Chapter 93

I’ll definitely show him when I get back.

After I make it through the final competition first.

‘Original Song Mission’

Four new songs produced exclusively for the final of <Debut Chart! 100>.

Thanks to the program’s unexpected success, they had managed to get songs from some fairly famous composers.

Now it was time to go through the beautiful process of reaching an agreement with my friends over which one we would choose.

With debut right in front of them, everyone’s egos had grown stronger and their opinions more forceful, so I already had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy.

“There are all these great hip-hop tracks lined up, so why the hell are you insisting on doing the tamest one?! You want us to lose every single audience vote?!”

“D-Day got a good response during the first competition. We can just do it like that!”

“God, that had the season working in its favor, and it suited the members because they were young!”

A full-blown fight broke out.

The two people who had jumped to their feet looked about ready to grab each other by the collar.

The problem was that those two people were me and Gowon.

You eighteen-year-old hormonal teenager, why are you such a pain in the ass?

I dearly missed my twenty-year-old baby junior who hadn’t been able to make a peep against me.

Though even that baby used to glare at me resentfully from time to time.

The shape of our current conflict was ironic too.

I needed to push Gowon into first place through this competition, so I was arguing for an intense hip-hop dance track.

It was a good song for showing off Gowon’s strengths in a completely different way from the previous competition.

But Gowon was inexplicably insisting on a rock-based song with a lot of vocal parts.

Since it was still a competition song, the beat wasn’t sluggish or anything, but it had this whole Our youth shines brightly! and Let’s all do our best together! kind of atmosphere.

It didn’t suit Gowon’s image at all.

You don’t have a refreshing look even at eighteen, you bastard!

That would be a little too harsh to say outright, so I tried to phrase it more tactfully.

“You can’t even smile at a camera for more than ten seconds. How are you supposed to do <Happy Smile>?”

Gowon bristled and raised his eyebrows.

He could probably rap with that exact expression.

“I can.”

“Oh, really.”

I took out my phone and turned on the video camera.

“Do it. Smile brightly for ten seconds without your face twitching, and I’ll admit it.”

“How am I supposed to do that in a situation like this!”

“Then how are you going to do it onstage?”

“Onstage is...!”

“Okay, guys. Guys.”

Jung Garam stepped between us.

Whir. Whir.

At that moment, several cameras blatantly swung in our direction.

So blatantly that even the other trainees noticed something was off.

Jung Garam mediated the standoff between us in a gentle tone.

“This isn’t going to work. You two go settle your opinions first. Sorry, but we have a lot more than this to practice, and we can’t keep wasting time. You know that too, right?”

“.......”

In the live-broadcast final, the trainees had to perform onstage no fewer than twice.

One was the team performance with the members currently gathered here.

The other was a position-based performance.

The position stages were exactly what the name implied: the trainees would be divided into Vocals, Dance, and Rap, then perform with others in the same role.

On top of that, there was also going to be a quiet group song to serve as the epilogue to the grand finale.

If I counted that too, it would make three stages.

So yes, Gowon and I fighting this fiercely right now really was causing trouble for everyone else.

“...Okay. Gowon, come outside.”

Gowon turned sharply without answering.

Just as I was about to follow him out, Jung Garam grabbed my shoulder.

Then he whispered in a low voice.

“We’re going to come in first anyway, so take it easy.”

“......?”

I narrowed my eyes, wondering why the hell he was saying something like that to me.

He shrugged.

“I feel like you and I are going to debut together. Think of it as... a kind of gesture of trust? Like, let’s get along.”

“...I see.”

So he had graciously deigned to select me already.

“What about Gowon?”

I lowered my voice too.

“Not sure. Our positions overlap, so I’m a little conflicted. We’ll have to group in a few people from other agencies too....”

“I see.”

You seriously thought a trainee who’s suffered his ass off all this time would be happy hearing something like that?

Heat shot straight to my head.

I forced myself to keep smiling and tested him one more time.

“You were good at arranging during the last competition. If we debut together, let’s write some songs together.”

“...Ah.”

For a split second, his expression stiffened unnaturally.

“Come on. The program’s this huge now. How much money do you think the company is going to invest? It’d be better to go with songs selected by the A&R team than stuff made by beginners like us.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Huh? Ah, well, I’m only at an amateur level anyway.”

“...Haha.”

No one who had ever stood onstage even once with a song they had worked on with their own hands could say something like that.

“Got it. I’ll go talk it out with him.”

“...Sure. Take your time.”

I turned away, swallowing a hollow laugh.

Well, well....

The adults’ mess had finally started casting its shadow over the kids in earnest.

But I could put that problem aside for a moment.

Right now, I still had the conflict with Gowon, who was glaring at me from over there.

No matter how much Gowon had improved, the competitors who had survived this far weren’t pushovers.

On top of that, the hand of outright manipulation had started reaching in.

So naturally, he should choose a song that would let him shine as much as possible even among the top-ranked group, yet that bastard was being stubborn over something pointless....

No.

Exhale.

I calmed myself as much as I could and asked gently.

“You want to do something refreshing that badly?”

Don’t tell me this bastard had been crying on the inside every time he had to do a dark concept in the real world too.

Come to think of it, he had stared pretty intently at that pink, sugary stage before....

“No, it’s not about the concept!”

“Then what?”

“.......”

Why was he sulking again all of a sudden?

Gowon scrubbed both hands over his face, then stomped closer to me.

“I deliberately...”

“Yeah.”

“...called him onto the same team.”

“Him?”

“The guy who took first place from you. We need to show the skill gap properly while you’re on the same stage.”

“Huh?”

After thinking about what he’d said for a brief moment, I understood.

“Hey, what do you mean he took it from me? Maybe he just did well.”

“No.”

Gowon answered firmly.

