Survival Island Filming (3)
The moment the staff switched the feed to Player 7 Ryu Yeon-woo’s headcam, the screen locked onto the muzzle of his rifle trained on the torso of Player 2, still crouched among the shrubs.
Yeon-woo squeezed the trigger without a flicker of hesitation.
Bang-bang—!
The plastic rounds punched straight into Player 2’s body as he hid behind a tree, still busy covering the opposite flank. Without missing a beat Yeon-woo pivoted, settled his sights on Player 29 crouched behind a rock, and fired again.
Bang—!
Bang-bang—!
Player 29 had only a single heart remaining, but Yeon-woo had no way of knowing that; he simply put three rapid, precise shots into him. The man who had been fretting over which way to shift in order to suppress his current opponent never even reacted to the sudden incoming fire.
One round to the head, two to the torso.
It was the Mozambique Drill—the classic combat technique used to put a threat down instantly. A hit to the head ends the fight at once; because the head is a smaller target, two extra rounds are driven into the chest as insurance so that even a miss still delivers immediate damage. The sequence was pure muscle memory. Yeon-woo had drilled it until he could execute it half-asleep; every shot landed clean.
The entire double elimination took barely two seconds of continuous motion.
Player 7 has eliminated Player 2. (2 hits)
Player 7 has eliminated Player 29. (1 hit)
The remaining survivors, receiving the alerts on their smartwatches, reeled in shock.
Wait—Player 7 is the same guy who scored the opening kill. And now a double kill…?
How did he chain two kills like that? Did several routes overlap and turn into a free-for-all?
With no way to see what had actually happened to Players 2 and 29, the others could only guess. Inside the control room, however, where every second had been watched live, admiration erupted.
“Holy crap, that was insane. We’ve barely started filming and we’ve already got a highlight reel moment.”
“You’re Ryu Yeon-woo’s manager, right? I heard he never did military service—how the hell does he shoot like that?”
The entertainment-industry contact sitting beside Kim Min-su asked the question; Min-su scratched the back of his head. The staff—and even the PD—were clearly waiting for the answer while pretending not to.
“Well… he’s pretty into military stuff, and back in high school he did some shooting in Hawaii…”
He never finished the sentence. Heads around him were already nodding in enlightened awe.
“Ah, of course. So he trained professionally overseas from a young age. World stars really are built different.”
“Exactly! That explains everything.”
The rock-steady shooting stance and the calm way Yeon-woo controlled the engagement were skills that only came from real professional training; the moment Min-su offered a plausible explanation, everyone latched onto it and turned it into established fact. People always do that when something exceeds their own frame of reference—someone supplies a tidy reason and the whole room decides it must be true.
“Professional…?” Min-su murmured. He sensed they had completely misunderstood, yet correcting them felt more trouble than it was worth, so he simply closed his mouth.
Meanwhile Yeon-woo was already gone the instant the two men dropped.
The production staff will pick up the outed players by GPS anyway. I made too much noise—time to relocate.
Those two would not be the only ones heading for the summit. The smart move was to leave the danger zone at once. He chose the safest route: the same path he had just climbed. Because he had cleaned out the nearest threats the moment the match began, he simply reversed course and descended the mountain.
At a height that still let him overlook the unpaved road, he began circling the island’s perimeter in complete silence, mapping the terrain as he went.
Racking up kills isn’t the point. I need to prepare for the fights still ahead.
Anyone who could have heard that thought would have stared at him in disbelief—three kills already and he claimed kills didn’t matter—but Yeon-woo was deliberately managing the tempo of the game.
Later on, how many hearts you lost on day one will decide everything. Once the numbers thin out, the production team will start throwing missions or restrictions at us to shrink the playable area.
The island was a decent size for thirty fighters. Including the three Yeon-woo had already removed, however, seven kill logs had already flashed across every smartwatch.
Seven people gone in under an hour. By five this afternoon we’ll probably be down to ten or fifteen survivors.
Maybe even single digits. He had only met three opponents so far, yet the overall skill level looked even worse than he had expected. When amateurs fight each other, the body count always climbs faster.
They don’t even know basic perimeter security, and none of them are used to killing their presence. They’re going to keep stumbling into one another.
In terrain this thick with trees and rocks—perfect for concealment—simply walking toward an objective was suicide. You never knew where an enemy might be lying in wait. Even advancing to the next piece of cover a few meters ahead required freezing, silencing every sound, and observing for several full minutes before deciding it was safe to move.
Clack—
The faint scrape of metal reached Yeon-woo’s ears as he ghosted forward. Sure enough, a participant was advancing from the eleven-o’clock direction. The man was doing his best impression of a special-forces operator from a movie or a video game—rifle locked to his shoulder, sweeping left and right as he walked.
