth and held back the tears that were about to burst out with the determination that I would absolutely never show that kind of sight.
"It was truly a great stage. Lucid Dive A team’s stage made me feel that from arrangement to concept to members, everything had come together as one, so personally I think it was the best stage of this Group Battle Mission."
"I share Judge Ahn Seongho’s opinion. This stage really showed that choreography isn’t about showing off difficulty, but ultimately exists for the sake of the stage."
"Lucid Dive A team, honestly, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried when I first saw your member lineup. But you made those worries look ridiculous; the stage you showed this time was the ideal image of an idol group I have in my head. Really··· you did well."
The judges each gave their comments, and from the audience seats behind them, the cheers still weren’t dying down.
Thump thump.
My heartbeat was pounding harder than when I’d done a really intense workout, and I could feel it spreading through my whole body.
At first, I’d been a bit embarrassed.
To put it exactly, I hadn’t understood why I had to sing and dance in front of complete strangers.
But now I understood.
All the days over the past two weeks when my teammates and I had stayed up all night together, sharing our opinions and practicing—
All of that had been for this single day.
For this one brief moment that was not even three minutes long.
Three minutes is such a short time that usually it passes by just from fiddling with your phone for a bit.
But right now, these three minutes felt like the longest of my entire past and present life combined.
‘Why does it feel like time is moving slowly?’
Even though I’d been so busy singing and hitting the choreography that I had no time to think, I could see everything clearly—starting with the judges, all the way to the faces of the audience in the stands looking at us.
And when I saw the people who were watching the stage our team had created, smiling as if they were enjoying it, I felt my chest tighten with emotion.
It felt like people were recognizing that everything we’d worked for over the past two weeks had been for this.
"Guys."
"Y-yeah··· sniff···."
I looked at each of my teammates’ faces as they practically buried their heads in my chest.
Of course Yunkyung, who had gone through a lot of mental stress, was crying, and Shinyu, too, was letting big drops of tears fall, maybe because the audience’s reaction to the stage she had arranged was good.
And Suyeon, who I’d thought might secretly be the most level-headed in our team, was also wiping at the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand, so it seemed like I wasn’t the only one moved by this stage; it was all of us.
But.
"Line up at your places so we can bow."
"You cra··· no, do you not have any emotions?!"
"Sion unni, this is a moment for all of us to be moved together!"
"I definitely saw her eyes fill up earlier!"
"You’re being petty, trying to act like you were the only one who didn’t cry, Commander!"
Hm.
As always, I just let the voices of the haters trying to slander me flow past.
"Dragging things out on stage while you’re crying is the most unsightly thing. We’re going to leave in a cool way."
If we’d done a good stage, it was only right to give a good final greeting and come down, so I lined the team up in a straight row.
‘It’s a bit of a shame, though.’
We only had five people, and we still couldn’t manage to stand in a perfectly straight horizontal line, which bothered me a little, but we couldn’t waste any more time.
When we bowed at a ninety-degree angle toward the judges and the audience like that, our stage finally truly came to an end.
After that, we walked out through the entrance we’d come in and moved to the waiting room where the contestants who had finished their stages were gathered.
On the way to the waiting room, my teammates were pouting, looking like they were unhappy with me for ruining their moment of emotion, but their expressions were still much better than when they had been bawling.
"Did you see that, Searchjol? What was your team’s score again?"
"Why are you picking a fight the moment you walk in?"
And now it was time to claim our rights as the victors.
The first target that came into my field of view was Seo Ryujin.
I didn’t even sit down; I went straight over to Seo Ryujin.
"Now then, little Ryujin, shall we do some math with unni?"
"Get lost!"
"I’ll give you a very simple arithmetic problem. Between 275 and 281, which number is bigger?"
Seo Ryujin’s team’s scores had been 91/92/92. And our team’s scores were 92/94/95.
Comparing the two, there was a score gap of a full six points, a heaven-and-earth difference, so I could proudly give her this quiz.
"···."
Seo Ryujin closed her eyes as if to ignore me, lips pressed shut, radiating her resolve that she would pretend she couldn’t hear and refuse to answer.
