And now, dear readers, we pivot.
Because while one half of LEAVEN was out there living their best Seoul lives — eating premium beef, gaming at holy ground, going on disgustingly cute double dates, having poolside meltdowns over tweets, and emotionally destroying this author on a street in Gangnam with a parent reunion that I am still not fully recovered from, thank you very much —
The other half? Still on the island. Still in the trenches. Still very much in the thick of it.
And if you thought the competition had cooled down in anyone's absence?
Oh, sweet summer child.
No.
See, Foca, Tuesday and Luca had handed the reins of the evaluation process over to the trainers before heading out. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly professional. The kind of responsible delegation that speaks well of one's organizational skills.
What it did NOT do — not even slightly, not even a little — was simmer the competition down. If anything, without the direct presence of the top brass, the temperature climbed. Because now it wasn't just about impressing the people in charge. Now it was about something older, more primal, and considerably more complicated.
Proving something.
To each other.
Here's the thing about mixing veterans with beginners in any competitive environment — the chemistry is never simple. It is never just "oh how lovely, different experience levels learning from each other in harmonious collaboration." That is not how human beings work. That is not how competition works.
The day-one LEAVEN trainees and the newcomers had been circling each other since the moment the second batch arrived — perfectly civil on the surface, all cordial smiles and polite greetings and cooperative energy in the common spaces.
But in private?
Oh, in private, everyone had thoughts.
Take June, for example. A newcomer, yes — but a newcomer who had already lived an entire industry arc before setting foot on this island. A shunned idol making a comeback. Everyone knew the story. Everyone understood the weight of it, the complexity of it, the particular specific kind of resilience it took to come back at all.
And genuinely? All of that was fine. All of that was valid.
But.
When you are a day-one trainee — some of whom had only just begun training when they first joined LEAVEN, who had been building from scratch, brick by brick, sweat by sweat — and you look across the room at someone who has years of professional performance experience already installed in their body?
The thought arrives. Uninvited. Persistent. Hard to argue with.
How are we supposed to compete with that?
It wasn't resentment, exactly. It wasn't malice. It was just — the deeply human, completely understandable math of fairness being run in real time and coming up uneven.
And so the invisible wall went up. Polite on the outside. Tense on the inside. The kind of division that everyone pretends isn't there, which is precisely what makes it louder.
The tension, as tension always does when left unaddressed, built. Quietly. Steadily. With great and patient commitment.
And then the first evaluations of the second half of LEAVEN arrived.
Which — and here is where the people running this program demonstrated that they were not, in fact, naive about any of this — the groups had been predetermined. Very deliberately so. No clustering. No safe havens. Every group was assigned at least one or two newcomers, woven directly into the fabric of the existing trainees whether anyone liked it or not.
Because comfort zones, as any good trainer knows, are where growth goes to take a very long nap.
The message was clear, even unspoken:
Figure it out. Together. Starting now.
And the tension that had been quietly building for weeks?
Finally had somewhere to go.
****
And among those newly shuffled groups, there was one where Zen found himself standing alone in a way he never had before.
For the first time in the entire competition — since the very beginning, since before the beginning — he had been separated from Yen.
His twin. His voice. The person who had always been the bridge between what Zen needed to say and the world that needed to hear it.
Zen's selective mutism had never been an obstacle in the competition so far, precisely because Yen had always been there — steady, fluent in his brother's silences, translating without being asked. It had been seamless. Natural. The way breathing is natural.
But Zen had always known, somewhere quiet and certain inside himself, that this moment would come. That joining LEAVEN meant that eventually, inevitably, he would have to stand on his own. He had prepared for it — thoroughly, carefully, the way Zen did everything. His phone. His apps. Every tool he could think of to build a bridge between his words and the people around him.
He had prepared everything he could possibly think of.
It wasn't enough for what was coming.
Liam was, by any honest measure, exceptional.
Strong trainee. Strong competitor. The kind of talent that made other talented people take notice. His relationship with the OG trainees was solid — built on months of shared suffering, shared rehearsals, shared investment in something they all wanted badly. So when the group voting happened, the newcomers had no real ground to stand on. Liam got the leader position, and fairly so.
But Foca had never chosen Liam in the first round of debuts.
Had praised his talent in the same breath as regretting — genuinely, specifically regretting — the one thing about Liam that talent couldn't fix.
The temper.
Short. Hot. And tonight, with the pressure of evaluations bearing down on everything, running dangerously close to empty on patience.
"Goddammit — why can't you get the choreography?!"
The frustration cracked through the rehearsal room like something breaking.
Zen's hands moved to his phone immediately. Quietly. The words appeared and the voice spoke them for him, steady even when he wasn't:
"I'm really sorry."
"Why did you even enter LEAVEN if you can't keep up?!" Liam's voice climbed. "What — you saw Jordan do it and thought you could too? That's not how this works. Jordan made it because he actually had what it takes. You?" A hard, cutting pause. "You're excess baggage. Dead weight on everyone around you."
The room went very still.
And then Liam said the thing — the thing that even as it was leaving his mouth, some part of him must have known was beyond the line. But the emotion was already driving and the brakes weren't responding.
"You're such a dead weight you're dragging your brother down with you."
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence.
Every eye in the room went wide. Several people stopped breathing.
