Idol Hides His Military Service

Because the Idol Ground 100 Position Battle was divided into the Vocal & Rap Position and the Dance Position, the practice rooms were also strictly separated.
Among them, in the practice room where the five team members who had chosen the Vocal & Rap Position song “When I Reach You” had gathered, a small commotion was going on.
“ I want to do this part here.”
“But honestly, I’m a little more confident I can do this part better.”
“Uh··· don’t you already have a lot of parts?”
“Still, wouldn’t it be better if the person who does it better takes it? For the team.”
Having more confidence in vocals than dance, Kim Suyeon had chosen “When I Reach You,” but it was not easy for her to adapt to the team’s atmosphere.
‘Is this the normal atmosphere of a team?’
Already three hours had passed since the team was formed, yet Suyeon’s team had not made any particular progress.
When they first gathered, time had been awkwardly wasted, and it was only thanks to Suyeon, who mustered up her courage to start the introductions, that they barely managed to move into a meeting.
-Then, should we start by choosing our leader?
Apparently all the team members had learned something from the previous Group Battle Mission, as they knew it was good to choose a leader first, so the When I Reach You team elected a leader before anything else.
There had been no problem up until the point where the oldest participant on the team, who also had a mild personality, took on the leader role.
But when it came to the main vocal position and the distribution of {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} parts for the mission song, the problem was that, because of the fierce conflict among the team members except for the leader and Suyeon, they were not making any progress.
‘If they were going to do this, why did we even choose a leader···.’
In the Lucid Dive A team she had been in before, they had not even separately chosen a leader.
Lee Sion had just naturally controlled everyone, and all the team members had accepted that as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Thinking about it now, she didn’t even know why it had turned out that way, but at the time she had had a feeling close to certainty that as long as they listened to what Lee Sion said, things would somehow work out.
But in the current team, even with the participant who was the leader trying to mediate, the remaining three team members refused to yield their opinions and had been locked in a heated argument for quite a while.
‘Looks like the other team members are used to this.’
For Suyeon, who was going through something like this for the first time, it was only bewildering; she had no idea how to deal with it. But the other team members were reacting as if they were used to it.
Watching them fight fiercely over the main vocal spot and the parts, as if they would be eliminated if they yielded anything, Suyeon was reminded of how, in her previous team, Lee Sion had forcibly distributed the parts.
-You handle dividing the parts appropriately, Shinyu.
-Huh? You mean I just arbitrarily divide them?
-You did the rearrangement, so you know best. Nobody has any complaints.
The truth was, back then, Suyeon had wanted to get a little more lines, but before she knew it, she had readily accepted because she was overwhelmed by Lee Sion’s force.
And looking back, that had been a truly wise choice.
Since it had been Geum Shinyu, the one in charge of the rearrangement, she had distributed the parts in a way that really let everyone show their individuality, and thanks to that, the Lucid Dive A team Suyeon had been in had been able to put on an amazing stage.
She hadn’t realized it when they were together, but now that they were apart, Suyeon felt the absence of Lee Sion as something far too large.
For some reason, whenever she was with Lee Sion, the atmosphere became very light and comfortable.
For example, Lee Gahyeon, who had been her previous teammate, was rather sensitive when around other people.
But even that Lee Gahyeon, when she was with Lee Sion, could be teased and played with even by timid Suyeon, and all Gahyeon would do about it was give them a glare and let it go.
Because of that, before they knew it, the team members would forget that they were even practicing, and it felt like a group of close friends hanging out together, so they barely even realized they were tired.
‘I miss them.’
Her current team members were still arguing over who got more screentime.
Suyeon found herself thinking that if Sion were on the team, then the meeting would have ended ages ago, and they would be messing around and practicing in the studio by now.
‘Although talking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms for an hour straight in the dorm is a bit much.’
Even as she suddenly thought she wanted to see Lee Sion, Suyeon was scared of running into her at the dorm.
