Race Start
Kim Su-hyeok took the sniper rifle Yeon-woo held out to him.
This rifle…
It was a famous one. The bolt-action sniper rifle the protagonist had used in a well-known Hollywood film about a sniper abandoned by his country after retirement. To professional snipers the world over, it was the stuff of pure romance.
"Thank you. I never expected to see one of these here."
Leaving Kim Su-hyeok's gratitude behind him, Yeon-woo began pulling gear from the military duffel one piece after another.
Starting with the full-body shock-absorbing suit the production company supplied as standard issue, then a lightweight plate carrier and every kind of protective equipment. He also handed out the rifles they would use as their baseline loadout.
"They only had rifles that take 5.56mm rounds. Looks like the practice ammunition they specially airlifted in only matches that caliber."
"Ah, so that's why you went with Heckler & Koch."
"Yes. I was torn between the G36 and the HK416 right up to the end, but I settled on the 416. It seemed like it would handle better across different environments."
It was one of the most widely used firearms among special forces units worldwide, and even domestically the Naval Special Warfare Flotilla had adopted the model. Kim Su-hyeok nodded at Yeon-woo's words and spoke again.
"Good choice. I don't know if you already know this, but the G36 is a solid rifle that also has some very clear drawbacks."
Yeon-woo answered naturally as he finished strapping on his gear.
"The optic issue only applies to the German Army standard model, so that won't be a problem. The handguard overheating is less of a concern too since these are survival-game conversions with lower firepower. But the G36's barrel is just too long. It would get in the way during operations in all kinds of ways."
Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon nodded along in agreement as they listened—then both of them tilted their heads at the same moment. They had only just remembered that the person they were talking to was not a special forces operator but a film actor, a star who symbolized the younger generation.
"…You're remarkably well-informed."
"Ah—I'm just a hardcore mil-geek, so…"
Yeon-woo was grateful that geeks existed. Call anything a "geek thing" and people simply nodded along; that was only possible because earlier generations of geeks had already blazed the trail, appearing on every kind of program and flaunting knowledge that outstripped the experts.
Kim Su-hyeok let the doubt drop and nodded.
"You did say that. Hmm. Impressive."
The three of them, now fully kitted out and combat-ready, looked around. Here and there, teams were complaining about the gear their leaders had chosen; others, like the Korean team, were quietly changing clothes without a word.
Kim Su-hyeok looked over the equipment Ryu Yeon-woo had selected one more time and decided it was a pretty solid set of choices. None of the models had any standout advantages—but none of them had real drawbacks either. Best of all, they were gear that Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon were relatively familiar with.
This wasn't a real operation; it was a survival game. How much difference could superior equipment even make? Most of the time, "better gear" didn't mean a massive leap in base performance so much as the ability to mount a whole range of mission-specific attachments—and there was no way a TV show would have stocked that kind of detailed kit. In that case, the best option was equipment that stuck to the fundamentals. Exactly the standard models Ryu Yeon-woo had picked.
There was, however, one piece that was not standard.
Kim Su-hyeok ran his fingertips along the bolt-action sniper rifle slung across his back. The smooth, carefully finished surface of the walnut stock felt good under his hand.
Mmm. Never thought I'd meet this rifle here.
It felt like his emotional attack power had gone up by about fifty points. Of course, Yeon-woo had chosen the rifle purely by stripping it down and picking the most efficient option; romance and sentimentality had not factored into the decision by even one percent.
The other teams seemed to have finished gearing up as well; the chaotic atmosphere gradually settled. Staff members began guiding each team outside.
"Looks like we're going in by boat."
"Ah—do you get seasick?"
Yeon-woo remembered Kim Su-hyeok getting a little queasy during the Okinawa infiltration mission. But Kim Su-hyeok shook his head firmly.
"No. No problem at all."
Watching him, Yeon-woo allowed himself a faint smile.
Look at this kid pretending to be tough. I already saw him get seasick.
Just then a staff member pointed to the vehicle that had brought Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon.
"All right, Korean team—you'll board this vehicle for transport."
Yeon-woo and his teammates followed the staffer and climbed back into the car. The place they arrived at was not what any of them had expected.
"Hmm? This isn't the harbor."
"No, it isn't."
Park Jung-hyeon, who had been quiet until now, spoke up.
"According to the map, there's a small airstrip over this way."
"Oh, you checked this far out? It's pretty far from the hotel."
"Yes. A little farther down this road there's a Koreatown, and a gukbap place."
"Ah…"
Just as Park Jung-hyeon said, a small town appeared, and a little farther on a wide open lot came into view. Something large sitting on top of it caught their eyes.
"…Are all of those here because of our show?"
At Yeon-woo's words, Kim Su-hyeok's mouth fell slightly open as he stared out the window. More than twenty helicopters sat outside.
"As expected of the Trillion-Dollar Nation."
America—nicknamed the Trillion-Dollar Nation because it poured more than a thousand trillion won into its defense budget. The scale really was on another level.
"They deploy twenty helicopters just for transport on a single program."
In reality the production crew needed rides too, so it might have been more than twenty. When you calculated the daily rental fees for the helicopters, it might not even have been that much money compared to the budget Blue Whale Gate had set—but the very idea of using helicopters instead of commercial flights or boats was something else entirely.
