The Hunt Begins
The first to notice — and be startled by — the strange red dot glowing alone at the center of the field was not the players, of course, but the control room.
The production booth registered Yeon-woo and his teammates' advance around the time Turkey's Yunus was tearing through a cornfield in pure terror. By then, Yeon-woo's team had nearly reached the oreum rising at the island's center.
Unlike the Korean team's peaceful progress, teams from every nation had begun colliding across the island in earnest, and sporadic firefights were breaking out. The control room was scrambling to track those engagements, mark edit points in advance, and hand out appropriate rewards to the winners.
In the middle of that chaos, a staffer checking movement distances and routes suddenly shot his hand into the air — then threw the data onto the bottom of the main monitor.
"We need to check the Korean team's body cams!"
1.Republic of Korea — 3,478 m
2. Russia — 542 m
3. Italy — 462 m
Averaged across the board, every team from the top ranks to the bottom had covered roughly three hundred meters. The Korean team's figure was more than ten times that average — enough to make anyone assume either a glitch or something highly unusual, which was exactly why the report had been filed.
"…Three thousand four hundred seventy-eight meters is how far, exactly?"
"A little over two miles."
The control room had been tracking every participating team in real time via GPS, with each position displayed along the bottom of the big monitors, so they already knew one team was heading for the center. Seeing the precise number, though, made the production staff grasp just how bizarre the situation truly was.
They scrambled to pull up the Korean team's body cams and confirmed that the squad had simply attached desert-mobility parts to their boots and kept walking — nothing more. The problem was that the distance was overwhelming compared to everyone else.
John McCallan shook his head at the Korean team, whose mere act of walking had somehow become a game-breaking play.
"…Our champion has a bolder streak than I gave him credit for."
Getting that far was not a matter of lucky avoidance — wandering until they simply arrived. Every team had to select its destination on the ops pad at the start of the round. That meant committing to a judgment with no idea whether they would run into an enemy or what obstacles lay along the route.
Other team leaders had also realized that the five-hundred-meter minimum advance rule did not forbid traveling much farther. They simply lacked the nerve to act on it, and so each had chosen a nearby zone they judged safe.
By actually doing it, the Korean team had fought no battles at all and needed no constant perimeter watch — which meant that despite covering far more ground than anyone else, they were the least fatigued team on the island.
"All right. Have the reward assessments been finalized?"
At John McCallan's question, the table directors nodded.
If players simply dug into corners and focused only on surviving one another, the show itself would lose half its entertainment value. So a rule had been written: any player who delivered a memorable performance would receive a special reward tailored to that achievement. The table directors were the ones who analyzed the matches to evaluate those performances.
By their judgment, however, nothing in the first round of the main game truly qualified as memorable play. It had been a string of relatively ordinary engagements. The only performance worth noting was the Republic of Korea's long-distance push.
After a brief deliberation, the table directors nodded, and one of them spoke.
"The teams receiving rewards this round will be France, currently leading in total kills, and the Republic of Korea, which covered the greatest distance."
John McCallan nodded, and the table director continued.
"But special rewards should only be granted for special play that deserves them. Speaking frankly, this round simply did not produce that level of performance. We'll have them choose between ammunition resupply and life resupply."
Hearing that, John McCallan looked out over the gallery. Among the faces, he spotted a man quietly nodding along to an interpreter's words.
Hmm. That would be Mr. Ryu's manager, wouldn't it?
A mischievous impulse took hold, and John McCallan spoke up.
"Then let's have each team's representative in the gallery make the choice."
Manager Kim Min-su, receiving the translation, went wide-eyed.
"M-me?"
The manager for French team captain Gaspard Delon, seated a row behind, looked just as stunned.
Kim Min-su sank into thought. Watching the other teams' matches from the gallery, he had already concluded that between ammunition and life points, life was the more critical resource. The Korean team had not spent a single life or a single round of ammo, so receiving life points would be the equivalent of banking a heal kit for later use. Compared to Season One, the multi-versus-multi combat meant that even after only one round, plenty of teams had already burned through life points — or lost a teammate entirely.
…Hmm. What would the actor have chosen?
Every time the Korean team flickered onto the screen, Kim Min-su locked onto them without blinking, absorbing every movement.
Ugh, what do I pick…
He raised his hand and spoke to the interpreter.
"I have a question. If we choose ammunition, and the team is using multiple types of firearms, which weapon's ammo is issued as the baseline?"
The table director, receiving the translated question, answered.
"We'll send a message so the team captain can decide that directly."
Kim Min-su nodded at the answer and made his choice. Someone who got hit a lot needed life points — but someone who did a lot of hitting might need ammunition more.