She had no choice, because once she got back to the dorm, Suyeon always had to pick one of three options.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Legend of Valley, the army.
She had no idea why a female high schooler like Lee Sion knew those three topics inside out, but if she didn’t pick, a catastrophe would occur where she had to listen to all three stories in a combined set, so she had to choose one with tears in her eyes.
Thanks to that, Suyeon had even dreamed about Romance of the Three Kingdoms recently.
-Under the peach tree, they swore to become brothers~
In the background music of her dreams, where she had become Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei all at once, even Suyeon herself found she was humming that song unconsciously now because Lee Sion had gone around singing it so much.
Even scarier, whenever Lee Sion started talking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms to other participants, Suyeon would be beside her, nodding along in agreement.
‘I wonder how Sion-unni’s team is doing.’
There was no point in thinking about Lee Sion any further when it wouldn’t improve her current team’s situation, so Suyeon thought about stepping up to lead the team herself like Lee Sion did, but she didn’t have the confidence for that.
So, she decided that once the team’s practice was over, she would go find Lee Sion and ask how things were going with that team and how she should solve this situation.
***
The sound of “Bang! Bang! Love” rang out through the middle of the practice room.
In her head, Ryu Ayeon imagined the three female singers who sang the original song as she moved her body.
‘At first, keep the hips low and go in with hip steps.’
To the sound of the drums that came as she stomped her feet in time with the lyrics, Ryu Ayeon matched her arm movements.
Bang! Bang! Love had been classified as a Dance Position song for this mission, but she could not forget that the essence of the song itself was a song for vocals.

‘You have to analyze the structure and interpret the rhythm to place the movements so the song and the choreography match up.’
So even now, in the process of creating the choreography, she was thinking hard about how to bring out the powerful vocal tone of the original song.
“Ayeon-ssu, how did you do the footwork at the start just now?”
“···The footwork?”
“Yeah, when you first went in just now, your feet were moving in this really rhythmic way.”
A voice broke the concentration of Ryu Ayeon, who had been thinking about the choreography.
The owner of that voice was none other than Lee Sion.
‘She noticed that difference?’
On the surface, Ryu Ayeon kept her composure in the face of the sudden question from Lee Sion, but in truth she was very flustered.
What Ayeon had just done in the intro part of Bang! Bang! Love was what they called a hip step. It was not an official term, but it was a phrase often used among choreographers.
They called it a hip step when you moved your hips to the song’s rhythm and matched the steps of your feet to that, and it was a technique that was not only hard to follow but not easy to even notice unless you had been dancing steadily for a long time.
But when a beginner like Lee Sion immediately noticed that hip step and came to ask about it, Ayeon couldn’t help but be surprised.
“The hips. You usually use the hips. When you ride the rhythm, where do you ride it from?”
“My feet?”
“Right. Normally when you first learn to ride the rhythm, you use the ends of your body, like your hands or feet. But you can ride the beat with any part of your body.”
As soon as she finished speaking, Ayeon demonstrated.
Neck, chest, hips, shoulders.
As Ayeon freely moved each part of her body to ride a specific beat,
“Isolation?”
“At least you know that much. You could say it’s an extension of that.”
Watching Lee Sion immediately identify what she had just done, Ryu Ayeon thought that her learning ability seemed decent.
‘So that’s why Seo Ryujin kept dragging her around.’
Among the Idol Ground 100 participants this season, there were not many who met Ayeon’s standards.
And one of those few was Seo Ryujin. Even for someone like her, who set the bar for skill quite strictly, there was nothing in Seo Ryujin’s ability that she could really nitpick.
If she were forced to nitpick, it would only be that Seo Ryujin spent more time watching others than practicing for herself.
It had been Seo Ryujin who had dragged Lee Sion around and made her practice, getting her to ride the beat with each part of her body the way Ayeon was now demonstrating isolation in front of her.
