Chapter 49

Chapter 49. Milky-White Do Jun-hyeok

While the members rehearsed, I talked with Yoon Jin-seo.

Apparently, after seeing the ticket I'd shown him last time, he wanted to attend badly enough to obtain another ticket separately.

Blue Moon had suddenly become the number-one group.

Maybe that was why the staff treated them completely differently now.

Almost like they were living national treasures.

"They're treating you like royalty. Now I understand why people say the entertainment business is good."

Yoon Jin-seo misunderstood while watching rehearsal.

Until recently, this was a group that couldn't even get invited to events like this.

And for me, this wasn't some glamorous business empire.

I was still basically a salaried worker.

"I didn't think you'd actually come. I'm deeply honored."

"How could I receive a gift and not come? I'm already overwhelmed just thinking about finishing 〈Dragon Hunter 5〉."

"How much have you completed?"

Ninety-eight percent.

Apparently, he couldn't find the remaining two percent and was only sleeping three hours a day because of it.

Did he really think that excuse would convince me he wasn't here because he liked Blue Moon?

Yoon Jin-seo might've been an even harder-core fan than I thought.

Still, he hadn't secretly been an Apollo member before.

He'd taken half a day off and come because he had a good ticket.

Then Apollo members recognized him and treated him like a national hero.

They even gave him the fandom shirt.

Thanks to frequent news appearances and the fact that his investigation had helped Blue Moon achieve a number-one record, Apollo practically treated Yoon Jin-seo like Admiral Yi Sun-sin.

I could suddenly understand a little why the king had demoted Admiral Yi to a common soldier.

"Are you insane?! How can the closing performer fail to arrive before the closing stage?!"

A man shouted somewhere nearby.

Blue Moon's rehearsal had just ended.

We were walking over so I could introduce the members to Yoon Jin-seo.

I wanted to leave him with a good impression of Serin.

But it sounded like there was trouble with the festival.

I stopped and listened.

"I... I definitely told him more than ten times to arrive on time, and I received replies too..."

A young woman who looked like an FD quietly tried to explain herself to the K-Culture Festival director.

"Then you go grab the microphone and tell the fans yourself. Tell them Min Gyu-chan, that idiot, was definitely informed of the exact performance time but couldn't understand it and is going to be late. Let's see who the fans throw rocks at!"

The CP muttered,

"Don't make excuses."

Then he turned and walked toward us.

When he saw me, he bowed politely.

"Ah, Blue Moon's manager. You're here. Sorry you had to see that. I'm extremely busy right now... I'll greet you properly later."

"Not at all. You're working hard."

The CP left.

He was probably going to try delaying every other performance as much as possible.

The FD remained where she stood, looking like she might cry.

Then she quietly headed toward the stage.

"Brutal, right? This is the reality of broadcasting."

When I said that, Yoon Jin-seo trembled like a middle-school student waiting to be hit.

Once the actual event began, Yoon Jin-seo went to his excellent VIP seat.

I caught a glimpse from backstage.

Seeing one person in a Blue Moon fandom shirt leave his group and sit alone in the VIP section was pretty funny.

That man probably didn't even know the fan chants.

Too bad I couldn't sit beside him and watch him panic.

"Ugh... The stage is huge. I'm nervous. So nervous!"

Blue Moon's turn was next.

Anna, shivering behind the stage, spoke.

They had performed on 〈Music Bang Bang〉.

But that happened inside a broadcasting-station theater.

It wasn't remotely this large.

Anna wasn't the only person trembling backstage.

The FD who'd been brutally scolded earlier was also shaking as she stared anxiously toward the crowd.

It was okay.

It was okay.

The CP was deliberately delaying every stage by two minutes.

There was a reason he'd reached CP level.

He was good at cleaning up his subordinates' mistakes.

"Wall... Please hold. Hold..."

Still, the FD looked ready to cry.

What did she mean, wall, hold?

I walked over.

"Is there a problem with the event?"

"Ah... over there."

The FD pointed past the stage like a rookie general commanding a siege.

Fans had left their seats and packed themselves against a temporary wall.

They were pushing it with their bodies.

When I looked closely, the wall was swaying.

Dangerously.

"Am I seeing things... or is that wall moving?"

"Yes. It's a temporary wall. There's steel inside, so if it falls, it'll be a disaster. What do we do...?"

I looked again.

Just as she said, it was shaking like an earthquake had hit.

The wall separated the stage from the audience.

Overexcited fans were pushing forward.

But the wall itself wasn't the biggest problem.

When crushing accidents happened in dense crowds, people were usually crushed between other people, not between people and walls.

By the time visible structures began moving from pressure, people inside the crowd were already under dangerous compression.

The FD was simply praying for the wall to hold.

But we had already passed the point where prayer was enough.

One wrong movement and it could collapse.

And many people in the crowd were probably already struggling to breathe.

"That was Triple Boys with their charming performance! Next is the group that has completely transformed with a brand-new image! Blue Moon!"

The MC's voice thundered through the venue.

"Blue Moon, get on the lift immediately! This way!"

Staff guided Blue Moon toward lifts beneath the stage.

The entrance was designed so the members would rise dramatically from below.

They swallowed their nerves and stepped onto the lifts.

It was a huge stage.

But there was no way we could continue like this.

People's lives were at risk.

I grabbed Serin before she stepped fully onto the lift.

