TeSTAR came down from the stage and sat on the talk show’s guest sofa.
But the one holding the microphone was… Cha Eugene.
‘Is that really okay??’
Even though she knew Cha Eugene was the most fluent in English, she couldn’t help worrying first.
But Cha Eugene handled it smoothly.
[Welcome! What’s your first impression of my show?]
[Hmm, it’s colorful, lively, and you seem like a great guy too~ I like that yellow tie. That’s the 127 Section logo, right?]
[Oh, thank you! This was the very first piece of official merchandise sold on the 127 Section official website on May 11. It was hard to get, and this is actually the first time I’ve worn it, for this special occasion.]
Her younger brother teased her.
“Do you understand any of that?”
Of course she didn’t.
She was just listening vaguely.
Still, the atmosphere was good.
‘Cha Eugene feels different when he speaks English.’
He seemed much more relaxed and mature.
On the screen, the brief small talk was coming to an end.
[Right, you really do look like a Californian! Now I understand. You seem like you’d like surfing, am I right?]
[Haha, is there anyone in San Diego who doesn’t?]
[Uh… in that case, hmm, you might not be very interested in this sort of thing. Yep.]
The host deliberately hunched his shoulders and looked around nervously.
Laughter burst from the audience.
[No, no, this is a different and fun experience. And 127 Section was a fun game!]
[That’s generous of you~ Good. Then shall we talk a little about your roles in the game?]
At that, Park Moondae, who was sitting beside him, immediately raised his microphone.
[Actually, we’re singers, and most of us had no acting experience. It was brief, but acting as game characters in a music video was fun and new for us.]
Clean, composed English flowed effortlessly from him.
“What the hell?”
The Kim Raebin solo fan… no, the university student who had now also become a Park Moondae fan almost shook the monitor.
“Wow, he’s fucking good at English?”
“Exactly!!”
Unlike the excited university student, who hadn’t expected his English ability, Park Moondae calmly continued the conversation on screen.
[Ah, so you weren’t the inspiration behind the companions themselves?]
[We did make the song while taking inspiration from them. This friend in particular did most of that. His name is Kim Raebin. You can call him Raebin.]
[Oh~ …Hello, Raebin? You really look like someone who composes! You have a musician’s eyes!]
[Hello.]
Kim Raebin awkwardly greeted the host on screen.
‘He made sure to bring up Raebin first.’
Even if she couldn’t follow the exact context, it was obvious enough from the video and the words she could catch.
The university student watched with satisfaction.
[What part of the characters inspired you? Whoa! That’s not an insult, it’s just a good question! Somebody tell him that!]
[Oh, his impression is a little intense, isn’t it? But if you look closely into his eyes, you can tell he has a very gentle soul!]
[He’s still scary!]
While Cha Eugene warmly approached the host, who was deeply committed to his nerdy loser persona, and defended Kim Raebin’s intimidating gaze, Kim Raebin’s answer was interpreted through Seon Ahyeon.
[He says their story had a lot of influence. ……It was a tragedy, but we tried to preserve the beauty and intensity that came from the characters’ good intentions.]
A French inflection could be heard in his speech.
‘He feels different when he uses a foreign language too?’
Just as he had been doing at official events lately, Seon Ahyeon barely stuttered even while speaking a foreign language.
Even the slight hesitations could easily be taken for shyness.
[Exactly! That’s the emotion I felt the whole time while replaying the trailer after finishing Chapter 1! Oh, now I can see your soul, Raebin!]
[Hahaha!]
Kim Raebin apparently didn’t quite understand what was going on.
He tilted his head with a blank expression.
“Ah, so cute!!”
“You think that’s cute? He looks like he’s about to shake someone down for money.”
“Shut up.”
The university student ignored her younger brother and focused on the screen.
[Then, do you perhaps have any plans for a new 127 Section OST?]
Originally, that question had been about ‘plans for the companion characters to reappear,’ but it had been revised because of TeSTAR’s earlier answers.
Park Moondae calmly gave the answer they’d prepared.
[We had a lot of fun working on the first one too, but even if a new OST comes out, I don’t think it’ll be our song.]
[Why on earth not?!]
Cha Eugene abruptly cut in.
[Because we’re curious about what kind of OST other artists might compose! You all are too, right?]
