Chapter 103
“Hello! I’m Kim Seungjae of Mystica!”
The band’s leader came energetically onto the stage. Unlike the rather sedate outfit from before, this one featured flashy color combinations and loose, fluttering clothes.
Of course, Mystica’s members were not handsome men with long, flowing, shaggy hair like Led Zeppelin had in those days. Some audience members did mutter, “Oh, what the hell? That’s disgusting…” but makeup techniques had advanced, apparently, and somehow they had managed to produce a look people could bear.
“What we want to show you in this performance is… early-1970s heavy metal. The period when hard rock was transitioning into heavy metal. You can think of it as a song that serves as a kind of tribute to the great forefathers of metal… something like that.”
At Seungjae’s words, cheers erupted from some of the audience. Was it because they had heard it was traditional heavy metal?
“Then we’ll begin now. Please listen to Thunderbird!!”
As the title was shouted, the song began with a rough bass riff. The hammering bass sound pounded the floor of the venue, raising the audience’s excitement.
Dragging my tired body home
Even if I sigh and blame the world
What gives me vitality every evening
Is you, waiting for me every day in the corner of that room
The drums and hi-hat were direct and powerful. The guitar riff and fast picking led the song without becoming excessive.
And the main instrument driving the song was, as the title plainly suggested, the bass. It was a monstrously powerful bass reminiscent of John Entwistle of The Who.
“Thunderbird, my friend!”
The solid vocals dominated the stage, even if they did not reach the highest register. The instruments seemed to encroach on one another’s territory, but in reality, none of them went too far. As the vocals and instruments meshed together, the audience gradually began to grow excited.
* * *
“Thank you!!”
‘They’re our enemies, but I can’t help acknowledging them.’
That was what Ayoon thought amid the rapturous audience. Heavy metal was a genre whose popularity in the Korean music market could only be described as plainly low. And the sheer tenacity that had let them make their way through the indie market with heavy metal was not something she could easily dismiss.
Those people had clearly prepared for this stage until their noses bled. There were obvious signs of it, too: dark circles from sheer exhaustion, and hands that trembled visibly even from the audience seats.
“Wow… That was truly an incredible performance. Let’s give Mystica another round of applause for showing us a stage like that!!”
Thunderous applause rang out. It was sincere applause, utterly unlike the applause when they had first appeared.
“They’re in first place?”
“Thank goodness we didn’t meet that team.”
“The next group is eliminated, right? It’s practically automatic.”
People around Ayoon were muttering like that. She wanted to scoff, but she could not quite bring herself to. Even as a Group Sound fan, she had to admit that this had been an outstanding performance.
‘Please, you guys…!’
So all she could do was pray as she watched her idols, Group Sound, come up onto the stage.
‘What are they wearing…?’
They were not wearing the casual clothes they usually wore, nor the idol-concept outfits they sometimes wore for performances. They looked like work clothes… Looking more closely, they were jumpsuits—the kind worn at work sites, with the top and bottom joined together. They were covered in various marks and had been given a slightly modified design.
What were they planning to do?
After Mystica, which had made the stage roar, came down, Group Sound prepared in a slightly solemn atmosphere as they set up their instruments. There was not much difference from usual, except that the equipment for keyboardist Hyuna had increased considerably.
Eventually, when preparations were complete, darkness descended. The stage was without a single light. In the darkness, a calm voice came through the microphone.
“Hello. We are Group Sound.”
The voice was quiet and low, but filled with confidence. Its resonance reassured Ayoon.
“Then we’ll get straight into the performance.”
‘Already?’
It was a stark contrast to the previous band, Mystica, which had begun its performance after a series of explanations.
There was no time for the audience to murmur or even think. The atmosphere spreading through the pitch-black set like fog, along with a low, droning hum and piano notes floating in from the analog synthesizer, forcibly plunged everyone into a dreamlike state.
By the time the short, clipped piano notes had begun to sound familiar, the melody entered in earnest… and the stage gradually began to brighten.
On a day blurred into the distance
Beyond the fog outside the bus,
Appearing like a heat haze,
A sea lit by dawn
Iseo sang into the mic, neatly caressing her bass. Beside her, Suyeon sat on a chair with her knees drawn up, playing a classical guitar as big as her own body. A minor-key classical guitar that sounded either lighthearted or resigned.
Even in these blurred hours
Even amid fading senses
The radiant horizon always
Shines somewhere far away
It was a song about the daily lives of people whose lives had been broken. About things everyone experienced. A story about people who did not lose hope even in lives that turned like a hamster wheel.
There was no trace of the storm-like fury of the preceding stage. Some people closed their eyes and savored the music, while others tapped their feet and enjoyed the melody.
Then the classical-guitar solo shook the audience emotionally. Its fierce yet lyrical melody, played softly, drew admiration from everyone.
“This kind of music is nice, too.”
“Is this rock as well?”
“They seem like a completely different band.”
People chatted quietly while the guitar continued playing. Yet they failed to notice.
That the atmosphere had changed before they knew it.
The pitch of the background synthesizer rose little by little. The atmosphere grew more intense. Like frogs in water slowly coming to a boil, the audience found itself watching a wave roll in from far away.
