Action Actor
Yeon-woo and his teammates fitted the desert attachments and started retracing the path they had come by.
As they pushed forward at speed, Yeon-woo looked up at the scorching Central American sun hanging high in the sky and ordered his thoughts.
He still hadn't pinpointed exactly which island Global Match was being filmed on, but it was clearly somewhere between Cuba and Miami.
The first day's competition would end eventually.
Night fighting raised the odds of injury, and the cameras scattered across the island would struggle to capture combat properly after dark—so the match was almost certain to wrap before sunset.
They hadn't been briefed on what came after, but the most likely setup was the same as the previous season: once the day's play ended, they would move to lodging and resume from the same location the next morning.
That was how it had worked on Survival Island.
But while we were circling the island, I never spotted anything that looked like a place they could use for lodging.
Would they just shove everyone into crude container-box dorms the way they had last season?
That had been a domestic production, and the cast had been washed-up or never-quite-made-it celebrities who would put up with almost anything for a shot at relevance.
The global celebrities on this show would never tolerate that kind of treatment.
And frankly, they were right not to. It meant they knew how to protect their own interests.
So they'll fly us back to the hotel by helicopter.
At first he had assumed the fleet of a dozen-plus choppers was pure Hollywood flex—a show of money. But once you factored in the island's size, the time and stamina it would take for every team to converge on a single dock, and the boat ride back to Miami, staging helicopters by team count was actually the most efficient option.
Then when does the clock run out today?
The ops pad only showed a countdown to the next strategy window—no ordinary clock—so he had no precise time.
We ate breakfast a little after seven this morning. I rested a bit, then they dragged me to the harbor first.
That had been roughly two hours after breakfast. After that came an hour of the shooting round and gear selection, then the team rendezvous and the helicopter ride onto the island.
So the match started around eleven a.m. Two rounds since then, three hours each—six hours total.
By that estimate it was already past five in the afternoon.
In Korea the sun would already be sinking and evening would be close.
Cuba sits at about 22° N, Miami at 25°. This island has to be somewhere in between.
Jeju was 33° N and the DMZ near 38°, so they were far lower in latitude—sunset would come later than back home.
Around 23° N, the sun sets roughly at eight. This is our last move of the day.
Once this round ended, Day One would almost certainly be called on the spot and they would head back to the hotel.
Then we push hard.
No more conserving stamina. Better to knock out as many teams as possible before the round closed.
Yeon-woo, who had been running in silence while he sorted it out, glanced once at Kim Su-hyeok leading the way and once at Park Jung-hyeon covering their rear.
"I think this is today's final round. We should pick up the pace and take out as many teams as we can."
Both men nodded.
"How much faster than this can you handle?" Kim Su-hyeok asked, looking back at Yeon-woo.
The real question was whether he could keep up.
Yeon-woo scratched his cheek and gave an awkward little smile.
"I'm good. I'm young."
Su-hyeok snorted a quiet laugh and nodded.
The kid had already shown outstanding ability and adapted to this world with an ease that made you wonder if he had been born for it. Even so, Su-hyeok had assumed there was still an unbridgeable gap in raw physical capacity between a civilian and a professional.
Hearing Ryu Yeon-woo's cocky answer, he wrote it off as youthful bravado—but given everything the young man had already delivered, he would probably manage to hang on. Fine. They would run it hard.
"If it gets too much, say so. Team Leader Park will look after you from the rear."
"Yes, sir."
Park Jung-hyeon answered, and Su-hyeok immediately lifted the pace.
Hoo. Hoo.
He switched into the Spanish breathing technique athletes used for sudden speed surges and began to pull away hard.
The first-round push toward the island's center had taken about an hour; on the return he intended to cover the same ground in thirty minutes or less.
After a long stretch of running he glanced back.
Even keeping up this far was impressive stamina for a civilian.
…?!
Bluff?
Didn't look like it.
Yeon-woo was following in complete silence, face calm, not even a flicker of strain.
"You're burning yourself out doing all the pacemaking alone. I'll take the lead for the rest."
At high speed the front runner ate the full force of the wind; that was always the hardest job. Yeon-woo surged past and slid naturally into the lead.
He can't be completely spent. Once we peel out to the perimeter we'll be rolling nonstop until the day ends.
It was pure consideration that made Yeon-woo take the front—but Su-hyeok, suddenly handed the second position, was thrown.
…Does this kid run marathons for fun or something?
He shook his head a moment later.
