Chapter 88

Kang Hajin turned to Yellow Team's assigned writer and asked, in dead earnest:

"Writer-nim. I have a question."

"Yes, Hajin-ssi."

"The picture you were going for here — is this really it?"

The writer looked to where Hajin was gesturing — as courteously as a waiter showing a guest to their table at a fine restaurant.

Lee Doha, whose shoulders wouldn't fit even the largest size — who, with the zipper open all the way, still couldn't stand up straight.

Kim Wonho, one pant leg rolled up to the calf, the top slung diagonally over shoulder and side.

Lee Yugeon, pants so short his ankles were on full display, face half-buried in a zipper cranked all the way up.

And when she looked over, she saw Kang Hajin right beside her, jersey slipped halfway off and hooked over one arm, looking back at her.

And the sight was, frankly….

"Ah…."

Extremely funny!

Fiercely handsome kids sprawled on the gym floor in bright-yellow tracksuits — the visual was really something!

"L-like baby chicks?"

"Not Br*ce Lee?"

"…ahhh."

"Writer-nim, that's the reaction of someone who just realized something."

Thankfully, the team uniforms were windbreaker material, in a yellow-and-white combo. So it wasn't quite the skin-tight look he'd feared, but the writer had to admit the overall picture wasn't exactly harmonious.

There was, of course, a reason behind it all.

"I mean, I'd like to swap them out for you… but the only remaining uniforms are either these or black, and the main PD said this team in black would be even worse, so…."

Hajin wanted to fire back, 'What's wrong with black? Black is what 80 percent of Korean men wear!' — but held his tongue. Because he understood PD Kwon's reasoning perfectly.

'They'd look like literal children of the darkness in black….'

The gist being — better cute gangsters than actual gangsters.

Unable to find a counterargument, Hajin moved on to his next prepared complaint.

"But couldn't we use a bit of a balance patch here? Feels like our team's a little too heavy on the physical types…."

Team composition, in other words.

If even one or two softer-image teammates were mixed in, that colossal cognitive dissonance might get chipped away a bit.

Fortunately they already had Seo Taehyun somehow pulling it off — just swap someone in for Dan Haru or Yuki and….

"Ah! Don't worry about that. You've got Taehyun-ssi on Yellow Team, right?"

The writer laughed brightly and answered without missing a beat.

At the sight of her flashing a thumbs-up on top of it all, Hajin fell silent.

One fact even Hajin, who'd watched every episode of Boys of the World, already knew—

"Taehyun-ssi is really, really bad at sports, so we're covered!"

Seo Taehyun was tragically un-athletic. (He'd been famous since Boys of the World for clocking 18 seconds in the 100m.)

Having gotten precisely nowhere, Hajin somberly accepted reality and shrugged the bright-yellow jersey back into place.

'Fine. If it's come to this, turn crisis into opportunity.'

If he couldn't avoid it, Kang Hajin decided to enjoy it. He'd wring every last drop out of this that he could.

Framed that way, this lineup wasn't half bad.

'Boost Lee Doha's trust, scope out Kim Wonho as a Comrade recruit, get on speaking terms with Lee Yugeon.'

Land even one and he'd get his money's worth.

It wouldn't be easy mid-filming, but as far as airtime went, he had an ace up his sleeve. Hajin gave a sleazy little smile and looked over at Taehyun, sitting next to him.

"……? Wh — what's up?"

Taehyun — who'd been waving a balloon-stick cheerstick — felt the gaze and jerked backward with a flinch.

Undeterred, Hajin — with a look of fond approval — patted Taehyun's carefully-set curls, gently enough not to muss them.

"Taehyun-ah. Grandpa's counting on his grandson."

"C-counting on what? Don't look at me like that."

"I trust our broadcast-genius Taehyun-i to handle everything."

Broadcast-wise, Seo Taehyun would take care of it — meaning I coast today and get to work collecting Selreg intel!

---

Or so he'd thought!

"Alright, today each team captain has a special authority! That being: the right to send players in!"

He'd been fully planning to coast!

"Captains, send out the players best suited to each event and rack up as many wins as you can! The championship team gets showered with amazing benefits!"

That was where Seo Taehyun's eyes lit up.

"But wouldn't it be too boring if that's all?"

"So, by the power vested in me as special MC — I just now! added another rule~"

"To the captains of the teams that come in first in each event, we're granting the right to name one player from an opposing team who has to play in the next event!!"

Nam Daun winked bright as anything and, just like that, shattered the happy little loop Hajin had been running — 'still, there are four teammates, plenty of other people they can send in besides me.'

And the result.

"Kangha-hyung, are you actually using your feet for jokgu? Ah, wait — jokgu is a foot game by default."

"……."

Kang Hajin. (Age 20, in the tender bloom of youth. Regressor.) Currently pulling off the astonishing feat of forced attendance in all 5 events run so far!

"HEY!!!! Kang Hajin, you said you were on the track team in elementary school!!!!! Get it together!!??"

"Ah~ overcome with frustration, Yellow Team's Captain Seo Taehyun has finally dropped the honorifics on player Kang Hajin!"

"I've been thinking this since a while back — Taehyun-i really has a set of pipes on him."

"Right? Good thing they picked such a remote location! Kudos to the production!"

The MCs on play-by-play were somehow more infuriating than the fuming Seo Taehyun himself.

Hajin clumsily raised a foot to meet the ball that was unmistakably flying straight at him, but it caught the tip of his shoe at a weird angle and went veering off into the distance.

As another point slipped away and the scoreboard flipped again, Seo Taehyun was now clutching the back of his neck like he was about to keel over from it.

