Kim Raebin was injured during the second recording after the stage rehearsal.
While performing the difficult group movement in Seon Ahyeon’s part, he had been lying at the very edge of the formation. As he stretched out his leg to get up, his foot struck one of the stage structures.
The stage being smaller than expected was what caused it.
…It was even smaller than they told us.
Sure, the stage set off to the side of an English-language talk show like this was inevitably small for a group performance, but we had already shortened our choreography routes to fit that.
It wasn’t like Kim Raebin went outside his assigned path.
In other words, those bastards had given us the wrong information, and now the kid’s foot was wrecked because of it.
Fuck.
No.
Let’s not decide it was wrecked yet.
There was blood because of the bruising, but it might not be as severe an injury as it looked.
“Raebin-ssi, can you move your foot?? Don’t actually move it, just tell us if it feels like you can!”
“…I can, but it hurts. It h-hurts……”
“We’ll stop the bleeding first!”
After receiving first aid, Kim Raebin was taken to the hospital in an ambulance.
The rest of the members were able to follow after briefly sorting out the situation.
There was no way we could resume filming the stage anyway, so the first take had more or less been forcibly fixed as the version that would air.
And soon enough, we received the conclusion.
“Two weeks?”
“That’s the minimum. And that’s only if he stays still while wearing a brace. Dancing is obviously impossible.”
“……”
The company employee who came out of Kim Raebin’s hospital room explained everything hurriedly through an interpreter.
The diagnosis was ligament damage.
And a cracked bone, along with torn skin.
…We avoided the worst.
If it had been a full fracture or rupture, the time he couldn’t stand onstage would’ve jumped into the range of several months.
Of course, the current situation was still bad.
“They said choreography as intense as ‘Procession’… We’ll have to watch his progress for at least a month before talking about that again.”
That essentially confirmed Kim Raebin wouldn’t be able to do choreography for the rest of this promotion.
It was exactly the sort of bad luck you didn’t want for a song that placed more emphasis on performance than anything else.
Is there some damn curse on America or what.
It wasn’t even funny anymore how we’d been taking turns ending up in hospitals ever since last time.
I kept my mouth shut.
Ryu Chungwoo carefully asked the company employee a question.
“Did they mention any possible aftereffects?”
“No. It doesn’t seem to be that severe.”
“……Whew.”
I saw Ryu Chungwoo let out a relieved breath.
The others finally looked slightly reassured too.
Cha Eugene, in particular, looked close to crying.
“C-Can we go in and see Raebin now…?”
“Yes, yes. The doctor just left.”
It would’ve been ridiculous to come all the way to the hospital and leave without even seeing his face.
We opened the hospital-room door and went inside.
“……Raebin?”
Kim Raebin was sitting on the hospital bed with a somewhat blank expression.
His injured foot had been fixed in an elevated position.
The moment Kim Raebin turned toward us, Big Sejin quickly spoke.
“Raebin, how’s the pain in your foot?”
“Yes. But the stage……”
“You don’t need to worry about it, okay? We just talked to them. They said if you endure for two weeks, you can go back onstage. It’s nothing serious~”
But even at Big Sejin’s words, Kim Raebin seemed to have sensed how serious the situation actually was.
He might be oblivious when it came to interpersonal subtleties, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t understand how work situations functioned.
Still, I hadn’t expected him to react this badly.
Kim Raebin’s eyes filled with tears.
Then huge drops began falling one after another.
“I’m sorry…… If I-I’m absent for two whole weeks……”
“Hey, what are you talking about~ Two weeks goes by fast! We already did the comeback stage, so what are you worried about?”
“Sejin’s right, Raebin. It wasn’t your fault in the first place. Just focus on getting better. Okay?”
“……Yes.”
Sniff.
Kim Raebin tried to hold back his tears while sniffling.
Suppressing a sigh, I pulled a tissue from the box on the table and handed it to him.
I didn’t feel particularly good about any of this.
“Don’t think about anything else and just rest!”
“Rest, idiot!”
Since there was no point in Kim Raebin staying alone at the hotel during our U.S. schedule, he decided to remain at the hospital for about two days where he could receive proper care.
The members loudly reassured him one last time and closed the hospital-room door behind us.
Only then did the conversation return to reality.
“We’ll have to divide Raebin’s parts, right?”
“We will.”
