Chapter 47.1

Chapter 47.1

Lee Wooshin was teaching two distinct martial arts. One was Krav Maga, an Israeli special forces martial art, and the other was MCMAP, which was adapted from the U.S. Marine Corps Marshall Arts program.

Krav Maga is a combination of the best aspects of various martial arts, such as jiu-jitsu, muay thai, boxing, and judo, which makes it excellent for close combat and especially advantageous for survival.

It was the pinnacle of military martial arts for lethal purposes, mixing bare-handed combat with knife fighting and firearms.

Due to her excellent reflexes, this survival-oriented training suited Han Seoryeong perfectly. With each sparring session, she quickly mastered the techniques, and her already sharp intuition became even more refined.

Ah… It would be great if we could just focus on fighting. Lately, Seoryeong found the training very enjoyable. She wished it could continue like this indefinitely…

With these assuring thoughts, she was eating her meal aggressively, but today, the atmosphere in the dining hall was unusually gloomy, like a funeral. Glancing around, she noticed all her comrades had dark expressions.

“Hey…. Shouldn’t we at least say goodbye to each other in advance?”

At that moment, one of the members who hadn’t even touched the plate said gloomily.

“I heard that more than half of us are quitting from now on.”

“Sigh… I quit because I didn’t want to deal with that crap, and now I have to do it again.”

“It’s still better to travel overseas as a mercenary than to stay loyal while earning only 1.7 million won.”

“That’s true, but…”

Sighs of frustration and similar sounds of exasperation could be heard everywhere.

“Please, just not Instructor Lee Wooshin.”

Even while stuffing her mouth with food, Seoryeong listened to her comrades’ conversation.

“I absolutely don’t want to share a room with him.”

“Oh… I’ve heard a lot about him too.”

The team members were mired in despair, like someone writing a suicide note, when one of the men, a normally jovial fellow who often chatted with the instructors, leaned forward with a smug expression.

“There’s one of the most notoriously vicious private military companies out there,” he said, “the Terrible Ones, a group of ex-South African Defense Force guys. Terrible ones in Korean.”

“…..”

“Anyway, there was a fucking brutal civil war in the 70s called the Blood Diamond, where rebels went around chopping civilians off hand and foot with axes.”

“Ahhh…, I’ve heard of that, the Sierra Leonean civil war.”

“Yeah, that’s when these South African mercenaries were sent in, and there’s even a bizarre story on record about them cannibalizing the rebels to pay them back.”

“…..”

“That’s where our instructor Lee Wooshin is from, isn’t it?”

I wonder what he learned there… The words came out of nowhere, and everyone stopped moving. Even the clattering of the plates stopped completely.

Seoryeong, who had been scraping the table until the last minute to find water and drink it, asked plainly.

“What do you do when you’re in the same room with the instructor?”

And then the guys were like, “Oh, so here is what I’m going to do to…,” and their faces became bitter..

“Hang him upside down first.”

“….”

“And then… Well, beatings are the basics. There are electric shocks and force-feeding. Nerve-destroying injections and stuff.”

Seoryeong was speechless, listening to their desires.

“There’s head-burying in the dirt, fire torture, waterboarding, bamboo skewers. And then there’s the ancient practice of domoji, which has been practiced since the Joseon Dynasty.”

The men’s faces turned ashen at these words. A heavy atmosphere of anticipation filled the dining hall.

Seoryeong put down her last scraped cutlery and rinsed her mouth with water. Setting down her cup, she broke the gloomy mood and asked.

“How do you know so well?”

“Because I couldn’t take it, and I failed out of Special Forces every time.”

During the 10-week training program, most soldiers fall apart.

48 hours of intense prisoner interrogation training. It’s torture training with a twist.

When they returned from the walk, they were greeted by sunglasses-wearing instructors. Gasping for breath, they gathered in the barracks and gulped down bottled water.

Perhaps due to what they heard in the morning, Seoryeong kept glancing towards the podium. Then, the instructors approached, each handing out a small note.

“Open it and memorize it in ten seconds.”