System expresses regret over the Fixed Regressor's hopeless jokgu skills…. (;´ Д `)

'That's rich, coming from the guy who slapped an athletics penalty on me?'

That was just a joke, though? ( -_・)?

This little shit…?

But Thirteen — as if it couldn't let an opportunity like this pass — spent a solid while taunting the wiped-out Hajin before vanishing. It clearly meant to collect on every bit of swindling and browbeating it had endured up to now.

"Ah~! Captain Seo Taehyun. He's finally asking for a substitution!"

"Wouldn't it have been better to sub him out from the start if it was going to come to this, Caster Nam Daun?"

"A player designated by the opposing team has to remain in the match for a set duration, so for Captain Seo Taehyun, I think this was the best call available. But the point gap from Kang Hajin's turnovers is going to sting."

They were really having a great time with this.

On his way back to his team's side, Hajin threw the commentary booth a pointed glare for good measure. But he didn't even have the strength for it, so he knit his brow and let it drop.

Back at their side, Seo Taehyun held out a towel and iced water and let out a sigh.

"This is an insult to the nickname 'wall-hopping captain.'"

"Taehyun-ah, sometimes hyung finds life really hard."

"Can you not see the one having a hard time right now is our team's scoreboard, thanks to you?"

"…I gave it my best, believe me."

Now — in his defense.

Kang Hajin's athletic ability was, by no means, subpar. On the contrary, compared to most people, you'd call it well above average. His parents had been athletic, and he'd enjoyed sports himself.

With one exception: ball sports. To be precise — the ones played with the feet.

'That trash senior fuck rode my ass because I couldn't play soccer.'

Your senior loves soccer, and you can't play? That was a crime. Ergo, Kang Hajin was a criminal. He was good at everything else, of course, which spared him getting written off as a total lost cause.

—You handle your body just fine, so why do your feet turn into flippers the second there's a ball involved?

That was the line another senior he'd been on good terms with used to say to him, marveling at it. But from Hajin's side, there'd been plenty to say back.

'When was I ever supposed to get the chance!'

Kang Hajin was the type who — while everyone else went out to the schoolyard after lunch — headed to the practice room. Sometimes the trainees would play one-bounce or ball games among themselves, but bastards who wouldn't even practice with him were never going to let him in on that.

And, tragically, every event run so far had been a foot-based one!

'Who runs FUTSAL as the opening warm-up game!'

Not standard futsal, of course — the variety-show version, played by rolling around on a pool covered in soap suds — but still….

Off the strength of that one futsal match, Hajin had been designated by the opposing teams every event since, forced into full attendance across the board.

He'd even earned himself a nickname: Yellow Team's X-man.

"Told him to play soccer and he hits home runs with the ball, told him to kick a jegi and he goes for a jump shot…."

"Ah, I said I'm sorry."

"Ugh, honestly…. It was funny, so I'll let it slide."

"Really?"

Fortunately, Seo Taehyun was every bit as fixated on airtime as he was on the benefits, so apparently Hajin's variety-show contributions counted as mitigating factors. (Being spectacularly awful at it had, in fact, been spectacularly funny.)

As if all the shrieking he'd been doing until moments ago had been an act (which it probably had been), Taehyun's expression settled back into calm.

"Well, our team's score isn't that far off anyway."

Taehyun's gaze went to the electronic board showing the team scores.

〈1st - Team Phoenix〉

〈2nd - Yellow Team〉

〈3rd - Team Lilac〉

〈4th - Team Blue Dragon〉

Astonishingly, Yellow Team was (despite Kang Hajin's insane trolling) holding 2nd place overall!

And the driver of that success was, right at that moment, over there.

"Ah~! Player Lee Doha, is he going to save that one! Truly astonishing!"

A ball that came flying in fast and bounced high found its proper trajectory off one header from Lee Doha, landing in a perfect spot to be attacked. Kim Wonho let out a satisfied whistle and delivered the finishing blow.

"Ah! Finally!! Yellow Team takes the win!!"

"Player Lee Doha is something else. He came in as a substitute and turned the score around in an instant!"

"Player Lee Doha's showing today has genuinely been astonishing~ Look at him bouncing around like that even in acupressure slippers! Honestly, on a variety show that's actually a demerit! The standard in those things is one scream per step, you know?"

The production, being dead serious about their variety, wouldn't have run plain-vanilla jokgu.

Each player had to wear a pair of shoes drawn at random, and Lee Doha had drawn acupressure slippers.

A textbook variety-show cheat item — the kind where just wearing them was supposed to send pins-and-needles through your whole body!

And yet Lee Doha himself was calmly high-fiving the other members and heading back to their side with a perfectly serene expression.

Taehyun jerked his chin at Doha with a deeply satisfied smile.

"Who'd have guessed Doha-hyung was a former athlete."

"…tell me about it."

Lee Doha, who clearly had good athletic instincts even at a glance, turned out to be — of all things — the youngest son of a gym owner.

Apparently, right up until he started seriously pursuing music, his father had tried to steer him into sports by putting him through every discipline under the sun.

True to that account, Lee Doha had been putting up unmatched results at this field day. Hajin being drafted into every event was, in fact, the other teams trying to hobble Lee Doha's runaway lead — enough said.

"We should've caught it when they shot his concept photos as a sportsman. Hyung's that good at sports, so why is his dancing like THAT?"

Seo Taehyun tilted his head in genuine puzzlement.

Watching Taehyun deliver, word for word, the exact line his senior used to hit him with, Hajin laughed awkwardly and downed a swig of plain water.

'The two things aren't the same thing, kid…!'

Something told him today was going to be a very, very long day.