“Out of every performance that day, nobody did better than you.”

“.......”

He said it with more certainty than I had myself, which made it too embarrassing to argue.

“So you want me to crush him with the kind of rock vocals I’m good at?”

After all that shouting and insisting, he got sullen the second I dug directly into what he was thinking.

“Isn’t that kind of cheating too? What’s the point of winning after pulling something like that?”

“How is that cheating? ...If anything, it looked like he was the one pulling something.”

“Huh?”

“There were a few people on his last competition team who’d been with him during the first round too. I heard that even after everyone’s phones were confiscated, he somehow had a second phone, and even though he practiced the least, the broadcast made it look like he was the only one working his ass off.”

Oh....

This bastard had more talent as a spy than Yunjin!

So kittens really were better at hearing what gets said at night!

“First of all, Gowon, I fully appreciate your admirable intentions....”

“You little...”

“So the concept doesn’t matter. You just want my vocal parts to stand out, right?”

“...Yeah.”

“Got it. Then we’ll do the song I chose.”

“What?”

“The intro, the bridge, the final chorus, and the ad-lib too.”

I looked Gowon straight in the eyes.

“Even if I have to fight for every part, I’ll win them all.”

At that point, I’d practically be taking every difficult vocal part in the song.

“I’m not the producer this time, remember?”

“......!”

The mission song itself had been made specifically for “survival-show trainees,” so there was no need for me to arrange it.

“I’m the main vocalist.”

In that case, there was no reason for me to step away from the central role.

“It’s not like I’m planning to hide my skills either. Why would I? I’ll make parts in that song where I can stand out just fine. Unlike somebody who keeps insisting on a song without even having a plan for his own parts.”

“.......”

“If we’d done that song from earlier, which part were you planning to sing?”

“I had a plan too....”

I could barely even hear him.

Good grief.

At that moment, a phone call broke the silence.

I took out my phone.

It was an unfamiliar number.

“Don’t answer. I heard there are a lot of weirdos calling trainees these days.”

He complained about everything, then worried about me anyway.

“I’ll answer first. If it’s weird, I’ll hang up.”

It wasn’t like I had a manager in this world, and sometimes the broadcasting station contacted me directly, so I couldn’t simply ignore unknown numbers.

“Hello?”

— This is Baek Hanje’s phone, correct?

Huh.

The voice was extremely familiar.

“Kwon Taeyoung?”

— That’s all I get?

The question came back tinged with amusement.

After a brief pause—

“CEO Kwon?”

— You don’t have to go that far. At least call me Mr. Kwon. Or just call me an old man.

“I’ll stick with CEO Kwon.”

There was a different kind of wish mixed into that choice too.

— About what you mentioned before.

“Yes.”

— Let’s meet briefly and talk about it. I told the station I had something to discuss regarding the sponsorship, so they let me in.

“You’re here?”

— Yes. Come down to the first floor.

“Oh. Okay.”

I hung up and turned to Gowon.

“Gowon. I’m going to see CEO Kwon for a bit, okay?”

“...CEO Kwon Taeyoung came here to see you?”

“Yeah. Anyway, we settled the song issue, right? Go back up first.”

“.......”

But the bastard trailed right after me.

“Why?”

“What kind of sponsor has its CEO come to the broadcasting station this often?”

“...Hmm?”

“That’s weird. Watching the broadcast, he was the only CEO who even followed you to the filming location. And why does he keep calling a trainee out privately?”

Now that he mentioned it....

A company CEO coming to privately meet some random trainee certainly did look a little suspicious.

But the person in question is Kwon Taeyoung....

“Hey, it’s fine. You don’t need to worry.”

“Then I can follow along too if some CEO asks to meet me alone.”

“Are you insane? Of course you can’t!”

“See?”

...No, but....

If this were the Gowon from reality, he would know just how absurd it was to suspect Kwon Taeyoung of anything.

But according to this Gowon’s common sense, every single thing he was saying was perfectly reasonable....

In the end, I went down to the first floor with Gowon attached to me.

CEO Kwon Taeyoung accepted Gowon’s presence without much comment.

“I took care of what you asked me about last time, Baek Hanje. There shouldn’t be any problems.”

“Oh, really? Thank you.”

Maybe because Gowon was sitting beside us, Kwon Taeyoung kept the explanation appropriately vague.

“What did you ask him to do?”

Hmm?

“What did he ask you to do?”

Gowon questioned Kwon Taeyoung as if he were about to interrogate him.

“There were people trying to exploit the contestants’ private lives. I prevented it before it could become a problem.”

“...Private lives?”

“<Debut Chart> has become such a success that people digging into the contestants’ backgrounds have apparently started approaching people around them. I discussed the matter with the broadcasting station, and they agreed to be more careful about it.”

“......!”

Gowon’s expression changed when he heard that.

“Oh, like calling their families and saying, ‘Invest money and we’ll make the contestant more successful.’ Scams like that?”

That hadn’t exactly been the original implication, but by now Gowon had gone almost completely pale.

“...Could I go make a phone call?”

“Of course. Take your time.”

Gowon sprang to his feet and hurried away.

“Your instincts really are something else, CEO Kwon.”

Eighteen-year-old Gowon was practically in the palm of his hand.

I’d meant it as a joke, but Kwon Taeyoung looked down at me with a face far more rigid than before.

“Why didn’t you ask me to protect you too?”

“...What?”

“If you’d told me to keep your story out of it as well, I would’ve looked after you first, Baek Hanje.”

Why me?

All of a sudden, I felt like I had seen that expression of Kwon Taeyoung’s somewhere before.

You stay out of this. Go inside with the others.

H-hyung. I... how... how could I....

Yeban, take Hanje’s phone. Don’t let him see anything.

A very long time ago.