The Grand Narrative of Victory (1)
Yeon-woo turned on the shower.
As the water streamed down, washing away the dirt and dust that had clung to every part of his body while he wandered the mountain, along with the sweat he had poured out all day, he slowly organized his thoughts.
Honestly, just the fact that I’m appearing should be enough for the buzz.
It wasn’t arrogance. It was a clear-eyed grasp of reality.
He knew full well how vast the gap was between the average casting level of a cable variety show and the influence he currently wielded.
Even so, it would only rise to the level of a cable variety show that managed to pique people’s interest a little more than usual.
Just me appearing won’t turn it into a variety show that every age group watches. The fans will probably tune in, but…
If it had been a variety show he appeared on personally, he would have been more than satisfied with the fans watching.
But this one had the Parabola drama team riding on it—and Saebyeol itself.
So he had no intention of settling for that much.
He would win the survival show without fail, and he would turn this variety program into a legend.
Because he planned to pull every single viewer over to the upcoming broadcast of Parabola.
For that, I need the essence of sports. This survival game is sports in the end, after all.
The world’s various soccer leagues including the Premier League, the NBA, Major League Baseball.
And the Olympics and World Cup held every four years.
Every year, champions emerge and medalists are produced in countless numbers.
That was why, unless you were a fan with a genuine interest in that sport, you rarely paid much attention to the winners or the winning teams.
The winner of a survival variety program would probably be no different.
These days there are too many other things to enjoy for people to go wild over a single story, and tastes have diversified. Honestly, even I don’t really know which team won the domestic league lately.
Yet even amid all that, sports still occasionally produced those “unscripted dramas” that lodged themselves in people’s memories and got talked about for years afterward.
In the end, if I’m going to make this variety show a legend, I have to write an unscripted drama.
That didn’t mean he could plan such a narrative in advance before filming started. He would have to improvise it on the fly while watching how the survival unfolded.
Dominate the battlefield, yet win like a movie—that’s how you pull the biggest box office.
In that regard, there was one fortunate thing.
Dominating a battlefield, and making a movie.
Both were things Yeon-woo did best.
I can already complete one of the victory narratives.
Just from the community reactions and the responses of the other players currently in the survival, Yeon-woo could clearly feel how thoroughly he was being dismissed.
But that was actually good.
There were many grand sports narratives that set people on fire, but a few of them were especially effective.
The first among them is the underdog’s revolt.
Leicester City’s fairy-tale Premier League title, a team whose odds of winning had been rated the same as a coin landing on its edge—0.02 percent.
The Boston Red Sox’s miraculous World Series win in 2004 after eighty-six years, the Houston Rockets’ miracle of consecutive upsets in the 1994–95 season.
The underdog’s revolt was talked about for years across soccer, basketball, baseball—every sport.
Only when the underdog least expected to win smashed through everything, climbed higher and higher, and finally seized the championship did the “grand narrative of victory” that captivated people finally take shape.
This one basically completes itself the moment I win.
But Yeon-woo wasn’t satisfied with that alone.
I’d like one more story layered on top of it…
The lodging split into two, the amateur players more tense than expected.
If he painted carefully with these pigments, it felt like another picture might emerge.
“Hmm…”
Yeon-woo finished his shower, put on the provided loungewear, and stepped out.
A participant who had been gathering dishes to head outside spotted him and pointed a finger toward the door.
“Ah, while you were washing up, the staff brought dinner, Yeon-woo-ssi. They’re grilling meat over charcoal outside, so come out and eat. They said the meal will be filmed with the fixed cameras they’ve set up.”
“Got it. I’ll just dry my hair and be right out. Thanks.”
After roughly drying his hair and stepping outside, he found a grill set over a drum filled with firewood, meat piled high and sizzling.
Everyone had spent the entire day exhausting themselves wandering the island, so a protein refill was definitely needed.
“Oh, Actor Ryu Yeon-woo has arrived.”
“Come on, no need to be so stiff with ‘Actor.’ Just call me by my name.”
“Shall we? Ahem, then I’ll call you Yeon-woo-ssi. Whoa, look at me making golden connections.”
Everyone seemed eager to build rapport with Yeon-woo, tossing conversation his way on all sorts of topics.
Yeon-woo smiled and answered appropriately as he continued eating.
Then one of them spoke up.
