Zombie Stage Round 1: Everything That Happens, In Order

This is a recap of Zombie Stage Round 1 — what happens, in the order it happens, with nothing added. Where a detail is an interpretation rather than something on screen, it is labelled as one. Every factual claim on this page traces back to the sources listed at the bottom.

The short version

• Released 26 June 2026 on the official ALIEN STAGE channel, alongside the songs.
• Two songs. Candy Scar (4:11), the duel; then an acapella pass of Little Bunny at the end.
• The duel. Mizi versus Sua. Mizi wins by one point.
• The aftermath. Sua is laid on a slaughtering table. Her arm is cut off and sold to the audience.
• The flashback. Interleaved with the performance: how the two of them went from a high-school audition to this stage.
• On screen: Mizi, Sua, Hyuna, Ivan, and Mizi’s mother in flashback. No Till, no Luka.

What the episode is

Round 1 is the first episode of Zombie Stage, the first alternate universe VIVINOS has introduced into the Alien Stage series. The AU was revealed on 5 June 2026 on the official ALIEN STAGE account on X, with a teaser video and an illustration titled Where the Show Never Ends. The episode followed three weeks later, on 26 June 2026, with both songs released the same day.

It is a standalone AU episode, not a sequel. It re-stages the Round 1 pairing everyone already knows — Mizi against Sua — inside a completely different world.

The world it opens in

The premise is not fan inference. It is printed on the official soundtrack release:

It has been a long time since an unknown infectious disease engulfed the world. Criminal organizations and corrupt police have concealed zombies in the underground world, creating a massive entertainment culture that trades their beauty and pain. The lives of zombies — singing, dancing, loving, and getting wounded — become commodities consumed amidst the cheers of countless spectators. The circus stage, where desire and forbidden madness intertwine, raises its curtain once again.

Three things follow from that, and the episode depends on all three:

1. The performers are zombies, infected humans, not aliens’ captives.
2. The audience is uninfected humans, paying to be entertained.
3. The losing performer is dismembered, and the parts are sold. That is the business model, not a punishment.

So the stakes of a round are not life and death. Both performers are already dead. The stakes are how much of your body you get to keep.

The performance: Candy Scar

The duel is Candy Scar — 4:11, composed, written and arranged by M!M!2K, produced by Kang, sung by Rubyeye as Mizi and C!naH as Sua, the same voice actors as in the main series.

It is a hyper-cute bubblegum idol song. Whipped cream, pudding, jelly, “Dreamy! Cutie! Love! Kyun!”, a fanchant. The only moment in a different register is the four-line English choir prologue before the beat drops — “Those bound by iron chains now / They still stare toward the night / Wounded souls still breathing / Glory be upon them” — and then the track never returns to it.

The two performers as the episode presents them:

Mizi performs in a pastel-pink strapless mini-dress with a flared sparkling petticoat, high pink twin-tails tied with oversized bows. Where the upper half of her face should be there is a heart-shaped hole — her eyes and nose are gone, taken by the owners of the stage. The infection runs down the right side of her jaw and throat, over her shoulder, across her upper back. There is a bite mark beside her mouth. She smiles the entire time.

Sua performs in a white puff-sleeved idol dress with long white gloves and a wide white headscarf. A large dark gemstone covers the left side of her face and her left eye socket; her right eye is a glassy purple. Her right leg is skeletal, exposed bone and rotting tissue, while her left carries a black heart-shaped gem high on the thigh. She also smiles the entire time.

The reading most of the fandom has settled on — and it is a reading, not a statement from VIVINOS — is that the cuteness is the horror. The lyrics say 함께 썩어가는거야 미쳐 아름답게, “we’ll rot away together, beautifully insane,” in exactly the same bright voice as the pudding-and-jelly hook. Our Candy Scar meaning essay takes that apart line by line.

