Chapter 145

"Yes. Team Youth-Never-Dies — great stage. Really the kind of stage that tugged at everyone's heart, I think."

Choi Yeonwoo, deftly settling the mood and steadying the room, delivered the wrap-up line. Gong Seok and Jung Siwoo, who'd been crying for a good while, had only just managed to pull themselves together.

"Personally, I had my own period of worrying about these kinds of things too…. so the lyrics hit even harder for me, I think. Our Woong down below listening right now — he's actually sobbing."

The camera naturally panned to Park Woong on one side of the audience seating.

Under a cap and a pulled-up hood, Park Woong — nose bright red — had the wad of tissues a fan next to him had handed over pressed straight to his eyes.

Choi Yeonwoo kept the post-stage talk going after that too — asking Team Youth-Never-Dies about behind-the-scenes moments from prepping the stage, asking Seok and Siwoo about the pressure of being the oldest hyungs. Meanwhile, on stage, the instruments were being cleared and reset for the next act.

Not wanting to let the feeling slip, Hajin just quietly looked out at the audience in front of him. Countless pairs of eyes, each carrying its own emotion, were fixed on them up on the stage.

"Last of all — Trainee Hajin, could you say a few words too?"

While Hajin had been taking the beautiful scene in, everyone else must have already shared their closing thoughts one by one. Hajin's eyes briefly met Haru's as Haru passed the mic to him. Haru — a little choked up too, apparently, eyes faintly reddened — just smiled and handed the mic over.

"……."

Hajin thought for a moment.

So many moments flickered past Hajin's eyes.

So, so many moments.

Then Hajin slowly lifted the mic and opened his mouth.

"I'm — really, truly happy I get to sing in front of all of you, like this. For so long, I'd been sure something like this would never happen to me in my life."

There had been stretches of emptiness that felt long enough to kill him.

"Admitting that the me who thought he was a star might actually just be a stone — that was so, so hard."

Times like that — Hajin had known them too.

"But if I hadn't had those stretches, I don't think I could be standing here now, singing this song with this feeling in my heart."

There are things you can only see once you've come out the other side.

Hajin, now, could look at his own life a little more clearly.

"That everything, right up until the final period, is just part of one long process — that's something I learned by taking part in this Miro Maze. Learning like this, one thing at a time, I'll work hard to become someone who can share more stories with all of you Destis."

Hajin — every trace of his usual playfulness and mischief set aside — delivered his closing thoughts calmly.

There was one more thing he wanted to say before he wrapped up, but Hajin hesitated for a moment. Whether he should say this, and if he did, what kind of aftershocks it might set off — a run of thoughts flickered through his head.

Soon, Hajin opened his mouth.

"I'll become a Kang Hajin you won't be embarrassed to like, or to cheer for."

Cheers erupted from the Destis.

But Hajin's remarks didn't end there.

"So — please: all of you, be people I can be proud of, too. Thank you."

Filtering and re-filtering that last line before letting it out with care, Hajin bowed toward the audience. The direction he'd been looking as he finished — was toward the group who had spat those ugly words at Wonho earlier.

Already saddled with a weak core fandom assessment, closing remarks that read essentially as a shot at his own fans could come back at him hard.

But Hajin didn't regret it.

Even if this one line sent his ranking crashing.

"Yes. That was Team Youth-Never-Dies' stage. Great work, everyone."

Yeonwoo — picking up on the strange atmosphere coming off Hajin — quickly delivered the closing line. Team Youth-Never-Dies bowed ninety degrees to the audience, then slowly came down off the stage. It was full evening now.

As Hajin pulled his in-ears out and handed them back, Seok — next to him — asked something.

"Hajin-ah."

"Yeah, hyung."

"…do you really think it's just a process?"

"Huh?"

"Ah, you know — that thing you were talking about, in your remarks earlier."

"Ah…. Yeah. I think so."

And, hyung — I hope you see it that way too.

That last line, welling all the way up to the base of his throat, Hajin didn't pass along. He knew Seok, too, had his own process to feel through on his own.

Seok sank quietly into thought. Hajin just walked, wordless, at his side.

And so, Team Youth-Never-Dies' stage came to a close.

---

The last team of Miro Maze's guerrilla concert was 'Team Raebingyu' — the team Lee Doha and Lee Yugeon were on.

A word roughly cobbled together from Loving You and Rap…. or so you'd think. Astonishingly, it actually had a meaning in hanja.

"Rae (來, come), Bing (憑, lean on), Yu (留, stay)."

"It means — come to us however much you like, lean on us, and stay."

…for a hip-hop team, was a name this sentimental really necessary? But the Destis loved it, sure enough — so let's leave it there and move on.

Team Raebingyu's members were leader Lee Doha, along with Lee Yugeon, Shin Kyungho, and Jayden.

Except for Lee Yugeon — who'd taken on rap for the first time back on Team Blue Flare — all of them were trainees who'd wanted to hold rap positions. So the fact that they'd be putting together a serious rap stage was something everyone had guessed from the moment the team was formed.

"For our team mission, we'll stake the DJ desk and the stage LED."

