Andy grinned as he stepped inside and let the door click shut behind him. “Okay, guys. Listen up." Everyone practically froze in place as all eyes turned to him. Perfect. “So, we gotKingmaker. The biggest, baddest, most legendary song on the list.” He let that hang in the air for a beat so their new reality could sink in. "Andyou know what?" he continued, letting his growing fire warm his voice and put a twinkle in his eye, knowing his speech would absolutely be the highlight of whatever episode it was dropped into. “I say, hell yeah. Because, out of the hundred Dream Boys in this building, I know for a fact that we’re the only team that can actually handle this song.” He paused again, grins and slow nods spreading through his assembled team. “Now, who’s ready to prove me right?”
Nine hands all shot up at once, including a slyly grinning Leo, who mouthed the words, “You got this.”
Andy nodded. “Great. Let’s get to work.” He found a tablet sitting on a table in the back of the room and inserted the thumb drive, pulling up a demonstration video forKingmaker’s intense choreography. The folder contained ten printed copies of the song’s lyrics, so he handed those to Peak to pass out and started the video. Everyone crowded around Andy as the video played, the music tinny and a little bland coming from the tablet’s speakers. The show’s choreographers had taken a six-man dance performance and reworked it into ten distinct parts. The extra bodies gave the number a lot more heft, but the flow was intense. Fluid to the untrained eye, maybe. But there was zero room for sloppiness or mistakes. He played the video back twice more before gathering everyone in a seated circle in the center of the practice room.
“Now that we’ve all seen the video,” Andy began, “what are your thoughts?”
Stunned silence.
Andy chuckled. “Don’t all start speaking at once.” Kyun Woo, one of the dancers, raised his hand. Andy nodded. “Go on.”
“The full routine looks deceptively simple,” Kyun Woo said. “But it’s not. Everything depends on perfect synchronization. Especially the positioning.”
Andy nodded again. “For sure. What else? Anyone?”
“Maintaining stable vocals without a backing track will be achallenge,” Sang Chul, a vocalist and the oldest guy in the room, suggested. “Especially during the chorus.”
“I think so, too,” Andy agreed. “And I’m curious about some of the harmonies. Anything else?”
The ice formally broken, the rest of the team clamored to offer their input. The hand work looked really cool. The footwork would be hard to master. The tough-looking, almost angry facial expressions would be, too. Andy nodded along, letting his team verbally wrap their heads around the challenges that lay ahead. It wouldn’t be easy–not even a little bit–and he wanted them to understand that before they even started rehearsing.
“Let’s talk about parts,” Andy finally announced, grabbing the folder and pulling out the notepad and marker. He began making a list, starting in English before scratching it out and changing to Hangul. Vocal One, Vocal Two, Rap One, Rap Two, Dance One, etc., continuing through all ten parts. “Here’s all the positions we need to fill. Which ones do you want?”
Min Jun raised his hand. “I’m sorry, sunbaenim. Are you not assigning our parts?”
Andy chuckled. “No way. I may be the team leader, but we’re still a team. So, I'm not assigning any of the parts. We're gonna build this performance together. You all know your own strengths, so let's figure out who fits where.”
As before, Andy’s announcement was met with a roomful of startled, slightly confused stares. He just sat there, grinning, as he waited for someone to take the plunge. Hyun Woo broke first.
“Vocal One has a lot of high notes and needs a lot of power. It should go to Min Jun.”
Put on the spot, Min Jun humbly bowed. “I’d be honored.”
“That’s good,” Andy agreed. “And I could take Vocal Two.”
A chorus of nods, and several other hands shot up. Sang Chul and Dong Yoon took on the Sub Vocal parts. Peak and Leo briefly debated the two rap parts, settling on Peak taking the more aggressive first rap verse and Leo the more complex,lyrical second verse. Once Hyun Woo and the other dancers divided up their parts according to their strengths and preferences, they’d nearly finished.
“Okay,” Andy said, glancing at the list. “That just leaves the Center position and the killing part, the bridge.” He looked up. “I was thinking we could–”
“You should take them,” Leo announced. Everyone turned to him. “Look,” he continued, leaning forward. “Let’s be real about the game we’re playing here. We’re Team Two. Our captain is the number two-ranked guy in the entire competition. The cameras will be on him. The Dream Makers will be watching him. The whole story of this mission is our team versus Min Jae’s team.” He made a point of meeting everyone’s gaze in turn. “If Andy isn't in the center, it looks like we don't have faith in our own leader. It makes us look weak. We have to put our ace out front. It has to be Andy.”
“He’s absolutely right,” Sang Chul confidently agreed. “Andy should take the bridge. The killing part needs to be delivered by the person with the most impact.”
Andy frowned, examining the faces of his teammates for their motivations. “I don’t know, guys.”
“Sunbaenim,” Min Jun said, a hint of playfulness in his voice, “it was your idea to let us all decide the parts. This is what we want.”
Andy snorted into a chuckle. He couldn’t deny that logic. Just like he couldn’t deny Leo’s. Andy wanted his team to win. And they wanted to win, too. “Well, shit. You got me there. Okay. I’ll do it.”
They shifted into a dance rehearsal after that, propping the tablet on the floor against the mirrored wall to watch as they mapped out their parts, the first tentative steps into a long, grueling week. Andy’s days soon began blending together. Starting out, he was always the first one in the practice room every morning, making sure everything was set for the day. Butthe others soon got the hint. They had no other reason to be at Sky Village. Nothing else they could’ve done would be more important. Not even sleep, since Andy usually kept them there long after the camera crews had wrapped for the night. He knew his fire could only keep them warm for so long. They’d need to add some fire of their own to forge themselves into a winning team.
That started in the vocal booths. Min Jun had the voice of an angel, but he lacked the confidence and, more importantly, the training to properly hit the high notes. When his voice started cracking, Andy stepped in, not as team captain, but as the instructor he’d been for years, running him through breathing and vocal exercises, teaching him to understand his power and range. When Min Jun finally nailed the notes–pure, powerful, and sustained–the look of shocked triumph on his face was a bigger victory for Andy than any field day prize.
The rap line found their groove soon after. While the dancers rehearsed, Leo and Peak regularly haunted the far corner of the practice room. Leo would be hunched over his notebook, his sweat-covered brow furrowed as he tweaked and played with the rhythm and rhymes of his verse, finding the perfect blend of timing and flow. Peak would be on his feet beside him, a barely-contained bundle of kinetic energy, coating the mirror with spray as he literally spit his rhymes, sharpening his diction as he wrestled with some impressive runs.
Through it all, the dancers drilled and drilled. Late one night, during a grueling session, their exhaustion started to show. Formations got sloppy. The energy–and the mood–seriously dipped. As they reset for the tenth time on a particularly complex transition, Sun Yi Zhe, an accomplished dancer and martial artist from Shanghai, completely missed his mark and ended up tangled with Seo Jin, an eager young dancer from Busan. Yi Zhe collapsed in a heap and burst out laughing. “Okay,” he admitted, out of breath. “I think my feet just revolted anddivorced my brain.” The whole room cracked up, the tension instantly broken.
As much as Andy was afraid to jinx himself, he began to admit that everything was going well. His team was only getting better. Tighter. He felt good. Confident that he’d be leading his team to an easy victory. At least, that’s what he remembered feeling on his way back from a bathroom break. Practice Room One–Min Jae’s team–was closest to the bathrooms, but its door was always closed. That evening, it was open. Naturally curious, Andy paused, glancing inside.