At that positive prompting, the audience automatically responded in agreement.
[Yes, yes, of course, but it’s still a shame! ‘Bonus book’ is a really good song.]
[Thank you.]
[You know what? Man, you’ve got taste! Excellent taste!]
[Me? Hahaha, that’s right!]
The host laughed at Cha Eugene’s compliment, and with that, the discussion about the game came to an end.
Only then did they exchange a few brief introductions and greetings before moving into the closing portion.
[The performance we saw earlier was fantastic, and I hear you’ve prepared another one?]
[Yes. We thought it might be good to show you one of the kinds of songs we usually perform.]
[Great, great! Then please, take it away. Andrew Band~]
As the band played preparatory sounds, the TeSTAR members rose from the sofa with smiles.
And then they began taking off their shoes.
[Oh~]
“Huh??”
“Hey, hey, didn’t they suddenly get shorter?”
The university student didn’t even have enough attention to spare to hit her younger brother for the nonsense he was talking.
Meanwhile, TeSTAR also took off the cardigans and jackets they were wearing and casually left them on the sofa.
Staff members came out and quickly removed the sofa.
That left all of them uniformly dressed in jeans and white short-sleeved T-shirts, barefoot.
Whistle!
Even the audience reacted audibly to the unexpectedly serious preparation.
Still holding the microphones they’d been answering with, TeSTAR moved smoothly into position and formed their choreography formation.
The lights went out.
Uuuu- Uu- Uuuu-
A slow, melancholy piano rose over the crackling band sound, distorted through the broadcast mix.
Then movements closer to contemporary dance began to unfold.
-Slowly sinking
Through time, through night
I don’t want to escape
Simple clothes, jazz sounds, a foreign language, and contemporary-dance choreography unfolding over a live band.
Every element created synergy, making TeSTAR’s performance look artistic rather than conceptual.
Even elements that might have felt unfamiliar or alienating here were absorbed into the whole and interpreted instead as ‘high quality.’
On top of that, the strengths of K-pop—a genre honed to the limit for the pleasure of both watching and listening—were unmistakable.
Especially when performed by a group capable of pulling it off.
And TeSTAR was exactly that kind of group.
-The midnight
When I met you
And next
Thanks to that, when the performance ended and the lights came back on, the audience was filled with the sort of applause given after a genuinely good show.
The host came bouncing out while clapping as well.
[That was nothing short of art! ‘Midnight, and next,’ from TeSTAR’s album <Time to go>. Everyone~ we’ll see you in the next segment!]
And just like that, their appearance, which had begun with ‘127 Section,’ ended with ‘TeSTAR.’
The screen changed to a commercial, but the impression left by the stage did not disappear easily.
‘They killed it.’
The university student struck the desk with her left hand, then lifted it again.
And that reaction became public opinion.
Since we’d come all the way to America, various schedules we could only do here had been arranged.
By the time we’d finished a handful of them, the episode of <Nerdy Andy Show> we appeared in had already aired.
Lying on the hotel bed, I checked Korean public opinion first.
There were several predictable articles with titles like ‘Successful Appearance, Explosive Response,’ and hmm…….
TeSTAR had even appeared in a video on a popular YouTube channel that reviewed overseas reactions.
[(Overseas Reactions) TeSTAR Gives Western Nerds a Taste of K-pop! Reaction Compilation with Korean Subtitles]
‘Guess the response wasn’t bad.’
Considering videos like that were appearing one after another, it seemed we hadn’t simply been laughed out of the room locally.
I searched for the performance videos uploaded by <Nerdy Andy Show>.
‘The views are pretty high.’
Even the one that wasn’t the 127 Section OST had a similar number of views.
I hadn’t expected that at all.
Both videos had long strings of mostly English comments, but I could get a general sense of the mood without too much trouble.
That was because I’d been studying English whenever I had spare time during these promotions.
‘It’s a Trait I got anyway. I can’t waste it.’
I had this in mind.
[Trait: International Student (A)]
-I understand exactly what you’re saying.
: Foreign-language acquisition ability +200%
Since it boosted learning speed, the faster I mastered a language, the easier it would be to swap the Trait out when the next one appeared.
Of course, I didn’t have enough time to become anything amazing.
I’d only learned enough to deliver memorized lines without sounding awkward.
‘Still, it was much faster than I imagined.’
