Lee Wooshin was teaching them two types of martial arts. One was Krav Maga, the Israeli special forces combat system, and the other was MCMAP, the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program derived from the U.S. Marine Corps.

It was a hybrid system built from the best elements of various martial arts—jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, boxing, judo—making it excellent for close-quarters combat, and especially advantageous for survival.

It combined unarmed techniques with knife fighting and gun-based striking methods, placing it at the pinnacle of lethal military hand-to-hand systems.

This kind of survival-oriented training was a perfect fit for her fast reflexes. Every time she sparred, the techniques stuck to her body at an accelerating pace, and her already sharp instincts only grew keener.

Ah... If only we could just do hand-to-hand combat and nothing else. Seoryeong found the training genuinely fun lately. If it could just continue like this, that would be perfect...

As she was innocently thinking such thoughts and aggressively shoveling food into her mouth like always, the mess hall atmosphere felt particularly grim today, like a mourning house. When she looked up, all the agents’ faces were dark and sullen.

"Hey... shouldn’t we, like, say our goodbyes in advance or something?"

One of the agents, who hadn’t even touched his tray, muttered gloomily.

"More than half of us are supposed to quit starting today, right?"

"Haaah... I quit the army in the first place because I couldn’t stand that kind of shit, and now I have to go through it again."

"Still, isn't it better to work as a mercenary abroad than pledge loyalty for 1.7 million won?"

"I mean, yeah, but..."

Sighs as heavy as groans rippled through the room.

"Please... just not Instructor Lee Wooshin."

Even while stuffing rice into her mouth, Seoryeong kept her ears on the conversation.

"Anyone but him—I never want to be stuck in a room with that man."

"Yeah... I've heard about him too."

The agents looked like people writing their last wills. Just then, one guy—usually chatty and friendly with the instructors—lowered his torso toward the table with a smug look on his face.

"There’s this one PMC known as the most vicious in the business. Formed by former South African Defense Force guys. They're called the Terrible Ones."

“......”

"In Korean, that’s kkeumjjikhan jadeul—‘the horrible ones.’"

"In the ‘70s, during the Blood Diamond conflicts, remember? Those brutal civil wars? The rebels were going around chopping off civilians’ hands and feet with axes."

"Ahh... yeah. Wasn’t that the Sierra Leone Civil War?"

"Exactly. So these South African mercs were deployed, and there are even recorded stories about them capturing rebels and eating them—like, cannibalism—saying they were just paying them back in kind."

“......”

"Our Instructor Lee Wooshin? He’s from there, believe it or not."

The remark trailed off weakly, but suddenly, all motion in the room stopped. Even the clinking of utensils on trays ceased completely.

Everyone, looking like they’d lost their appetite, silently reached for their water cups. Meanwhile, Seoryeong, who had been scraping her tray clean to the end, asked plainly:

"What happens when you go into a room with the instructor?"

The agents all made the same bitter face that seemed to say, Ugh, right, we forgot she was here...

"First thing, he strings you up upside down."

“......”

"Then... well, beatings are a given. There’s electric shocks, forced feeding, even injections that supposedly destroy your nerves."

“......”

"He buries your head in the dirt, tortures with fire, water cages, bamboo spikes... even domoji—that old Joseon-era method."

As the list /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ went on, the agents’ faces turned ashen. A heavy, oppressive air settled over the mess hall.

Seoryeong finally set down her spoon, rinsed her mouth with water, and placed her cup down. She pierced the gloom with a level voice.

"How do you know all this?"

"Because I couldn’t endure it—I got discharged from special forces training every time during that program."

The most dropout-heavy part of the ten-week course:

A 48-hour high-intensity POW interrogation drill. Crudely put: torture training.

***

When the agents returned from their run, what greeted them were instructors in sunglasses. Gasping for breath, they assembled in formation at the training yard, gulping down water first.

Maybe because of what they'd heard that morning, they kept glancing nervously toward the training podium. That’s when the instructors came forward and handed out small slips of paper, one by one.

“Open it and memorize it within ten seconds.”