Thud-thud-thud—
The sound of helicopter rotors spinning carried in through the window. For Yeon-woo and the other two, the fact that they were about to take part in a survival game—and the sheer scale of it—suddenly felt a lot more real.
"This is going to be fun."
The other two nodded at Yeon-woo's words.
"It really is."
The helicopters carrying each team climbed in altitude and lifted into the sky.
"Have you ever ridden in a helicopter before, Team Leader?"
Kim Su-hyeok's voice, addressing him as Team Leader, came through the headset inside the cabin.
"Y—yes."
"Pardon?"
"Ah—no. This is my first time."
In his previous life he had ridden helicopters so many times he couldn't have counted them on his fingers and toes combined, so the instinctive "yes" had slipped out first. But thinking about it, even living the life of a world star in this life, he had never actually been in a helicopter.
Yeon-woo looked out the window. The helicopter was leaving Miami behind, flying toward the Bahama Islands—an archipelago of countless islands. Below them lay the Cayman Islands; behind them, the Gulf of Mexico; and a little farther north, the famous Bermuda Triangle. From Cuba to Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico—this chain of island nations, each smaller than Korea, was ringed by coral reefs and emerald seas, famous as a global resort destination, with countless large and small islands scattered everywhere.
And just as many cockroach-like drug cartels, too.
When you worked the overseas division at the NIS, there were two main jobs you had to prioritize. First, monitoring North Korean activity. Second, tracking down and eliminating drug organizations that had fled abroad.
These days voice phishing is so rampant that the China and Southeast Asia desks are probably the busy ones.
But back when Yeon-woo had been active in his previous life, tracking Korean-origin drug organizations hiding out across Central and South America had been one of the most important missions. Thanks to that, he was fairly familiar with the environment here.
While he gazed out the window, lost in old memories, the helicopter gradually began to descend. A fairly large uninhabited island came into Yeon-woo's view. It looked like a volcanic island—there was a peak with a decent slope in the center. He could make out terrain that looked like overgrown cornfields, and a broad stretch of sand that had desertified because it sat in the path of the sea wind.
So this is the place.
An island where mountain, forest, desert, and scrub were all jumbled together. The battlefield where Survival Island – Global Match would be held for the next several days.
Meanwhile, that same morning—
Manager Kim Min-su followed a staffer's directions and headed to an indoor studio in Miami. Blue Whale Gate had identified the "gallery" as one of the reasons the original Survival Island had succeeded. At the time, they hadn't known what to do with the external staff who had come along with the contestants—leaving them all waiting in one place felt awkward—so they had simply set up a few monitors and cameras in a corner of the situation room and more or less left them there, figuring they might as well grab a few reaction shots.
But once they started editing, those people had naturally become a gallery and a set of observers, adding flavor to the program in between segments. Their gasps of admiration every time a player pulled off an outstanding play had been perfect for cutting in.
The staffer guiding Kim Min-su pointed to a luxurious velvet sofa and smiled.
"Mr. Kim. You can sit here."
"Th-thank you."
He answered in awkward English and sat down. Unlike the last shoot—with its sweltering heat and makeshift container boxes—this place felt like the lobby of a high-end hotel. A screen as large as a movie theater's filled one entire wall up front, and in front of it, staff sat surrounded by equipment, monitoring conditions across the island in real time. It looked exactly like those movie command centers where people hug and cheer when a rocket launches after a countdown or the hero's radio comes through.
On the glass table in front of Kim Min-su's sofa sat finger food and wine, laid out with a clear message: eat and enjoy.
"Ugh… Our actor's going to be suffering out in the blazing sun, and here I am living it up…"
He shook his head at the thought of Yeon-woo, but the soft velvet of the plush sofa wrapping around his body felt like paradise on earth. Looking around, he saw people who appeared to be staff for the other contestants, what looked like professional American broadcasters, and others holding various documents and cards, deep in serious discussion.
Kim Min-su rummaged through his worn leather bag for the proposal Blue Whale Gate had sent to Saebyeol. Flipping through the pages, he nodded.
"Aha—so those people are the table directors?"
To make the program more entertaining, they had decided to award bonuses of a different form from the previous season multiple times during the game—a system meant to replace the special cards from the original. In the previous season they had hidden boxes containing things like "Hit Count Reset" or "Player Location Check" cards around the island. This time, the "table directors" sitting over there in constant discussion would watch the players' performances in real time and award matching rewards whenever someone pulled off a spectacular or ingenious play.
Just then, large letters appeared on the big screen up front.
Before the game begins, we will announce the results of Round 1.
Winner: Ryu Yeon-woo — Republic of Korea (KOR)
Eliminated: Paweł Kamiński — Poland (POL)
Looking at the English text on the screen, Kim Min-su cheered awkwardly.
"It says 'winner,' so that means our actor won something, right?"
Round 1 had not been shown to the gallery, so he had no idea what kind of round it had been—but a win was a win, wasn't it?
On the other side of the room, an angry voice erupted from another sofa.
"Co kurwa! What the hell is this crap? Eliminated before the game even starts?!"
The man who had spat the Polish curse shot to his feet. Then the screen switched, and drone footage filming the island from high above filled the display. Black helicopters were descending toward various points across the island.
The real game was about to begin.