Ryu Chungwoo folded his arms and gave a bitter smile.
“We’ll have to learn new stage routes from scratch too.”
“Well, jet lag means we can’t sleep anyway. Might as well do it~”
“……”
Bae Sejin’s face seemed to turn completely white, but he didn’t say anything.
Apparently, he felt too guilty complaining about extra choreography practice when one of the members had an injured foot.
Compared to Idol Inc., that was tremendous growth.
Now everyone’s going to be exhausted.
Kim Raebin would be mentally exhausted.
The rest of us would be physically exhausted.
Emotionally, I wanted to leak to some media outlet, whether here or in Korea, that this accident happened because the talk show’s communication had been careless.
Because it pissed me off.
But I can’t do something like that recklessly.
This was our first appearance on an English-language talk show without anything like a game collaboration attached to it.
Avoiding unnecessary noise was the correct move.
Still, that didn’t make it any less infuriating.
What kind of nuisance was this?
Do we need to get even bigger?
The problem was that I couldn’t even guess how much bigger we’d need to become before boycotting an overseas talk show would actually hurt them.
I sighed and pushed the useless thoughts away.
Let’s just practice.
It looked like we had come all the way to another country only to fall into choreography hell again.
While TeSTAR was reorganizing its performance because of the injury issue…
Back in Korea, Golden Age—the group belonging to Ha Iljoon, whom Park Moondae called Goldie #1—was finally beginning to spread through the idol-listener community by word of mouth.
-The second I heard the chorus my heart started pounding
-We can’t let people call this a hidden masterpiece years later, let’s go lol
-It won’t leave my head. Countdown until it becomes a CSAT-banned song has begun (location: inside my brain)
What was interesting was that these so-called K-pop listener netizens actively wanted Golden Age’s new song to do well.
Golden Age was still the underdog, not yet firmly established, and thanks to Choi Wongil and Goldie #1, the group had gained an image of having suffered through a lot.
On top of that, the song was genuinely good.
Helping it achieve respectable results felt a little like carrying out justice, which people found entertaining.
Of course, most of it was nothing more than talk driven by curiosity.
But Golden Age’s agency didn’t miss the timing.
They combined WeTube promotion with all sorts of SNS viral marketing.
And the effort to raise the group’s public exposure was carried out with enough sense not to feel unnatural.
Eventually, it worked.
[Golden Age Hi Goody Challenge]
On a certain platform for short videos, a simple dance using the song started catching on.
Thanks to that, Golden Age’s digital track began climbing back up the rankings at a rapid pace.
-Holy shit it’s at 26 now
-Daebak
-Go higher, congrats congrats~
-They kept forcing viral marketing everywhere and finally succeeded in PR-ing their manufactured reverse climb. Congrats~
└The jealousy is insane
└Looks like that fandom
Meanwhile, the TeSTAR fandom, which under ordinary circumstances might’ve pushed back against this momentum, was in a bit of chaos.
-Fuck, what are we going to do about Kim Raebin’s foot? Company, please die for pushing ahead without changing the choreography
-Right before the overseas stage tooㅠㅠ I’m so disappointed and worried, I’ve been completely out of it all morning
-I’m worried our baby bunny Raebin is blaming himself even now. Don’t worry about us and please just focus on healing your footㅠㅠ
#Raebin_GetWellSoon
-It’s kind of funny how that person isn’t injured but somehow injured their eyes all by themselves. Maybe they were distracted by dating, reasonable suspicion there
-Can’t Cha Eugene just handle Kim Raebin’s parts alone? I seriously don’t know why they had to split them with Lee Sejin too when he isn’t even a rapper…
It was because of the news of Kim Raebin’s injury.
TeSTAR’s fans were too busy worrying about the injury, regretting that they wouldn’t see the full group for a while, and dealing with the occasional trolls swirling around.
And from their perspective, it wasn’t as though checking Golden Age’s rise was absolutely necessary.
Golden Age’s somewhat belated chart resurgence had ultimately failed to enter the very top of the digital rankings due to the inherent limitations of being a rookie boy group.
Besides, TeSTAR’s new album, with its strongly Korean aesthetic, was receiving overwhelming praise.
TeSTAR’s fans were merely annoyed that every so often people would appear trying to poke at them with comments like, Isn’t Golden Age’s song better, though?
No matter how you looked at it, the gap in level between the two groups was obvious to anyone.