At the time, all Ryu Ayeon had thought was, Why is she wasting time like that? But now she could understand it a little.
‘This kid has good instincts.’
The truth was, whenever Ryu Ayeon looked at Lee Sion, her head became a mess.
If she were to take the things that were the exact opposite of what she had made her convictions, and give them form, the result would be Lee Sion.
-Ayeon, I wish you would look around you a little more.
When she had heard the exact same words not only from Park Taesu, the CEO of her agency, but also from Hyeryeong, the idol she respected as her role model, it was the first time Ayeon’s convictions had wavered.
‘They’re saying I’m wrong?’
Because she had devoted herself solely to practice to improve her skills.
For Ayeon, the idea that getting along more closely with the other trainees was more important than that was something she simply could not accept.
In her mind, an idol was literally someone who had to become another person’s object of admiration, so they had to be more perfect and have more outstanding skills than anyone else.
However, as Idol Ground 100 went on, those thoughts of hers were being broken down bit by bit.
She hadn’t realized it while they were preparing for the Entrance Ceremony or the live broadcast stage, but in the first mission, the Group Battle Mission, Ryu Ayeon had shown an awful stage.
-If you’re that good, why don’t you just go solo instead of trying to be an idol?
-Do you really think the stage you made is a good stage?
-Being picked by you was the worst thing that happened to me in this program.
The team members whom Ryu Ayeon had personally chosen and practiced with for two weeks told her that being chosen by her had been the worst thing that had happened to them on this program, and left those sharp words behind as they walked away.
And as she listened to those words from her team members, Ryu Ayeon had not been able to refute a single thing.
Because the stage where she herself had done the choreography and handled the rearrangement had, objectively speaking, been a failure.
At first, she had thought it was because her team members’ skills were lacking.
She had thought that the stage had failed because the team members had not been able to pull off the choreography or the vocal parts she had assigned them.
But,
Even if I wake up, I won’t forget
Diving into this night
After finishing her own stage, she had watched on the monitor in the waiting room the stage of Lucid Dive A, led by Lee Sion, and realized that her thinking had been wrong.
Lee Sion, Geum Shinyu, Kim Suyeon, Lee Gahyeon, Im Yunkyung.
Not one of the Lucid Dive A team members could be called an outstandingly skilled participant.
In contrast, in the team where Ryu Ayeon had been, starting with herself, there had been two A-grade participants, and even the lowest grade among the rest had been C; their average skill level had been high.
And yet, the stage of the Lucid Dive A team, made up of those participants with lacking skills, had been far better than the stage of Ayeon’s team.
Even Ryu Ayeon herself had not been able to take her eyes off the stage the whole time.
And the expressions of the judges and the audience as they watched that Lucid Dive A stage.
They had been exactly the same as the expression of young Ryu Ayeon when she had watched G.G’s stages as a child.
An idol.
As much as she didn’t want to admit it, the stage that Lucid Dive A had shown that day had been an idol stage that completely captured everyone’s gaze.
Only,
“Ayeon-ssu, is this how you’re supposed to do this?”
“···Don’t call me Ayeon-ssu.”
“Ryu Ayeon feels too distant and cold, and it still feels like there’s some distance between us to just call you Ayeon, so we compromised on Ayeon-ssu. Does it bother you?”
“Just call me Ayeon.”
Whenever she saw Lee Sion practicing the hip step she had taught her and asking if she was doing the movement right, something in Ayeon stubbornly resisted admitting those thoughts of hers.
‘It was a fluke. She just happened to put on the best stage of her life that day!’
She simply could not accept it.
-Captain, why does your English pronunciation sound like my dad’s?
-Mr. Yunkyung’s father must have actually learned English properly. This is a British accent.
-Huh?
-The truth is, English didn’t start in America, it started in Britain. And in Britain, the original, my pronunciation is what you’d call standard.
-But it sucks.
-You wanna die?
