The Maknae Has to Be an Idol

My members still looked like they couldn’t comprehend me. They stared at me like they had no clue why I needed to be captured by that man.

“What are you going to do after getting caught? And what happens if you are caught by someone like that?”

“You are going to risk your life because you have to move in unexpected ways? Let’s think of another way. There will definitely be a better method. We have made it all this way.”

“This is going too extreme, Tae-Yoon. I think it will be better for you to find another method.”

“The goal is to get caught. The system wouldn’t expect me to get caught by the truck driver and that’s the biggest crack we can make right now,” I replied to them. I thought it was natural that they were worried. I would’ve responded the same way in their positions, but I needed to do this. I couldn’t keep dragging our uncertain situation on, not knowing what was going to happen.

“I have Insight and can give orders with that. I won’t easily be beaten by him. I’m going to keep acting until the moment I’m caught and endure until there’s a big enough crack in the system. I will manage the situation, so it won’t become too dangerous.”

“…This is making me too nervous…”

“…Is this all right…?”

“No…even if you can give our orders, it’s not like Insight is all-powerful. I don’t think this is right.”

‘…They are going to flip over if they hear that I have to last until I’m on the verge of death.’ It was a lie that I just needed to get caught by the truck driver. The main action I needed to take was to push things until I was about to die, but if I revealed this part to them, I thought I wouldn’t be able to even start the operation. But I couldn’t back down just because my members were against it.

“We need to persistently dig into the system’s weak points. We can’t just be satisfied by doing the bare minimum. We need to go up and above so that it even shocks us. I think we need to take that much risk to make an impact on the system. Also, I think I can do this safely enough. Do you want to see me giving a command with Insight right now?” I asked.

“What?”

Before I even heard their reply, I gave my order. I ordered them to get up from their spots and stand in a line on one side.

“…This feels icky.”

“Are you playing with us…?”

“Don’t do this without our permission from now on.”

“You all must have realized this is how overwhelming the ability is. It can be safe. Even when the truck driver ambushed us last time, I didn’t get hurt at all and I’m fine.”

My members appeared to be a bit conflicted hearing this, and I thought I needed to push my stance further.

“I think this is our biggest opportunity yet. How long do we have to wait for the next safe opportunity to come? Ten years later? Or will it come after I regress twenty times? No, even if that time comes, is there any guarantee that it would be a safer method than the one we have right now?”

My members looked shaken by my words. There were no ‘safe’ methods to put an end to the system. Whatever method we chose, we needed to risk our lives. Yeon-Hoon’s request was for us to accomplish a couple of more death-flag missions with my members’ lives on the line until there was an opportunity for me to more safely stir up the system. Yet, I thought it was better for me to risk my life than my members’ lives. I was sick of doing missions that risked my members.

My members were still looking at me warily.

“If you all won’t help me, I will act on my own. Even if I fail and the worst comes to worst, I can just regress another time. Since I succeeded in gathering you all in the first regression, I will be able to do it faster in the second regression. So, don’t worry. We will all meet again.”

I had no intention of doing a second regression. Furthermore, it was a wonder if there would even be another regression if I died under the truck driver’s hands. Yet, I said all this to assure them.

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“Haaa…okay, I understand. You have a point.”

“Tae-Yoon, are you confident that you can gather us again in your second regression?”

“Don’t ever put yourself in a dangerous situation, okay? If you think things are going wrong, just choose to regress again.”

My members warned me again before giving permission for my plan.

“But how will we find the truck driver?” Dong-Jun asked. This was the problem. There was no clear method that I had in mind yet, and I couldn’t just recklessly wander around in search of him. If possible, I wanted to call him to us, like how the man came to find us in the parking lot. However, since I didn’t know why that man came to us in the parking lot that day, it wasn’t easy to think of a method either.

‘Didn’t we get our first win on a music show that day?’ That was the only special thing about that day. But I doubted our win was the reason why the man came to find us. After all, if he had come to find us for winning first place, he should’ve come to find us dozens of times already. Perhaps, he just happened to come to us by pure chance. Yet, I didn’t want to lean on some random probability for our plan.

“Rather than finding the man in person, I think we need to call him towards us. Does anyone have an idea on how we can do that?”

“Hm…”

“A way to call him…?”

“That’s difficult…” My members looked deep in thought, and it was then, Do-Seung suggested an idea.

“Don’t we need to make a reason for that man to come find us?”

“A reason?”

“A reason why he needs to see us this very instance. Seeing how he suddenly ambushed us at the parking lot, I’m sure he was under some kind of mission too. I mean, you said he had another system talking to him.”

It was a logical deduction. Though I simply told him that there was another system attached to the man, Do-Seung already connected the ambush incident to the system and deduced that the man must have received a mission relating to that. It appeared all those regressions weren’t for nothing. Of course, I knew that the man’s mission had been to kill me and annihilate the entire team but…

‘I hope they don’t realize this,’ I prayed inside my mind that my members won’t realize this fact.

“What could make the truck driver search for us…hm…Maybe we can ask a journalist to publish an article saying that our group is breaking up and each of us are retiring. Then, he could pop out to the scene in shock,” Woon suggested a quite provocative idea.

“But wouldn’t it be really hard to resolve the situation afterwards?”

“…That’s true.”

Yet, the scale of the proposal was too big.

“Then, how about we say that we are going on a lengthy tour? And we won’t come back to Korea for a while. Then, he could feel anxious about not clearing his mission on time and search for us,” Dong-Jun developed Woon’s idea further and proposed.