But that kind of rebellion was pointless against me.
Who was I?
-Jijon Sion you fXXking bastard your parents XXXX
I was the Freud of the canyon, who had researched psychology for a full four years on people whose mental training was still lacking, down in the gorge.
"Now, who’s the scrub?"
Crack.
I didn’t raise my voice as I leaned in to Seo Ryujin’s ear.
I spoke very quietly.
But clearly.
I had only whispered, carefully articulating each syllable, but I could definitely hear the sound of something snapping in that moment.
So then I hunched into a turtle pose to protect my back, ready to dodge the slap from Seo Ryujin that was sure to fly at me.
‘Wait, doesn’t this actually expose my back more?’
In that instant I realized I had judged wrong, and belatedly flailed to get my hands back to cover my back, but—
"Huuuu···."
Surprisingly, Seo Ryujin took a big deep breath and controlled herself like a monk training in the Way.
"S-Seo Ryujin, how are you holding this back···."
"Unni, stop it··· it’s pathetic···."
And Suyeon and Shinyu, who had been watching the whole time, each took one of my arms and started dragging me away.
Pathetic?
For me, Lee Sion, to hear the word “pathetic” in my combined 49 years of life.
It was like I could hear the sound of my ironclad mentality, which even the battalion commander hadn’t been able to break, shattering.
"You did such a good stage; why did you go over to Ryujin unni and pick a fight?"
"But she called me a scrub—how am I supposed to just let that go?"
"You called her Searchjol first."
Seeing Suyeon nitpicking over whose fault it was when we were on the brink of a great work, I felt my heart growing heavy.
Was this how a staff officer felt watching Masok insist on climbing a mountain to set up camp?
If we didn’t take this chance, we didn’t know when another moment would come again when we could tease Seo Ryujin like this.
In any case, once I had more or less finished my revenge for being called a scrub by Seo Ryujin, I finally sat down on the waiting room chairs where our team was gathered and took a short break.
‘Maybe I went a bit overboard?’
In truth, going straight to Seo Ryujin and picking a fight the moment I walked in hadn’t been just for the sake of revenge.
My teammates were looking relieved, like they felt everything was over now that the stage was done, and I needed to reset them back to their original state.
‘In the army too, it’s not during training that the most injuries happen, but afterward.’
Our team had certainly finished this stage well, but this was only the beginning.
There was still a long road ahead to debut, and if they stayed in this mood like everything was over, they could end up in serious trouble, so it was important to bring things back to normal.
‘A commander always aims for two results with a single advance.’
This subtle strategy of both taking revenge on Seo Ryujin and returning our team to its original state was something these rookies had no way of knowing yet.
In any case, since the mission was complete, all I had to do now was sit and stare at the monitor installed in the waiting room.
"Unni, you’re not nervous?"
Suyeon looked at me like she found me fascinating as she asked.
"About what?"
"Once today’s stages are over, it’s vacation, so I’m already nervous about how the broadcast will have come out."
Ah, come to think of it, by the time we were locked up in the dorm, Idol Ground 100 Episodes 1 and 2 would already have been airing outside.
In my case, since my aunt would have edited it for me, I’d been living without giving it much thought, but the other contestants had reason to worry about how they would appear on air—or whether they would appear at all.
"Honestly, confiscating all our phones is a bit too much."
"Yeah, seriously, without phones we don’t even know what the reaction is like outside."
"I’m really curious about how I came out on the broadcast too!"
Since they were at an age where they couldn’t live without their phones, they seemed displeased that the production staff had confiscated all electronic devices.
‘There are kids who go through that for two full years.’
At least in the future there would come a day when they could use their phones outside of working hours, but for now there were young people who couldn’t even properly watch TV, let alone use a phone.
While my teammates were chattering, curious about how things were going outside,
-Today, all 20 teams have finished performing their stages. Here we have the scores listed by each team that fought in the Group Battles···.
On the monitor in the waiting room, the image of MC Jang Junseok explaining something to the audience was playing.
"It looks like the on-site vote scores came out now!"
At Yunkyung’s words, my teammates—and the other contestants gathered in the waiting room—fixed their gazes on the monitor.