If I’d gotten something like this back when I was still a university student, I probably would’ve locked myself in a library for half a year.
Anyway, because of that, I could roughly read the comments.
-Their strong musical identity is interesting
-K-pop? mind blown
-They’re really incredible singers, the live performance was impressive!
-I think I’ve fallen for them, the YouTube algorithm keeps leading me to new videos
-Popular opinion: TeSTAR was underrated in the K-pop world and nobody expected nerds to be the ones who finally discovered them
Aside from comments about 127 Section, that was roughly the atmosphere.
What I hadn’t expected, though, was that ‘Midnight, and next’ would appeal to the viewers of this program.
‘I thought they’d hate it for looking gay, if nothing else.’
Wasn’t that something people over there often said when they saw K-pop?
Even I knew that much.
But it seemed we’d benefited from the genre of the song.
Apparently, a lot of the viewers of this show were programmers, and this sort of lo-fi jazz had become popular in those circles.
-Added it to my coding playlist
-They look like real musicians! I wish they’d do the Fallen OST too though (laughing-while-crying emoticon)
-Good music for calming down. I’ll listen to it when I’ve been coding all night and haven’t produced a single bug. (horrified emoticon)
Read only on MUGEX
Anyway, overall…
it had been a huge success.
Just in case, I checked the Korean gaming communities too.
They had completely mellowed out.
There were even several people reminiscing nostalgically about the atmosphere around the game’s launch.
‘Drawing a clear line paid off.’
We didn’t look like we were going to drag out the OST or characters past their limits, and we’d performed the collaboration song well live, so it seemed we’d regained some goodwill.
The TeSTAR fans who had been on the verge of turning openly hostile toward the 127 Section gaming communities had also calmed down considerably.
“What’re you staring at so seriously~?”
“The internet.”
“Our performance?? Nice~”
Big Sejin, fresh from the shower, flopped onto the bed beside mine.
He’d ended up with me because we’d randomly switched hotel roommates for a YouTube upload.
‘Surprisingly, he isn’t that annoying.’
He was a little bothersome and noisy, but our daily routines were similar.
Big Sejin asked cheerfully,
“So, what do you think? Think our next album will do even better?”
“Who knows? We’ll find out when we release it.”
“Hey, at times like this, you’re supposed to say everything’s going to go amazingly~”
Big Sejin laughed brightly, then began looking at his own smartphone.
‘Well, the odds are pretty good.’
As the <Nerdy Andy Show> videos received fairly positive reviews, it was obvious that overseas K-pop fans were rapidly becoming interested in TeSTAR.
It was probably because we’d been recognized in a field that wasn’t particularly close to K-pop.
‘That’s how people are.’
At this rate, it seemed reasonable to have some expectations for the views on our next album’s music video.
I shrugged, then spoke to Big Sejin.
“I’m going to sleep.”
“Yeah, you can turn off the lights~”
I switched off the lights, lay down on the bed, and checked my smartphone again.
Now that I’d finished monitoring our own response, I wanted to see what the overall current public mood in Korea looked like.
And that’s when I found out.
While TeSTAR was gradually starting to eat into K-pop’s overseas share, a storm was brewing domestically too.
A rookie boy group’s debut song had become a massive hit on the digital charts.
It belonged to Goldie #1’s group, who had finally succeeded in debuting.
‘Oh.’
From what I could tell at a glance, it wasn’t quite TeSTAR-level for a debut, but it was performing extremely well on the digital charts.
The consensus was that the song itself was exceptionally good.
‘If they can maintain this momentum, they’ll succeed.’
Goldie #1 was a pretty decent guy, so that was good news.
And thinking that far made my thoughts move to something else.
My Status Abnormality.
If Cheongryeo was right, the fourth Status Abnormality I received this time would be my final mission.
And judging by how things had gone so far, it would definitely demand an even higher benchmark.
‘…Then would it be better to receive the Status Abnormality now?’
Seeing both the response coming in from overseas and a new rival rising quickly at home made me think that.
That the next year or so might end up being our career high.
Of course, we might keep growing endlessly like VTIC and become even more successful.
But in an industry environment this uncertain, I couldn’t be sure of that.
Still, this year looked almost guaranteed to go well.
‘Hmm.’
For now, I summoned the Status Window pop-up.