All throughout practice, there was not a trace to be found of anything that could be called seriousness in Lee Sion’s attitude.
And as if it were contagious when you were with her, even the other team members besides Ryu Ayeon were melting into that kind of atmosphere.
When even Yoo Jihae and Kim Nayeon, whom she had thought of as the reliable skilled members on this team, were being held captive by Sion and listening to Romance of the Three Kingdoms stories,
Even someone like Ryu Ayeon, who usually avoided getting involved with others to an extreme degree, found herself on the verge of stepping in.
On top of that, the way Lee Sion approached her without hesitation and started talking to her made her twice as exhausted, because this was the first time in her life that Ryu Ayeon had encountered this type.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Huh? It’s only 3 a.m. We go just a little more and then head back, and it’ll be perfect.”
Another scary thing about Lee Sion was her tireless stamina.
All the other team members besides Ryu Ayeon and Lee Sion had already collapsed from the intense practice that had started on the very first day and gone back to the dorm, but.
Lee Sion, as if she had just started practice, was still full of energy, asking Ryu Ayeon all sorts of things about the choreography.
‘I’m losing in stamina···?’
Even someone like Ryu Ayeon, who had never lost to anyone when it came to practice volume since her TSP days, was honestly at her physical limit.
“Why can’t I get the same feeling as you? It just feels awkward somehow.”
Yet Lee Sion, who had stayed in the practice room this long to ask her about the choreography, still looked perfectly fine, like she had just started practicing.
And although normally she would have strongly disliked anyone asking her for help or coming to her with questions, this time, Ryu Ayeon could not do that.
Because Ryu Ayeon had a debt in her heart toward Lee Sion.
The live broadcast stage that could be called Idol Ground 100’s first stage.
Back then, when she had been center, Ryu Ayeon had made the mistake of misstepping at the very end of the song.
‘If it hadn’t been for Lee Sion···.’
Normally, it would have turned into a disaster where she fell right in the middle of the live stage, but fortunately, thanks to Lee Sion stepping in at that moment, she had been able to finish naturally.
So that incident had remained as a lingering debt in Ryu Ayeon’s heart.
Because she cared so little about other people, receiving help from someone else also felt uncomfortable to her, so she had thought that someday she would return what she had received from Lee Sion, at least.
And she was thinking of settling that this time by helping with practice.
“Right now, you’re following the movements, but you’re not using the gaps in between.”
“The gaps?”
“For some reason, you connect and cut off the movements really precisely.”
“Really?”
“That’s not a bad thing. It gives the dance sharpness. But this dance needs both sharpness and smoothness. What matters is not snapping each move off, but letting them flow together, and you keep cutting them, so the feeling doesn’t come alive.”
Then, Ryu Ayeon added an explanation that the gaps before moving from one move to the next were important.
It wasn’t just about vaguely going into the next move; you needed prior preparation so you could flow smoothly into the next move.
“Like this?”
Barely had Ayeon’s words ended when Lee Sion’s dance movements became far smoother than before.
“···Yeah.”
Seeing Lee Sion copy exactly what she had taught her, she didn’t even have the energy left to be surprised anymore.
-And I think I can beat you even if I go up against you.
Suddenly, Ryu Ayeon remembered something Seo Ryujin had said back when they had run into each other in front of the practice room at dawn.
At the time, she had thought Seo Ryujin was just trying to provoke her into getting mad, but now that she thought about how Seo Ryujin had seen this side of Lee Sion before she had, she found she could understand that remark.
‘Must have been fun to watch her practice.’
Back then, she had thought Seo Ryujin was an idiot for saying she watched other participants practice for fun, but if someone was improving this fast, there really was enough value in just watching.
And while Lee Sion and Ryu Ayeon were devoting themselves to choreography practice in the studio at the late hour of 3 a.m.,
Outside the dorm, out in the world—or more precisely, in a certain online community in the outside world—things were heating up intensely.