“But hey. Do we really have to fight among ‘us’ tomorrow?”
At the words of Seo Ju-hyeon, one of the participants, the others tilted their heads.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean, twelve of us made it this far, right? The odds of a winner being decided on day two are pretty low. So if, while the match is going on tomorrow, ‘we’ at least don’t attack each other and cooperate instead, our survival rate on day two shoots way up…”
Another player scratched his cheek after hearing Seo Ju-hyeon.
“…Yeah, that does make sense. It’d be nice if all of ‘us’ survived day two and competed for the win at the end.”
At some point they had decided to drop formal speech among themselves, casually calling one another “us” and trying to form a community—the phrasing caught Yeon-woo’s eye.
It was a natural phenomenon, really.
As Yeon-woo watched the participants talk, the book The Origins of Totalitarianism by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had covered the trials of Nazi war criminals, came to mind.
When people are continuously exposed to a terrifying, high-tension situation, anyone develops a stronger urge to form a group and call it “us.” In a way, it’s pure survival instinct.
Yeon-woo quietly observed the players laughing and chatting as they ate dinner.
The meal was a completely different atmosphere from the survival game that had played out that afternoon.
No one was being chased, and no one had to shoot anyone else.
Instead, the dinner felt peaceful and leisurely, like friends who had come to hang out and grill some barbecue.
Perhaps because of that, the tension that had gripped them all day was loosening as they ate, and they were overreacting with laughter even to trivial stories.
I wonder if the people staying at the other lodging are any different.
Surely similar talk about cooperating or forming an alliance had come up over there as well.
People’s heads all worked about the same.
Meanwhile, the other participants who had looked tempted by Seo Ju-hyeon’s words still tilted their heads.
“But Ju-hyeon hyung. If we team up and fight like that, won’t the production staff stop us? They’d probably see it as a loophole…”
“They clearly said that as long as it isn’t dangerous behavior, any method is free. You heard them emphasize it twice before the game started, right? Any creative approach is allowed in combat.”
“Yeah, they did say that.”
Seo Ju-hyeon nodded at the person agreeing with him and continued.
“People cooperating depending on the situation is a skill too, right? If we just cooperate among ourselves for tomorrow and take out everyone from the other lodging…”
“About that.”
Yeon-woo cut in at that moment.
This is as far as it goes. I need to break the mood right here.
When Yeon-woo, who had been quietly eating until now, opened his mouth, everyone’s attention focused on him.
In truth, with a world star sitting at the same table, there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t conscious of Yeon-woo.
Seo Ju-hyeon, whose words had been suddenly cut off, frowned slightly, but the others’ gazes naturally turned to Yeon-woo.
Having lightly seized the initiative of the conversation, Yeon-woo looked at the players and continued.
“The people we should be considering aren’t the production staff, but the ‘viewers’ who will be watching our program, don’t you think? After all, this isn’t a real battle—it’s a ‘broadcast.’ If we form a pack and go around hunting cowardly, I don’t think it would look very good to the viewers. Sorry if that was out of line.”
By deliberately mentioning the words “viewers” and “broadcast,” he made the players realize they were not soldiers dropped onto a battlefield but entertainers currently on air.
Everyone had come hoping to gain popularity; no one would deliberately do something that would get them cursed out by netizens.
They had simply forgotten their position for a moment.
At Yeon-woo’s words, everyone opened their mouths slightly as if they had been struck on the head.
And they realized once more that the very place where they were eating was being filmed by cameras.
In a system where they were enemies of one another, deliberately forming an alliance was called teaming.
If he kept pushing for teaming under the guise of solidarity here, how he would be edited was as clear as day.
Even Seo Ju-hyeon, who had been passionately holding forth, seemed to recognize his mistake; he glanced sideways at the camera installed in the yard and hurriedly continued.
“R-right! Thinking about it, that does seem a bit off from the original spirit. Better to play the game fair and square after all. Haha.”
With that, no one at the dinner table mentioned “solidarity” again.
But perhaps what the production team actually wanted was “solidarity.”
With the lodging split, two teams would naturally form, one side would win, and the final battle would stage the tragedy of mutual slaughter among those who had once been comrades.
That won’t do. That’s not the direction I want.
To complete the planned narrative, things had to flow in a different pattern.