However…
To someone who had spent two weeks unable to promote, staring at his smartphone from either a hospital room or hotel room, the situation carried considerable meaning.
Read only on MUGEX
“Congratulations on escaping the cast~”
“Good work, Raebin.”
“No. I’m only sorry for causing trouble.”
Wearing a lighter brace than before, Kim Raebin bowed his head energetically.
He had only just managed to receive the doctor’s permission to return to the stage without choreography.
“Come on, it wasn’t trouble~ Still, hearing you’re coming back does make us feel more secure!”
“R-Right!”
“Thank you.”
The members reassured Kim Raebin appropriately, then scattered to their own hotel rooms.
We had to sleep quickly and wake up to revise the stage again, this time with Kim Raebin added back into the formation.
I tilted my head toward one door.
“This is your room.”
“Yes!”
We’d assigned the rooms arbitrarily while Kim Raebin was out for his medical examination.
It’s not like we’re staying here long anyway.
The Japan schedule was short.
I held the room door open until Kim Raebin entered, then headed to shower.
“I’m taking a shower first.”
“Yes!”
A few days of rest had apparently made him absurdly tense and disciplined.
Shaking my head, I took a quick shower and came back out.
Then I met the eyes of an extremely nervous Kim Raebin.
“……?”
He looked like he was about to drop some kind of bombshell.
Don’t tell me his injury got worse.
Since I didn’t particularly want to hear that his choreography absence would be extended even longer, I stayed silent too.
Eventually, Kim Raebin opened his mouth with difficulty.
“Um… Hyung.”
“What?”
“Even to your ears… is Golden Age’s new song a masterpiece that appeals to more people than the songs I worked on?”
“……??”
What kind of completely random topic was this?
I stared at him in disbelief.
Kim Raebin squeezed his eyes shut and began rattling off words.
“My contribution to the current performance is severely lacking, and if my involvement is also acting as a negative factor in the digital music aspect, then from now on I should refrain from composing and arranging activities and instead develop other—”
“Wait, wait. What are you talking about?”
The conversation had veered into such an absurd direction that I cut him off.
We just released a good album, so what nonsense is this?
Of course, having a self-producing member was a double-edged sword.
If they did well, it created synergy.
If they did badly, it became material for internal conflict.
It wasn’t difficult to create a frame like, This comeback’s digital performance failed because of the producing member’s stubbornness and lack of skill.
But Kim Raebin has never failed so far.
Golden Age hadn’t risen high enough to become a first-place candidate or anything, and Kim Raebin’s own form hadn’t declined.
So what the hell was this sudden nonsense?
I asked as calmly as possible.
“Why did you suddenly start thinking that?”
“While I was monitoring reactions to our digital tracks… the algorithm happened to show me a video of Golden Age’s new song, and there was a comment that had received an extremely large number of recommendations……”
“Give it to me. Let me see.”
“Yes?”
I got the video link from Kim Raebin and checked it.
[Golden Age_Hi Goody_Best Comments Compilation]
…So it was one of those comment-reaction videos.
It showed stage footage while displaying a collection of popular comments related to the song.
If public opinion toward the song was favorable in the first place, videos like this naturally selected only positive and entertaining comments.
Of course it was full of praise for Golden Age’s song.
And when that happened, wasn’t comparing them to whoever was strongest at the moment practically inevitable?
-I turned on a music show to watch TeSTAR and came to my senses chanting Hi Goody Goody
-I don’t listen to loud boy-group songs trying too hard to act cool, but I listen to Hi Goody. Song of the year
If you looked at the comments written under this video, rather than the ones shown inside it, even more blatant comparisons appeared.
Watching only this video, you could almost believe Honestly, Golden Age’s song was easier to listen to had become the dominant public opinion.
“Hmm.”
I looked away from the smartphone screen.
Kim Raebin muttered.
“…For that reason, I would like to request an objective and dispassionate evaluation.”
For crying out loud.
Is this guilt?
Kim Raebin wasn’t normally the type whose confidence in his own abilities shook easily.
Apparently, being unable to stand onstage because of his injured foot had increased the pressure he felt to excel somewhere else.
So he kept seeking out comparisons between the song released at the same time and the title track he had made.
And eventually, that had led him all the way to this conclusion.
“……”
I sat down on the bed opposite Kim Raebin.
And chose my words.
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