"We'll take the ammunition, then."
John McCallan looked genuinely surprised. Between ammo and life, anyone could see that life was the more valuable resource; he had even thought the reward balance was off. And yet Mr. Ryu's manager had chosen ammunition.
There was no way for John McCallan to know that this was the bitter, long-held choice of a manager who, back in Season One, had been blocked by every other gallery member from securing extra ammo for his team.
…This dot is an actual team too?
Gaspard Delon — French team captain and popular singer — studied the red point blinking dead-center on the ops pad and set their next destination.
They had been the first to clash with the British team, lost one of their own in the fight, and wiped the British squad completely. After that, they had run into the Indian team — all three still alive — and in the ensuing firefight had dropped one of them without taking a scratch, forcing the rest to flee.
Drunk on consecutive victories, Gaspard Delon confidently tapped the absolute center of the touchpad.
"Heh. Whoever you are, you're a slippery bunch. Charging straight for the center the moment the round starts… Looking back, it was the only path that let you avoid unnecessary fights."
But if he had taken the coward's route like that center-bound team and dodged combat, he never would have grown from the two engagements he had just survived.
"Looks like I'll have to teach the lesson myself. A man grows on the battlefield."
Gaspard Delon raked a hand roughly through his hair. Every word he spoke was being recorded through the mic built into his protective gear.
Ah, I'm so fucking cool.
He was thoroughly intoxicated with his own magnificent image. Then, like a proud ant on the march, he began to advance.
Meanwhile, Yeon-woo — who had been stretched out in the grass resting — lifted the touchpad and tapped the far side of the oreum at the center. The cone was large enough that five hundred meters was easily covered just by selecting the opposite slope.
He rose slowly from the grass where he had been lying as if it were his own bedroom and walked over to where Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon were. Both of them had set their rifles down and sprawled out flat as well.
"Ah — you're finished, sir."
Spotting Yeon-woo approaching, they scrambled to correct their posture and stand, but Yeon-woo waved them down.
"Rest a little longer."
Lying in the grass had nothing to do with showing off or overconfidence. The opposite, in fact — free time would grow scarcer from here on, and the specialists the enemy teams had brought would not be pushovers in a firefight. They were conserving stamina while they still could.
"The enemy is still far off."
Every opponent was fully geared, which meant a minimum of fifteen kilograms of equipment weight alone. The approach terrain was anything but flat. Even if someone spotted Yeon-woo's team at the center and sprinted the whole way, it would clearly take more than twenty minutes. There was more than enough time to prepare at a leisurely pace.
"Our next waypoint is Point B, as planned. Team Leader Park, go ahead and scout the area. If you spot anyone approaching, signal with a gunshot."
Park Jung-hyeon nodded at the order. Working from the dots on the ops pad and the distance they had already covered, he calculated a roughly five-hundred-meter separation and decided the cactus-and-rock-strewn slope on the far side of the oreum was the best fit.
Yeon-woo turned to Kim Su-hyeok.
"As for us — we hold this position until thirty minutes before the first strategy window ends. Team Leader Park will already have secured the far side of the oreum, so we'll take out every enemy approaching from either direction."
Kim Su-hyeok gave a silent nod.
"All right. Let's split up."
"Yes, sir."
They divided into two elements and took positions on opposite faces of the oreum, looking out over the broad plain.
Visibility changed relative to elevation. In metric terms, the square root of your height multiplied by 3.57 kilometers is how far you can see. Put simply, the earth is round — so the higher you stand, the farther you can look. From the top of the oreum, surveying the movements of any enemy approaching the center was easy. That was exactly why Yeon-woo had headed for the middle.
In combat, spotting the enemy first mattered more than anything else.
"Two approaching from the southwest."
Kim Su-hyeok, scanning through his scope, spoke quietly. Yeon-woo looked in the same direction. Something was moving out there, but the naked eye could not make it out clearly.
"How far?"
Kim Su-hyeok estimated by eye for a moment, then answered.
"Roughly seven hundred meters, give or take."
"Then open fire the moment they come inside three hundred fifty."
"Understood."
Kim Su-hyeok nodded and quietly adjusted his clicks. A few minutes later, he spoke again in the same low voice. The two figures had entered his effective range. He had swept the far ground thoroughly — no additional companions in sight.
"Firing."
At Kim Su-hyeok's word, Yeon-woo looked down across the broad grassland spread below the oreum. Even to his naked eye, the two silhouettes were now clearly distinct.
"Do it."
Yeon-woo nodded. Prone on the ground with his aim locked to precision, Kim Su-hyeok squeezed the trigger.
Bang—!