Anyway, it was something that couldn’t be avoided.
“Ready… start!”
With the whistle sound, the first runners buried their faces in the flour plates. Yunbeom was overly enthusiastic as expected. He tried to scoop up a huge amount of flour but ended up inhaling it through his nose, coughing and spewing out white powder.
“Pfft!”
Haram, who was watching, burst out laughing.
“Hey! Don’t laugh! Take it!”
Yunbeom mumbled with the paper in his mouth and approached Haram. Haram quickly bit down on the paper and thrust his face toward Yunbeom. The two men’s faces came dangerously close.
Thud thud thud.
Yunbeom tilted his head too vigorously, causing half the flour to spill onto Haram’s eyes. In an instant, Haram turned into an old man with white eyebrows.
“Mmph! Ngh! (Ah! My eyes!)”
“Pass it quickly! We don’t have time!”
Haram fumbled to find Eden, unable to open his eyes properly. Eden calmly grabbed Haram’s shoulders and lowered his posture. Eden was the most stable one at least. He gracefully tilted his head and received the flour on Haram’s paper.
Doha concentrated all his nerves on receiving the flour Eden passed to him. He carefully turned his head to avoid spilling the flour that had already diminished by more than half, when he happened to lock eyes with Sehyun.
‘Gasp.’
Accidentally inhaling in surprise was the problem. The flour on the paper went down his windpipe.
“Koff!”
Doha tried to hold back his cough but ended up spitting out the paper he was holding in his mouth. Whoosh—! A white flour bomb poured all over Sehyun’s face.
“……”
Silence. And a moment later, explosive laughter erupted as if it would blow the arena away.
“Pf, pfft, pffft!”
“……”
The scene of Sehyun brushing off the flour that had settled thickly on his eyelids was properly captured on camera. The members were busy laughing at Sehyun.
“Hng, kkheup, huk.”
“Pfhoop.”
“Ahahahaha!”
“Sehyun totally looks like a rice cake!”
Haram laughed so hard he reached the point of tears. Eventually, he plopped down on the spot.
“Ha… Quickly, next.”
Anyway, the game continued. In the end, the flour game ended in utter defeat only after all the members had turned into white snowmen.
* * *
Silence hung in the car carrying the AVN members returning to their dorm.
“Why did you do that? That was all caught on camera!”
The AVN members’ mood was bad today. It was because of Chase’s impulsive action. The scene of him pushing Sehyun was fully captured on camera, and everyone there had seen it.
“People can make mistakes when they’re running!”
Chase became even more brazen instead.
“It happened because that bastard was sticking right up to me getting in the way.”
“Do you have some grudge against Lim Sehyun?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. I just really don’t like that bastard.”
“Don’t cause unnecessary trouble and kill your temper.”
“Ah! It’s not just me! That bastard picked a fight with me first, you know? What, he said my face looked like shit or something?”
As Chase fumed, the members shook their heads. He was the most troublesome risk member in AVN.
Still not cooling down, Chase banged the back of his head against the seat repeatedly then twisted his body.
“Ah! This is so annoying! I’m coming back late, so drop me off separately.”
The manager who was driving looked at Chase in the back seat through the rearview mirror.
“They said not to let you out.”
“What am I, a dog on a leash?”
“They’re worried you’ll cause an accident.”
“Ah, fuck, everything’s shit. I just want to go back to America.”
Chase ruffled his hair. After throwing a tantrum, he opened his phone. His phone screen lit up brightly.
Tick, tick.
Chase, who had been pressing something and scrolling down the screen, started tapping on the keyboard. The manager’s gaze glancing at Chase was filled with anxiety.
* * *
[Episode 5] Relay of Passion, the Flour Game(?) Where Everyone Got Covered #BattleCrown #TeamBuildingEvent 1.87M views 1 day ago
[Comments 1873]
They do all sorts of things lololol
What era flour ga…
└It’s not gay, it’s game
1:29 They’re already laughing before it even starts
They have no intention of holding back laughter
on:ex Fighting!!!
Even covered in flour they’re cute ㅠㅠㅠㅠ so cute
2:11 A man who suspiciously likes powder
Why is the relay portion so short?
sehyeon is soooooo cute😭
He’s fucking excessively handsome, I like Sehyun better than my dad but not as much as my mom anyway yeah
The fact that they got excited and the three of them took a picture and uploaded it then did a speed delete lololol
└Do they upload to Byeolsta without getting company approval…?
└They probably do but the academic consensus is that Lim Sehyun can’t be stopped
└For real he uploads whatever he feels like
2:41 Just date each other already… what are you doing
lololol but Eden’s the only one who’s still fluffy through all this
└Sehyun is also fluffy in a different(?) sense; there’s no way there’s moisture
└Why did he get so covered lololololol
└Our Doha has no will to hold back laughter
└lololololololol
OnX kids really seem close
Why is Sehyun’s knee like that?
