"Comrades! You think you can protect our hyungnim with bodies like that!!"

Goseong, in Gangwon. Halfway up a hill of about three hundred and thirty hectares.

Up here the season had already covered its tracks, and you wondered when autumn had even arrived.

The first snow had fallen on the summit of Seoraksan. The reds and yellows that had colored the mountain until recently were nearly all down now, piled up as dry leaves that rustled underfoot.

A cold mountain wind drove through the bare branches over and over.

In the middle of it. A man stripped to the waist, wearing nothing but military pants, was shouting with the veins standing out in his neck.

"NO, SIR!!"

At one time the Cheonmu guards called this wide training ground a playground for romantics.

Clean air. Ridge after ridge, running on without end.

Open space where they could train as hard as they liked out of the public eye and show off how much man they were.

Nobody says it now.

A hell for the experience of it, no — an actual hell!

The second one was a great deal more accurate. Part of the hill had been formally licensed as a survival-game site.

Prefab container quarters had gone up so the training staff could stay. A high steel fence and surveillance gear ran around the edge.

Now nobody sets foot in it without a pass.

Toward the center of the site, a dozen or so Cheonmu guards were training with mud and dust all over them, screaming as they went.

One man drove them into hell on a schedule.

Special instructor Kim Cheolsu!

The man is out of his mind, completely.

To the guards in the training he is so far from normal that they doubt whether he is human at all.

It has not been made public, but he is certainly assumed to have come out of the North Korean special forces.

He was small-framed, and with his shirt off he was nothing like himself with clothes on.

He looked lean, but hard split muscle ran the length of him.