This was quite convincing. If we let it known that we won’t be in Korea for a long period, the truck driver would have less time to get rid of us. But it wasn’t like we could schedule a long tour out of the blue. It would be hard to solidify the idea into reality. Yet, another idea came to my mind.

“How about we just say that we are debuting in America? How about it?” I proposed. We just needed to spread the news that we won’t be in Korea for some time. Though it was hard for us to schedule a tour, declaring that we were going to debut in America was easy. Since our song got into Billboard just at this time, it would be quite a natural course of action.

“That’s good.”

“That will be the cleanest way of doing things.”

“Oh yeah. I should’ve suggested debuting instead of a tour.”

My suggestion seemed to please my members.

“Then, let’s discuss that with the company first.”

“All right.”

“Haaaa.”

‘…Now that we are going to do it, it scares me.’

A heavy silence filled the room. Dong-Jun bit his fingernails, Woon hugged his knees, and Do-Seung let out a deep sigh while leaning against the wall. Because whatever our plan was, in the end, it didn’t change the fact that calling the truck driver to us would put me in a precarious position. This was a plan that I forcefully pushed ahead and undertook. My members wouldn’t feel too good about that.

“You don’t regret it, right? Tae-Yoon?” Dong-Jun asked.

“There could be another way, Tae-Yoon,” Woon said while looking at me.

“There could be a better way. Think about it carefully.” Do-Seung’s eyes looked solemn.

“…I think this is the best plan we can do.” That was all I could reply. “I can no longer let the system play around with your lives.”

As Yeon-Hoon said, another chance could appear if we waited and finished a couple of more missions. It wasn’t like I knew the future. But even if a safer method came up in the future, I would choose this path. It brought me utmost stress to always have my members’ lives at risk.

“I’m also scared. Though I’m confident I won’t get hurt, it’s not like the risks are zero,” I said. Though I didn’t tell my members, I was aware that a death caused by the truck driver would be critical to me in some way. It made me more afraid because I didn’t know exactly how. Yet, I still planned to go through with the plan.

“ I will try to end this system so that this world, all the world that you all lived in, and everything wouldn’t go to waste.”

Do-Seung looked at me blankly and then asked, “Will I be overreacting to hug you in this situation?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t care. I will hug you,” Woon said and suddenly hugged me.

“Oh, what? Is this supposed to be a touching moment?” Dong-Jun came behind me and hugged.

“What? At this point, I will be the only cold-hearted one.” Do-Seung wrapped his arms around Dong-Jun and Woon, who were already hugging me. His arms were extraordinarily long. And though he wasn’t here, I thought Yeon-Hoon could be watching this scene from afar.

***

There was a single room hostel called ‘Rise to Success’, located in the less populated areas of Gangnam-gu. The place was famous among workers whose jobs were at Gangnam as a place to stay just for the night during overnight shifts.

Unlike its name, the place was used by people who had already achieved success and worked crazily for it. Since the residents only used the hostel to sleep, the place was easy to manage. And workers didn’t have to worry about residents paying rent late because most of the people using their place were company workers.

Thus, it was an easy place to work at. Yet, one of the workers who had been enjoying this easy job while studying for the exams at the same for the past years was having a headache because of one resident in the building recently.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

—Ahhhhhhhhhh!

—Fucking bastard!

—Get out! Get out! Get out!

—Ahhhhh!

—Gasp!

—Haaaaa!

Strange screams came out of the room from afternoon to evening. When the guest had first signed up for this place, he had exuded a dark atmosphere, but the worker had simply brushed off the matter, thinking it was another man exhausted from his work. Yet, the first impression the man gave on the signing day was simply a foreshadow to the upcoming nightmare he would bring.

Though he didn’t get any complaints yet since most of the residents here came late in the night and collapsed to sleep, it was a huge problem for someone who was supposed to be the manager of this place.

“Please protect me God…Please look over my soul and body as hardships come my way…”

Bang!

Bang!

“Hmph!” It twisted and turned a person’s heart to stay stuck 24 hours in the same place with someone who was clearly not in their best mental state. He feared that if he told the guest to leave, he would seriously get stabbed by a knife. But enduring day by day like this was another torture in itself. Yet, the worker wondered if he would be able to get another sweet part-time job like this if he quit.

Boom!

It was then he heard a bigger sound than usual. He opened the management room’s door and slightly arched his head out.

Gasp!

The door of the room the guest in question was staying was wide open. The problematic guest walked towards the entrance door. He had long, unkempt hair tied sloppily behind his head, and he aggressively scratched his bloodshot eyes with his rough fingers. The worker quickly pushed his head back inside, hoping to not meet the man’s eyes.

‘Please go. Please just leave without saying anything. And if you are leaving, please never come back,’ the worker prayed to himself and waited till the man completely left the hostel.

“Haaa. He’s gone.” The man was outside. The worker could finally have some peace of mind at least until the man came back. He leaned his body back into the chair and pulled out his phone. After going through that ordeal, the worker thought he would just surf through his phone for an hour and then study afterwards. He habitually went into Utube and saw the eye-catching thumbnail that was at the top of the page.

“What? How long has their song been in Billboard that they are already debuting in the US?”

—Siren, debuting in the U.S.! Their Goal is to get first place in the Billboard Hot 100? Check out these explosive responses!!

The video was about the biggest boy group in the nation right now, Siren. This sort of exaggerated news always caught viewers’ clicks and was already circulating around the web.