“Well, we don’t have alcohol, but since meeting like this is fate too, let’s at least raise our colas and toast. Eat and drink our fill today, and tomorrow we fight hard again.”
When Yeon-woo rose boldly and called out, the others nodded and lifted their cups.
“Okay. Let’s do that!”
“Good, good. Rest well today and fight hard again tomorrow!”
Whether Yeon-woo’s words had fired them up, everyone stood and clinked their cups hard in a toast.
If the PD sees this scene later, he’ll get a sense of which direction to edit the overall narrative.
The next day dawned.
At ten in the morning, staff arrived at the lodging to take the players.
The starting points were the places where each player had been standing when the match ended the previous day.
The spot where Yeon-woo had finished the afternoon match yesterday was quite a distance from the lodging, so it took him considerably longer than the others to reach his starting point.
There was definitely a player lying in ambush a short distance away when the match ended yesterday.
He judged that the first priority was to deal with that guy the moment it started and secure the surrounding safety.
Ziiing—!
The smartwatch on his wrist vibrated long and hard.
The signal that the match was starting again.
Yeon-woo immediately sprinted in the direction from which he had heard the beep when the game ended yesterday.
I have to charge in before the opponent can take cover and start scanning the surroundings.
Racing at high speed between the trees, he soon spotted the opponent far ahead, scanning the area.
Having prioritized speed over stealth, Yeon-woo’s approach must have been audible; the opponent’s body turned toward him.
……!
Confirming the charging Yeon-woo, the opponent hastily raised his gun and aimed.
Yeon-woo used a thick, large tree between them to run at an angle that made precise aiming difficult, while slightly loosening the bag slung over his shoulder.
Judging that taking cover was already too late, the opponent alternately aimed his rifle at both sides of the tree where Yeon-woo might emerge.
Then it happened.
Something suddenly flew out from the left side of the tree.
Bang—!
Reflexively pulling the rifle’s trigger, the opponent instantly realized his mistake.
What had flown out wasn’t a person—it was the bag Yeon-woo had thrown.
He hurriedly swung the muzzle the other way, but it was already too late.
Bang—!
Bang-bang—!
In that interval, Yeon-woo had slid out to the right, dropped his body flat to the ground, and immediately pulled the trigger, landing consecutive rounds on the opponent’s body.
At once the light on the opponent’s protective gear lit up red, and the smartwatch chimed.
Player 7 has eliminated Player 4.
(Hits: 3)
Three hits means a player with zero points and zero losses.
Someone who had either been lucky the previous day or had deliberately done nothing but run.
The moment he confirmed cover was impossible, he calmly laid down suppressing fire—that was decent enough, but…
Surpassing the gap in experience and physical ability was impossible.
Yeon-woo quietly studied the opponent staring blankly at him with a hollow expression.
With the helmet, goggles, and full combat gear covering most of the body, the opponent probably had no idea that the one who had eliminated him was Ryu Yeon-woo.
Hm?
Examining the opponent, Yeon-woo tilted his head.
A short length of rope—something whose use had been ambiguous—had been cut and tied around the man’s forearm.
It looked like it would only get in the way during combat.
Tied around the forearm, it almost resembled some kind of mark.
Seeing it, Yeon-woo let out a short laugh.
So they made that choice after all.
It seemed the people at the other lodging had chosen teaming.
And before long he could be certain.
Ziiing—.
Ziiing—.
Player 1 has eliminated Player 11.
(Hits: 1)
Player 1 has eliminated Player 18.
(Hits: 1)
Player 24 has eliminated Player 15.
(Hits: 1)
As Yeon-woo carefully moved while surveying the island’s terrain, his smartwatch kept vibrating.
Kill logs were arriving at intervals of roughly twenty to thirty minutes.
All of them one hit?
It was possible that players who happened to have only one heart left were being eliminated one after another.
But Yeon-woo was certain.
The ones with rope wrapped around their forearms are moving as a group and hunting.
When several people fired at once, only the bullet of the last player to land the elimination would be recognized, so the log would most likely display a single hit.
The participants who had shared the same lodging last night were probably being picked off one by one right now.
Of course he had fully expected as much, but in the end the participants at the other lodging had made the wrong choice.
With that, every condition for the grand narrative was in place.
If the first sports victory narrative that set people on fire was “the underdog’s revolt,” then the second was “schooling the cheaters by beating them with pure skill.”