Full kit, uncomfortable combat boots, desert attachments that made running even worse—and still holding this pace. That was pure talent.
…Maybe scouting new agents out of survival hobby clubs really is worth looking into.
Watching the hobby-club civilian named Ryu pull ahead of him, Kim Su-hyeok drifted into an unexpected train of thought.
Tat-tat-tang—!
Tu-du-du—.
They had been running for some time when gunfire cracked from the left of their line of advance.
Yeon-woo, still in the lead, raised a clenched fist—the halt signal.
They scanned every direction, then dropped into cover beside a sizable dune nearby.
Tang—!
Ta-tang—!
The shots kept coming, but none of them seemed aimed at Yeon-woo's group.
The distance, though, was uncomfortably close.
"Looks like a firefight's broken out nearby," Park Jung-hyeon said.
Yeon-woo nodded and pulled the ops pad from his pouch.
Time remaining until next strategy window: 02h 03m 15s
Distance remaining to objective: 616 M
At the start the remaining distance had been a little over three kilometers. They were essentially at the objective.
Time, on the other hand, was still plentiful.
Tat-tat-tang—!
The gunfire continued without pause.
"We approach carefully, check the situation, and if we can take them, we take them."
At Yeon-woo's order both men nodded.
The sustained shooting suggested two teams dug into cover, trading suppression fire. If they had met head-on in the open or if one side had managed a clean ambush, one team would already be eliminated and the fight would be over.
Yeon-woo and his teammates dropped low and began a silent approach toward the sound of the guns.
They left the desert terrain and entered denser scrub.
The shots had sounded extremely close, but on an island almost free of man-made structures the sound simply rolled outward with nothing to break it—so it carried farther and louder than the actual distance.
Shhhk—.
Sssk—.
The three of them ghosted between the trees with footwork that barely disturbed a leaf.
In computer survival games, deliberately advancing toward someone else's gunfire was usually called a "Lü Bu play."
Lü Bu had been a warlord at the end of the Han dynasty and a central figure in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The old line ran: among men, Lü Bu; among horses, Red Hare.
A "Lü Bu play" meant exactly that kind of aggressive temperament—going out of your way to hunt other players for a fight.
They had peeled off the center and swung to the perimeter for one reason: to hunt other teams.
Gunfire was gunfire. No reason to avoid it.
And it's exactly the kind of play the production team and the audience will love most.
When the show eventually aired, the image of Team Korea deliberately walking toward the sound of guns would be pure broadcast gold.
It had been the same on last season's Survival Island: in shows like this, narrative was everything.
Last time the winning story was framed around "the underdog's revolt" and "justice served." This season Team Korea's story is "troll play."
A team that shattered common sense and moved differently from everyone else.
Audiences had always loved that kind of lunatic in survival formats.
They kept advancing on the gunfire until an artificial structure—rare on this island—came into view.
It was a single-story concrete building that looked like a hangar, large enough to house a light aircraft.
Hmm. We passed cornfields on the way in. Probably a shed for farm equipment or crop storage.
Yeon-woo and his teammates circled the structure at a distance.
The shooting had gradually thinned as they approached; both sides had apparently realized they were only burning ammunition for no gain and had settled into a temporary lull.
Then a human silhouette shifted among the trees in front of the building.
Yeon-woo and Kim Su-hyeok, in the lead, spotted it at the same instant and froze.
The concrete building had only one entrance—a heavy iron door. The team outside was using the trees as cover, pinning the team inside.
The ones inside can't get out. The ones outside can't risk a blind entry. So they're just staring each other down.
Yeon-woo sorted the situation in a heartbeat.
If we play this right, we can run "shout east, strike west" and "kill with a borrowed knife" at the same time.
Make noise in the east, hit from the west.
Use someone else's blade to do the killing.
Classic stratagems—and still among the most effective ever devised.
Yeon-woo whispered the plan he had just formed to Kim Su-hyeok and Park Jung-hyeon.
Su-hyeok stroked his chin and nodded.
"Sounds plausible. If we execute cleanly it should work… but can you actually pull it off?"
He was looking at the single-story concrete building as he asked.
Yeon-woo smiled and nodded.
"I've shot more action than people realize. You could almost call me an action actor."
Su-hyeok thought of Jeong Do-jin hurtling through outer space in White Blood, and nodded.
Come to think of it, the young man standing in front of him was the lead of the series he himself had binge-watched until he was completely hooked.
"Let's do it."