The flashback: how they got here

The episode cuts a backstory through the performance. In order:

1. High school. Mizi wants to be a K-pop idol and wants Sua with her. They audition together as a duo. Both are rejected.
2. After graduation. They practise and audition a second time. Mizi is clumsy at hers, but the judges see more charm in her than in Sua. Only Mizi is accepted. Mizi is devastated that Sua was not.
3. The debut. Mizi becomes famous on her looks — billboards across the city, an image she is pushed to sexualise for a male audience. At first she stays close to Sua.
4. The clematis. Sua brings Mizi a bouquet of clematis flowers. Mizi smiles, then immediately hands the bouquet to a staff member and turns back to what looks like a photoshoot. This is the beat the fandom reads as the friendship breaking: Sua has become another fan.
5. The cigarette. Sua catches Mizi smoking, takes the cigarette out of her hand and scolds her. Mizi slaps her. Sua pulls her into a hug anyway.
6. The mother. The hug triggers a panic attack in Mizi and a flashback to her own mother — the only appearance Mizi’s mother makes in the episode. Mizi pushes Sua away and runs into the night.
7. The bite. During that escape, a zombie follows Mizi and bites her beside the mouth. The shot is framed from Sua’s point of view: she is there, she sees it, and she does not move.
8. The kiss. Sua slips past a guard into the building where the infected Mizi is being kept, opens Mizi’s mouth with her fingers and kisses her — infecting herself on purpose, so that the outbreak cannot separate them.

That last beat is the one that reframes the whole song. When Sua sings 너는 나의 신이야 (“you are my god”) in what is otherwise stock fan-chant vocabulary, she is not being hyperbolic.

Steps 4 to 8 are described here as the ALIEN STAGE Wiki transcribes them from the episode. The motivations attached to them — that Sua deliberately let the bite happen, that the slap comes from Mizi’s industry trauma — are the fandom’s reading of the framing, not narration.

The result, and the table

Mizi wins by a single point.

Sua is then laid on a slaughtering table, and her arm is cut off and sold to the public. She does not struggle. Over this, an acapella pass of Little Bunny plays — 작은 토끼, a nursery rhyme about a rabbit hopping away into the forest with dirt on its paws, sung by Rubyeye, released the same day as ZOMST Original Soundtrack Part.0.

A children’s song over a dismemberment is the episode’s closing argument, and it does not need annotating.

Who appears

| Character | In Round 1 | | --- | --- | | Mizi | Performer. Wins by one point. Former K-pop idol, now a zombie idol. | | Sua | Performer. Loses by one point; her arm is cut off and sold. | | Hyuna | Appears. No role has been shown or announced. | | Ivan | Appears. No role, no design page, no track in the AU. | | Mizi’s mother | Flashback only, during Mizi’s panic attack. |

Till and Luka do not appear and have no Zombie Stage design. There is one further Zombie Stage character on record who is not in this episode: Hia (희아), Sua’s older sister, blind in her left eye. Her status is listed as unknown and she has not appeared in anything yet.

What we are not claiming

An earlier version of this page carried a shot-by-shot breakdown with timestamps for every cut. Those timestamps were not verified against the episode and have been removed. To be explicit about what this page deliberately does not assert:

• No timestamps. We do not publish a cut-by-cut time index for Round 1, because we have not built one against the official upload frame by frame.
• No Till cameo. There is no sourced audience cameo. Till has no Zombie Stage design.
• No episode runtime. The two song runtimes are documented; the episode’s total is not, so it is not stated.
• No placement for the other two OST tracks. The Dressing Room (0:31) and the title track Zombie Stage (1:07) exist on the soundtrack, but no source places either inside the episode. The two songs the episode is documented to contain are Candy Scar and Little Bunny.

If you have a sourced correction, send it to [email protected] with the source and it gets added and dated.

What comes next

A second Zombie Stage episode is expected in 2026, and a post by Kang on 5 April 2026 confirmed further episodes are coming in both the main universe and the alternate ones. No date, no cast, no title has been announced. We track anything that gets confirmed on the next round release date page.

The one piece of Zombie Stage material released since Round 1 is Ache, a 19-page comic posted on the official ALIEN STAGE account on 17 July 2026, with an official English translation on VIVINOS’s Patreon. It is set in the Zombie Stage universe and features Mizi and Sua. It carries a content warning.

Sources

• Official soundtrack release copy for the world description (VIVINOS / SCALAR, via the Korean streaming release, 26 June 2026).
• Official ALIEN STAGE account on X: the 5 June 2026 teaser and illustration, the 26 June 2026 episode and OST releases, the 17 July 2026 Ache comic.
• Song credits and runtimes: the Zombie Stage soundtrack releases.
• Episode content, character designs and flashback sequence: the ALIEN STAGE Wiki on Fandom, available under CC BY-SA. Quoted and paraphrased here for commentary.
• Zombie Stage and Alien Stage are © VIVINOS / STUDIO LICO / SCALAR. This page is unofficial fan commentary.