At Lee Wooshin’s curt command, Seoryeong narrowed her eyes carefully. On the slip of paper she unfolded, a cryptic coordinate was written:

59.9343°N, 30.3351°E.

Seoryeong shoved the meaningless numbers into her head. Lee Wooshin checked his military digital watch and spoke.

“We’re now beginning the Refusal to Divulge Information Training.”

Ah... Someone let out a quiet groan.

“That’s the fancy name. I just call it torture training.”

He habitually curled the corner of his mouth.

"The paper you received contains critical operation details: mission name, target, comms data, infiltration route, rendezvous point, airdrop location, and more. The principle is simple. Your job is to protect the information you just memorized."

The sound of heavy breathing gradually subsided.

“From this point on, instructors will use every fucking method imaginable to get you to talk.”

His voice turned cold and impassive. Seoryeong snapped back to awareness and repeated the coordinates again in her head. 59.9343°N, 30.3351°E. Her mouth felt dry. Her heart pounded violently.

“Most of you will probably drop out during this process. But those who survive this training usually make it to the end.” 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

For a moment, his gaze seemed to pierce directly into Seoryeong—but with those sunglasses on, she couldn’t be sure.

“Through this program, you’ll learn the mindset to endure pain, and the attitude to adopt during interrogation.”

At last, he curled his lips into a meaningful smile and gave a final farewell.

“Then let’s hope we all meet again with our limbs still attached.”

And before he could even finish speaking, one of the agents in the front row suddenly staggered and collapsed.

“――!”

What... the hell? Everyone froze and looked down in alarm. But the strange part was the eerie silence—no one caused a commotion.

Even though someone had just collapsed, the instructors stood there with their hands behind their backs like nothing happened. Only the agents looked around in confusion and panic.

Seoryeong, her face set in a grim line, was scanning the surroundings when her vision suddenly spun.

“...Ah...”

Her body felt like it was being drained. Strangely, she couldn’t move a single finger. She tried to resist to the very end, but her knees gave out first, and her upper body tilted toward the dirt ground.

She forced her eyes open, barely keeping them from closing—and saw that she wasn’t the only one. Most of the agents standing at attention were staggering and dropping one by one.

The last thing Seoryeong saw was a pair of jet-black sunglasses.

***

She met her husband for the first time around the age of twenty-four.

After she was suddenly struck with a retinal disease, her life—which had been as dry and brittle as fallen leaves—was swept away in a rapid current. The condition progressed quickly, and the world began narrowing day by day.

Seoryeong went blind before she could even prepare for her changed life. No matter how many times she blinked, the fog on her vision wouldn’t lift—and that’s when she realized she hadn’t even prepared a cane.

There were days she couldn’t take a single step outside her room. She was only twenty-four.

Barely the same age as a typical college graduate. But she thought: I’m not going to die in this damn room.

So, in desperation, she grabbed a long umbrella and went outside.

Having spent her whole life relying solely on sight, all the smells and sounds that flooded in made her dizzy and nauseated.

Were human senses always this sharp? Seoryeong, reeling with dizziness, barely managed to find her way into a store.

She went in to buy a white cane for the visually impaired—and that’s where she met Kim Hyeon.

He was an employee from a different medical equipment supplier, but Seoryeong mistook him for the store owner.

She asked him about the product, paid for it, and even learned how to use the cane from him.

It was a plain and uneventful first meeting.

But she still couldn’t forget that day—because of the sudden downpour.

She didn’t have the confidence to walk home with both a cane and an umbrella. So she sat inside the shop to wait out the rain, and the more she thought about it, the angrier she became.

Why do I have to live with a cane? I lived kindly like everyone told me—why the hell did this happen to me...

She hadn’t accepted any of it yet. It wasn’t something she could simply accept.

Just because she went blind didn’t mean she had anyone to help her, or to let her cry and collapse and throw tantrums until she refilled her strength and stood up again. She’d been alone since birth. How could life make her even more alone than that?

And yet—dragging herself all the way here just to keep surviving made her feel pathetic, miserable, and hollow. Her chest heaved as if it might explode from even the slightest poke.