The Group Battle Mission still wasn’t completely over.
The final victory was decided by adding the scores from the on-site vote of the 500 audience members who had come today to the judges’ scores, so it was too early to let our guard down.
Maybe that was why the teams that had received high scores were staring at the monitor with anxious eyes.
Conversely, the teams that had received low scores were looking at the monitor with eyes filled with their final hopes.
Even though our team had beaten Park Soyeon’s Lucid Dive B team with high scores, my teammates must have still been nervous, because they had their full attention glued to the monitor.
What caught my eye, in contrast to the others, was Geum Shinyu, who was glancing around, her gaze somewhere other than the monitor.
"Do you like it a bit better now?"
"Excuse me?"
"Don’t be scared—look straight at it. You were the one who contributed the most to making our team’s stage this time."
The place Geum Shinyu kept glancing at was none other than where Park Soyeon was sitting.
"Really?"
"Of course. Do you ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ think our team could have done a stage like this without you?"
"If anything, if it hadn’t been for me··· we might have done even better."
I shook my head at Shinyu’s words.
"Even if Ryu Ayeon came into our team in your place right now, I don’t think we would have done a better stage than this."
I meant it.
Although the team had formed in the first place because Yunkyung had grabbed onto me before falling off the cliff, I hadn’t regretted my decision once after that.
‘Ah, maybe I regretted it once when I made them do the sexy concept?’
Anyway, the stage we had shown this time was a stage only we could have done, and I didn’t think that even if Ryu Ayeon took Shinyu’s spot, we would have done a better stage than now.
And only after hearing what I said did Shinyu look at the monitor with a much more relaxed expression.
Now that I felt Shinyu was finally settled, I turned to look at the side where Park Soyeon, whom Shinyu had been watching, was sitting.
‘She still hasn’t come to her senses.’
Maybe stung by the way our team had trounced hers in the judges’ scores, Park Soyeon was staring at the monitor like she was about to jump someone.
Whoosh.
Then she turned her head, about to look in our direction, and since I happened to be looking at her at that moment, our eyes met.
‘And what are you going to do if you look?’
This was why seizing the initiative was important.
She had probably planned to glare at either me or Geum Shinyu, but the moment her eyes met mine, she immediately turned away and avoided my gaze.
She’d already had one harsh lesson from me, and there was no way Park Soyeon had the guts to charge at me here like before, in a place full of people and cameras.
‘I, on the other hand, can.’
By contrast, I had nothing to lose anyway, so I kept glaring at Park Soyeon.
-The tallying of the audience’s on-site votes has now been completely finished! Now we will reveal the final scores, which are the total of the judges’ scores and the on-site vote scores!
***
To live or to die, that was the question.
In Kim Miyoung’s head, the line from Hamlet, one of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, was drifting around and around.
Ring ring.
And while that was going on, her phone had been ringing for a while now, but she didn’t have the courage to answer.
–Big Sis–
It had already been a full week that Miyoung had been ignoring calls from her older sister, Madam Kim Sukja, who was also Sion’s mother.
‘If I pick that up, she’s going to try to kill me. How am I supposed to answer?’
Ever since Idol Ground 100 Episode 1 had aired, she had been under a fierce barrage of calls and messages from her big sister, Kim Sukja, but was stubbornly ignoring it.
Of course, if it were only up to this point, Miyoung could fully endure it, even if she felt sorry toward her sister.
After all, Idol Ground 100, where she was serving as main PD, had surpassed 5% viewership with the recent Episode 2, and its peak viewership had reached 8%. In just two episodes, people were calling it MPlay’s best program of the year.
But.
‘She’s about to be released soon···.’
After today’s Group Battle Mission and the first ranking announcement ceremony, it would be time for her niece, Lee Sion, to leave the dorm.
Miyoung could still vividly recall her niece threatening her with a fork and knife back at the pork cutlet place.
‘That kid is the type who does what she says she will!’
The moment the monster named Niece was released into society, it would only be a matter of time before she found out that Miyoung hadn’t kept her promise.
Miyoung had to find a way to stay alive.