"Serin. Let's delay the stage."

"What? Can we?"

I told the members to return to the waiting room.

Like always, Serin didn't argue.

She simply agreed.

"What are you doing? They need to go up now! We can't delay this much!"

"Exactly. The longer we wait, the more excited the audience will become."

Staff tried to stop me.

The FD's pupils kept trembling.

Then she supported me.

"The wall really does look dangerous..."

We couldn't keep delaying aimlessly.

I pushed the members toward the waiting room.

Then I stepped onto the lift myself.

"That wall is going to collapse. We need to disperse the people. Go to the waiting rooms and start moving the participating idols outside the venue. Their fans will follow and the crowd will spread out."

"What are you going to do up there?"

The FD asked.

I had no idea.

I would beg people to move.

Plead.

Shout.

Whatever worked.

When I explained, the FD almost impulsively pressed the lift button.

As it rose, I kept talking.

"If the fans all leave at once, we could get traffic accidents outside. Tell the others to prepare road control."

〈N.Dolphin〉's intro began playing as the lift rose.

Fine.

I had a microphone.

When I suddenly appeared onstage instead of Blue Moon, the fans murmured in confusion.

Then the Apollo members gathered in the distance began shouting.

"Huh? Waaaaah! Do hyung! Do hyung! Do hyung!"

From the VIP section, Yoon Jin-seo stared at me like I'd lost my mind.

Once Apollo began chanting Do hyung, other fans started joining in.

"P-Please listen to me for a moment! This is an emergency."

"Do hyung! Do hyung! Do hyung!"

"So handsome!"

These people had lost their minds.

Then again, fans had come here specifically to lose their minds.

Expecting rational behavior might've been unfair.

"Everyone on the left side of the audience! That wall is about to collapse! Move away from it!"

Only then did the crowd quiet down.

Fans near the left looked at the temporary wall.

Even if they realized it might fall, they couldn't easily move.

The venue was completely packed.

There was nowhere to go.

We needed an orderly evacuation.

"We need to create space! Starting from the people seated at the very back, please leave the venue first! That's the only way to open space!"

Right then, security guards rushed out from backstage and grabbed my shoulders.

I'd told them to control the roads.

Of course.

Why would they listen to some random outsider?

Still, they never got the chance to simply drag me away.

One of the huge sheet-metal panels covering the steel frame of the temporary wall suddenly fell.

"Aaaah!"

Dozens of people disappeared beneath it.

Fortunately, the entire wall hadn't fallen.

And as far as I knew, those panels weren't the heaviest building materials.

But the reactions of the people beneath it looked far worse than expected.

The crowd screamed and began panicking.

People at the very back finally started leaving the venue.

Everything became chaos.

I once again told the guards to control the roads.

They realized this was no time to worry about chains of command.

They grabbed their radios and hurried backstage.

I called 119 while waiting for more space to open.

Then I jumped down toward the left side of the stage where injured people were crawling out from beneath the panel.

"What happened?"

Yoon Jin-seo hurried after me.

"I don't know. Looking at the exposed steel frame, it isn't that light. Maybe it was installed badly... More importantly, there are probably already people injured from crowd pressure."

I moved injured people away from the wall and sat them down on chairs.

They needed hospitals.

But nobody looked immediately life-threatening.

Then, with the staff arriving late, we lifted the panel.

There was brief disagreement over whether we should move it.

But the edges were sharp and the panel was flat.

Removing it quickly would buy time for first aid.

Even with ten people lifting, including me and Jin-seo, it was extremely heavy.

It was only "light" compared to other wall materials.

For a person trapped underneath, it was absurdly heavy.

Once we moved it, we found more people with serious injuries than expected.

We carried them farther away and seated them while waiting for ambulances.

As the emergency response was nearing completion, we found one final injured person lying completely still.

They wore a blue Blue Moon fandom shirt.

Probably a high school student.

An Apollo member.

"The arm is completely broken!"

Yoon Jin-seo shouted after examining the fan.

The arm really had broken completely.

A small amount of blood was leaking from it.

Considering the size of the injury and how little blood was flowing, the heart might've stopped.

I checked the pulse.

No breathing.

No pulse.

"Jin-seo. Stop the bleeding on that arm somehow. We're starting CPR."

"A-All right."

Yoon Jin-seo suddenly removed his shirt.

He wrapped it tightly around the fan's arm.

The man's muscles were surprisingly solid.

Now I understood why he'd chosen his shirt as the bandage.

Once I confirmed the bleeding was controlled, I began CPR.

I could vividly feel the fan's ribs cracking beneath my hands.

Crack.

Crack.

About five minutes into CPR, I saw an ambulance in the distance.

It was plowing through plastic audience chairs as it approached.

Other injured people hurriedly stood and made way so the unconscious fan could be transported first.

"W-What happened here?"

The ambulance driver got out looking confused.

"I told you over the phone. Didn't I say a wall collapsed?"

The driver answered.

"I didn't hear anything about that. I was only told to bring that person here..."

He pointed toward the back compartment.

What the hell was he talking about?

The rear door opened.

But the person stepping out wasn't another paramedic.

Not a nurse.

It was Min Gyu-chan.

Today's scheduled final performer.

"Ugh. I almost ended up late. Why is the place so empty?"

This bastard used an ambulance as a taxi.