If I fire here, everyone nearby will go on high alert and movement gets a lot harder…
Even a survival airsoft gun carried a long way on an island this quiet. Rough estimate: a clean hundred meters of clear hearing.
But if I leave him alone, our paths will keep crossing and he’ll be a constant nuisance.
There was only one clean solution.
I’ll have to force a surrender.
Surrender was the rule that let you eliminate an opponent without firing a shot. The English word itself meant exactly that; in game terms it traced back to blackjack, where a player dealt a hopeless first two cards could fold the hand. In this survival match, once a player was judged completely helpless—regardless of remaining hearts—he was out on the spot.
According to the PD’s briefing, pressing the muzzle against the back of the neck or simply taking the weapon away both count as a valid surrender.
The man ahead was holding his rifle in a clumsy movie-style grip while scanning left and right. Snatching the gun looked unrealistic.
So only one option left.
Yeon-woo slung the rifle across his back, drew the pistol from his belt, and began matching the man’s footsteps. Exactly the way he had once trailed a Southeast Asian laborer who had suddenly abandoned his post and fled into the forest during the Okinawa operation, he watched the length of each stride and planted his own foot at the perfect instant. When the target’s right foot went forward, so did Yeon-woo’s; the left followed the same rhythm. Because his own strides were far longer than the man’s cautious, almost mincing pace, the gap closed steadily. He stepped only on bare earth, deftly avoiding every scattered leaf and twig, so the man whose entire attention was fixed ahead never noticed a thing.
After a dozen silent steps Yeon-woo was inside point-blank range. His index finger stayed on the trigger, ready to dump three rounds the instant the man spun or broke into a run.
“My hands are sweating.”
“Why isn’t he just shooting? Why keep following like that?”
Managers, industry people, and staff who had turned into an impromptu gallery inside the control room all gripped the edges of their seats, eyes locked on the monitors. Other skirmishes across the island were being patched in from the nearest cameras in real time, yet the main screen stayed fixed on Player 7—Ryu Yeon-woo’s cam feed.
“He’s going for a surrender…”
PD Yoon Chang-joon shook his head slowly. Yeon-woo’s performance so far was already enough to produce a spectacular broadcast, but now that things had come this far the PD wanted a legendary variety show that would be remembered for years. That required Yeon-woo to stay alive longer. The image on the monitor, however, looked dangerously reckless.
“Even so, this is pure bravado…”
Surrender had been written into the rules mainly as a clean way to remove players who had lost their weapons or their will to fight—not as a technique meant to be used mid-combat. What idiot would calmly let someone press a muzzle to the back of his neck or hand over his gun?
Apparently that idiot was right here.
“Huh?”
Everyone watching the monitors opened their mouths and tilted their heads in unison.
“Why doesn’t he realize someone’s right behind him?”
“Maybe he’s so tense he can’t hear footsteps or presence?”
On screen Yeon-woo had closed to point-blank range with the pistol leveled, yet the man ahead still walked on, completely unaware. The only angles available in the control room were Yeon-woo’s headcam, bodycam, and a distant fixed camera; none of them made it obvious that he was matching every footfall in absolute silence.
The distance shrank to less than a meter. With a final quick step Yeon-woo pressed the pistol’s muzzle firmly against the back of the man’s neck.
“Stop.”
“Eek!”
Already wound tight, the man nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden whisper right behind him and tried to spin around. Yeon-woo drove a knee into the man’s thigh to pin him, clamped the opposite shoulder in an iron grip, and shoved the pistol harder against his neck. Then a calm, almost languid voice—completely at odds with the life-or-death tension—spoke from behind.
“Come on, sir. At this range even plastic rounds are going to hurt a lot. How about we just call it a surrender?”
“Urgh—what kind of strength…?”
The man tried to twist free on pure instinct, but his upper body was locked solid. The control room must have been watching as well; even though the man had not verbally surrendered, the system judged him completely helpless and the red lights on his protective gear lit up.
Realizing he was out, the man sank to the ground with a hollow expression. It was less despair than pure muscle failure after staying locked in high tension for so long.
“How the hell…?”
He stared blankly back along the path he had just walked. Someone had closed all the way to muzzle contact against his neck and he had never noticed.
Elsewhere across the island, the same news left giant question marks floating over more than one head.
Player 7 has eliminated Player 26. (Surrender)
Jo Yun-hyeok, who had arrived late at the thicket near the octagonal pavilion where Yeon-woo had earlier taken out two men and was now hiding, stared at his watch in disbelief.
…What? He took someone out by surrender?
Player 7 again. An opening kill and a double kill could maybe be explained by luck or chaos, but a surrender? That made no sense at all.