Team Raebingyu had no set choreo — instead, to fill the otherwise-empty stage, Jayden had personally reached out and brought in a DJ hyung he knew. The idea was to play beats live on stage and use that to push their rap performance to the front.

But — here, a huge accident nobody had seen coming happened.

"Uh, uh…. what on earth just happened here?"

"Team Raebingyu, you have failed your team mission! You will not be able to use the DJ desk or the stage LED."

Team Raebingyu had gone and bombed their team mission — the one with two whole items riding on it.

It wasn't that Team Raebingyu had actually done the mission wrong, though.

"Ah, from where I was standing, I'd have called this a pass. The Destis' bar seems to be set pretty high."

Team Raebingyu's mission was 'Random Play Dance.'

Probably a mission picked out because good dancer Lee Yugeon and bad dancer Lee Doha had wound up on the same team.

The songs that played were all either songs done on Miro Maze, or songs by Miro's direct sunbaes — Upia and Enderway.

Three chances total.

The first chance failed because Shin Kyungho blanked on the choreo to Miro Maze's title track 'Daylight.'

When Choi Yeonwoo asked for a verdict, the Destis — as if with one voice — shouted 'fail.'

That was where it all started going wrong.

—Yes, second try! Destis, your verdict?

—FAIL!!!

—Ah, come on, why? This is honestly straight-up unfair-hating, for real.

On Team Raebingyu's second try too, the Destis mercilessly shouted 'fail.' Sure, Jayden had been a beat late finding his spot midway through — but it was the level of slip you'd normally look past.

Yugeon, looking aggrieved, slid his sukajan halfway down off his shoulders in protest — but even then, the Destis just laughed among themselves. As if to say: no team-mission clear for you guys.

There were a handful of reasons the mood had turned this way.

For starters, of all the audiences it could have been, this one didn't happen to have many personal fans of Team Raebingyu's members in it.

Doha's and Yugeon's fan bases — the ones with the strongest cores — were mostly adults, which made it hard for them to make it out to a weekday-afternoon guerrilla concert on the outskirts of Seoul.

Jayden had climbed this far more on international-fan picks than on domestic ones from the start, and Kyungho was in the middle of losing fans in waves as burner accounts about his dating life quietly circulated.

On top of that, most of the fans in attendance didn't particularly love Team Raebingyu.

Shin Kyungho — a trainee who'd already gone and set off dating-burner rumors of all things — went without saying.

And Jayden — whose overseas fans were constantly picking fights along the lines of why do they discriminate against Jayden? — didn't have great domestic opinion either. Even though Jayden himself hadn't actually done anything wrong.

Lee Doha — good at rap, bad at dance — sat in a 'not exactly my kid, but he'll probably debut anyway, right?' zone,

and Yugeon — who at least had every kind of stan-fodder stuck all over him — got wildly split reactions.

Which was why, when the outcome 'team mission failed' came out for the first time, the majority of Destis found it entertaining.

I mean, come on. The team my ult's on — sure, I'd want to make sure they walked away with every item. But this team isn't that team.

And from a variety-TV standpoint, how funny is a situation where a team-mission fail costs them two whole items? On top of that, watching the trainees look deflated or aggrieved and grovel at the Destis for a pass had its own kind of cuteness that was fun to watch.

And finally, in the hearts of a few who'd been out on the idol stone-plaza long enough to consider themselves veterans, a thought started stirring and lifting its head — no way they'd actually not give it, right?

The kind of people whose views ran close to a conviction that these survivals are all rigged anyway held a groundless faith that even if they shouted 'fail' this time, production would end up fixing it one way or another.

And, because all of these reasons had lined up together….

—Fail!

—No wait — they haven't even properly danced yet, how is this a fail, seriously.

—Fai—l~~~

In the end even the third attempt — the last chance — went sailing out as a fail.

Being the final attempt, Choi Yeonwoo asked for the verdict again and again, and a few Destis, reading the room, did shout 'pass.'

But once the loud minority took hold of the mood and started leading the crowd, the general audience got swept into that current very, very easily.

And just like that, Team Raebingyu had lost both the 'stage LED' and the 'DJ desk.'

When Choi Yeonwoo delivered the final verdict, a stir ran through the Destis — as if they hadn't actually thought it would end this way. A realization arriving far too late, of course.

"Still — this time, the Destis' bar was set pretty high too, honestly. At the MC's discretion — if you clear all your personal missions, I'll make it so you can still earn back the remaining two items. Destis, sound alright?"

""Yes~!!""

""No way!""

"Ah, that's not fair! Just do it without them!"

Choi Yeonwoo, invoking 'MC's discretion,' had smoothly conjured up a workaround — but a handful of people, still lost in the fantasy of me, the one directing this delightful moment, kept shouting at full volume.

Unable to watch any longer, production briefly cut the recording and issued a warning to the audience about their individual heckling.

But — the hour, well into the evening.

The crowd, hundreds of people now, swollen far past its size at the start.

Trying to get the mob psychology of that many people gathered in an open space under control was—

—dishearteningly, not nearly as easy as saying it made it sound.

"That kind of stuff, there or not — your stage is boring either way~"