Zen's eyes filled — immediate, involuntary, the tears not falling yet but sitting right there, right at the edge, his whole face arrested in the stunned stillness of someone who has just been hit somewhere they didn't know was exposed.
"Bro." Mikko's voice came in low and firm, stepping forward with the calm of someone choosing to be the steadiest person in the room. "I think that's enough."
"See, that's EXACTLY the problem!" Liam turned on him. "Everyone rushes to his rescue. Because of his condition? That's what makes Jordan different. Jordan never made it about his condition. Not once. He just worked." His eyes cut back to Zen. "This? This is just pathetic."
"Dude." Mikko's voice came down harder this time, the calm still there but with an edge underneath it now. "We're all going to take a breath. You've made your point."
"So now I'm the villain?" Liam's jaw tightened. "I worked for this. Everyone who was here before these new people came — we worked, we sacrificed, we gave everything we had for a shot at something we've wanted our whole lives. So forgive me," and his voice dropped, which somehow made it worse, "for not being more accommodating to someone who clearly isn't ready. I'm not going to lose my dream because I'm carrying someone who can't keep up."
The rehearsal room held its breath.
And then Zen's phone spoke again.
Everyone turned.
He had been standing there through all of it — through every word, through the thing about his brother, through the pathetic, through the dead weight — and he was still standing. Eyes wet. Hands steady on his phone. The determination in his face quiet and absolute, the kind that doesn't announce itself, that just simply is.
"I'm so sorry for holding you back. I promise to do better."
The synthetic voice of the app delivered it evenly. But the eyes behind it said the rest — everything the app couldn't carry, everything that didn't need words.
Something shifted in the room.
And Liam saw it. Whatever he was feeling, however hot it was still burning — he saw it.
"You better," he said, and his voice had lost some of its heat, replaced by something harder and flatter and more tired. "When I get back — you know that choreography. All of it. By heart." A beat. "Anything less than that, and if you have any conscience in you at all — you already know what you should do."
And then he walked out.
The OG trainees on the team filtered out behind him, one by one, the door closing with a finality that felt louder than it was.
And Zen remained — phone in hand, eyes still glassy, the determination still sitting in his face like something planted deep — still standing.
Still there.
****
The room was quiet now. Just the hum of the ventilation and the distant sounds of the building going about its business.
Zen wiped his eyes one final time. Carefully. Like closing a door.
Then he straightened up, pulled a breath in from somewhere deep, and —
"You can do it, Zen!"
Soft. Low. Barely above a whisper. But real. His own voice, small and private, speaking only to himself in what he was absolutely certain was an empty room.
"You have a really pretty voice."
Zen spun around so fast he nearly lost his footing.
Mikko. Still there. Sitting quietly against the far wall like he had never moved, watching Zen with an expression that was gentle and completely without agenda.
Zen's heart was somewhere in his throat. His hands found his phone immediately — the reflex so deeply ingrained it happened before the embarrassment even fully arrived.
"I thought you left too."
"I couldn't exactly leave you alone after all that," Mikko said, with a small, easy shrug and a smaller smile. "Call it being concerned for a fellow human being. It's a character flaw, apparently."
"I really appreciate it," Zen's phone said, while Zen himself managed a small, genuine smile. "But I think I'm okay."
He paused. Then typed again, because he meant it and wanted it said properly.
"What Liam said wasn't wrong. I'd be frustrated too, if someone kept pulling the group back. The sooner I hear it, the sooner I can actually do something about it."
Mikko looked at him for a long moment. The kind of look that's actually seeing someone.
"Wow," he said. "You're tougher than you look, Olaf."
A beat.
"...Did you just call me a snowman?"
"They're cute," Mikko said, entirely unbothered. "Kind of like you."
Zen stared at him.
"You're weird."
The robotic voice of the app delivered it with complete flatness. Zen's small smile made it funnier than any tone could have.
"Yeah," Mikko agreed pleasantly. "I get that a lot." He pushed himself off the wall and stretched, all easy energy, the kind of person who simply decides the mood and then becomes it. "Anyway — less talking, more dancing. Come on, I'll walk you through the choreo."
Zen's phone was already responding.
"You'll miss lunch."
"I'll eat more at dinner," Mikko said, with a wink that was so casual it looped back around to being endearing. "Not a big deal."
Zen looked at him for a moment. This strange, unbothered, quietly kind person who had stayed behind for no reason other than simply deciding to.
"Thanks, Mikko," the phone said. And then, because Zen typed it and meant it, even knowing exactly how it would sound — "You're weird. But you're a good person."
The robotic monotone of the app delivered this verdict with the solemnity of a court ruling.
Both of them burst out laughing.
"Gee, thanks," Mikko said, voice completely dry. "That robotic voice is really something else, you know that?"
He was still smiling though. Couldn't really help it.
Then something settled in his expression — quieter, more certain. His eyes on Zen, who was already pulling up the music, already getting back into position, already doing the thing he said he would do.
"You know what?" Mikko said. "Mark my words — one day, you're going to talk to me yourself. Your own voice. Voluntarily."
Zen looked at him. Something flickered across his face — complicated and soft and not quite ready to be named yet.
He didn't respond.
But Mikko had already decided.
And when Mikko decided something — quietly, without announcement, without fanfare — he had a way of making it happen.
This was a promise he intended to keep.