└He fell during the relay;ㅠㅠㅠ
└Sehyun’s from the track team so he’s good at running… why did he make a mistake?
└Look at the members’ expressions, they must have been really worried ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ
2:20 Look at Baekdo laughing, he seems like someone who appeared on Battle Crown just to do this ㅇㅇ
Don’t get hurt you guys~~
Despite the unfortunate incident at the team building event, the broadcast was prettily packaged. Doha scrolled through the YouTube comment section, wondering why fans didn’t spare their praise even for such a strange game.
Is getting covered in flour fun…?
“Hmm.”
After browsing the comments for a while, Doha turned off his phone and put it in his pants pocket.
Today was the day for self-produced content filming. The main content was members sitting at desks in school uniforms, solving simple quizzes or having conversations.
Although the schedule was arranged for relatively comfortable indoor filming, the fatigue hadn’t been relieved since they had gone to Japan for a commercial shoot yesterday and until this morning.
Doha still wasn’t used to the tight schedule of waking up in Korea, falling asleep in Japan, and then coming to his senses to find himself back in Korea. Even within Korea, if he dozed off in the car, he would get confused about whether it was the commute to or from work.
“Yawn.”
Doha yawned and sprawled on the desk.
“You’ll mess up your hair.”
Since they had gone to the shop in the morning to get their hair and makeup done, he couldn’t comfortably slouch. When he stretched because he felt stiff, Sehyun massaged Doha’s shoulders.
“Mm.”
The members took their seats one by one, and preparations to start filming were complete. Without a break, the cue sign dropped and they began reciting the lines in the script.
After a smooth greeting, briefly going over each person’s recent updates, the quiz time began in earnest.
They started a speed quiz where you say the first two characters of a four-character idiom and complete the rest.
Haram, who was in charge of giving the questions, shouted to Sehyun.
“Eoду!”
“Eodu? Dark? The dark space between us?”
“Hey, those are our song lyrics.”
“No, wait. What was the question?”
“Lim Sehyun is pretending he didn’t hear.”
“Ah really, I couldn’t hear because your pronunciation was weird!”
“Alright alright, the answer is eoduyukmi!”
When Sehyun stubbornly insisted, Haram would clutch his stomach laughing and point it out. The two’s chemistry worked well, capturing good scenes.
“Next is Doha!”
They were pretending to be skipping evening self-study sessions, fitting the setting of same-grade friends. When Haram called Doha, he solemnly gathered his fighting spirit.
I can’t look more ignorant than Lim Sehyun.
“Jeonhwa!”
“Beon… wibok!”
He almost said phone number, but barely managed to remember this was a four-character idiom.
“Weren’t you about to say number just now? Isn’t this wrong? It’s wrong.”
Sehyun, who heard the ‘b’ sound, tried to pull Doha down with him like a drowning ghost grabbing someone, but Haram shook his head.
“Quick thinking bonus points.”
“Ah, why are you only lenient with Doha hyung!”
“Hyung? We’re all friends in this classroom, aren’t we?”
“Again, this is invalid. Again!”
The atmosphere heated up more and more. Wrong answers ran rampant, and it was chaos with everyone biting and criticizing each other.
Who would win the game was already beyond their interest, and time flew by as they competed to show off their ignorance.
In the midst of it all, Doha had one thing that bothered him.
‘Is his condition not good?’
It was because of one person whose energy seemed particularly low today.
“Ilchwi!”
“…Woljang?”
In the midst of the noisy commotion, Doha’s gaze suddenly turned to a corner.
‘……’
It was Eden. He was laughing. But there was no soul in it. Normally, if such a wrong answer came out, he would have either roared with laughter or thrown in a sharp comment. But right now, he was just a mechanical reaction bot itself.
“Now, this time it’s Eden! Sipsi?”
Haram pointed to Eden. But Eden was blankly staring into space and missed the timing.
“…Huh? Yeah?”
He was definitely different from usual. Was there some problem? The members casually laughed and said the opportunity had passed, moving on to Yunbeom’s turn, but Doha’s gaze kept lingering on Eden for some reason.
When fierce debate went back and forth during Yunbeom’s turn about whether the answer was correct or not, Doha subtly approached Eden.
“Are you feeling unwell somewhere?”
He asked wondering if Eden was sick, but Eden shook his head left and right.
“I’m fine.”
He definitely seemed to lack energy. But when he said he was fine himself, there was nothing more Doha could do. After saying he understood, Doha felt somehow uneasy.