Where the dawn sea had lingered beyond that fog
That utterly silent, motionless place
Now flows—the sea and horizon alike;
Everything spills down beneath that wall
Iseo’s voice sounded as if she were suppressing half her anger. A three-voice chorus came in to fill the space around it.
Since when did we
Convince ourselves that what wasn’t there existed,
And rationalize
Our boundless despair?
What stood out was Suyeon’s voice. It rose to seemingly endless heights, expressing her anger. Anger and a sense of deprivation at discovering that the utopia they had believed they could reach someday was a lie.
Through an emotional performance so vivid it seemed as though she herself had experienced it, the audience gradually began to move according to the band’s intentions. As they waited for the climax of the building music, their anticipation slowly rose.
And what awaited them was, quite literally, an ‘intense’ electric-guitar solo.
“Rise up, you poor!”
The electric-guitar solo began with Iseo’s shout. Kiiing-! The guitar’s pitch soared to its absolute limit. The rushing bends, whammy-bar work, and vibrato kept every note in constant motion.
The audience, eroded endlessly by the notes like a pier in the middle of a stormy night, had risen from its seats without realizing it. They had watched the performance from beginning to end, so they knew this anger had been injected into them by the stage before their eyes… Yet they unconsciously came to believe that the emotion belonged to them.
And so they grew angry. At those who had stolen their hope. At those who had presented them with something that had never existed. And they expressed that emotion through action, stomping their feet to the steady beat of the drums until the song ended.
* * *
While the MC struggled to bring the audience back to normal, Myeongjeon briefly checked his guitar. His emotional, improvised playing had left the guitar in less-than-ideal condition.
“I enjoyed your performance.”
“Ah, yes.”
A voice came from beside Myeongjeon. Myeongjeon turned to look at the speaker: Kim Seungjae, Mystica’s leader and vocalist.
“Your group was good, too.”
“Ah, really? Heh-heh-heh… Thank you. It’s an honor.”
Seungjae paused and looked at his opponent. Ha Suyeon, a second-year high-school student, had been learning guitar for just under a year. According to Jung Jaehyeok, the band’s guitarist, she studied under guitarist Seo Myeongjeon.
The word genius suited her perfectly.
He had thought it would be a difficult match. Still, he had believed they had a chance. When bassist Ha Sugyeol had performed [Thunderbird], he had even thought they could win easily. It was that good a song. He had thought so even more strongly after finishing their performance. Their opponent was talented, but it would not be easy to put on a performance this good.
But that belief shattered after the solo in the first verse. It was a performance that made even the mentors and judges, who had to remain cool for the sake of evaluation, struggle to calm their emotions—and even the opposing leader himself grow agitated.
‘How far will this girl go?’
“Honestly, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried when we picked you as our opponents… But now that it’s turned out like this, I do regret it.”
Seungjae muttered that. The result had not yet been announced, but he honestly thought it would be strange if they won. At those words, Myeongjeon briefly twirled a lock of hair as he searched for words. This was not really the moment to say something like, “You shouldn’t have done something you’d regret.”
“They say there’s no winning or losing in music, but in any case, we’re taking part in an audition… So there’s bound to be a contest.”
A staff member could be seen approaching the MC in the distance, apparently after the votes had been tallied. The MC looked toward Suyeon, then nodded repeatedly as though he had expected this.
“But our lives are long. In any case, we’ll meet again somewhere, won’t we? When we do, I hope you’ll be making good music.”
There was a strangely seasoned quality to ‘Ha Suyeon’s’ way of speaking. Nodding at her words, Seungjae thought that age really was meaningless. For someone so young to have such mature thoughts… She was truly someone worth emulating.
* * *
There was no particular reason for the internet to become unusually noisy just because it was the filming day for [Invasion 2024]. After all, Invasion 2024 was ultimately a prerecorded broadcast, so the results could not be known in advance.
Audience members signed pledges not to reveal what they had seen beforehand. The combination of those pledges and the prerecorded broadcast did a great deal to prevent the results of Invasion 2024 from being spoiled.
But today was different.
The one-on-one battle format had been announced that very day. And the tantalizing prospect of a showdown between first and second place was enough to make community regulars wonder, ‘What on earth is happening in the battle right now?’
The first popular post to appear in one of those communities fueled the speculation even further.
[Mystica’s performance was insane]
Everyone’s going crazy right now
They thought they were crazy old men just because it was ’70s heavy metal, but the audience was running and jumping, and some people were even slam-dancing lol
What did it even mean that an audition-show audience had started slam-dancing? Yet the audience reports trickling in one after another were enough to make people think Mystica had beaten Group Sound.
[Are the Group Sound kids finally getting wrecked?]
Serves them right lol
[Looks-powered bubble group—guess I don’t have to watch them anymore]
Looking at the contest results, only Round 3 was a fluke; Rounds 1 and 2 were just bottom-tier.
Yet they kept getting final-boss edits because of the PD’s one-sided editing and those damn faces lol. It was ridiculous.
For the brief time after Mystica’s performance ended, people unable to learn the contest results right away spent the time relentlessly trashing Group Sound. They acted as though they had run into their parents’ killers.
The mood turned around immediately after a fancam of Group Sound’s performance was uploaded.