Under the gaze of everyone present, Long Zhan moved like a hunting leopard, swift and decisive. In one large stride, he leapt over the grenade on the ground and charged straight toward the mission target.
Up to this point, everything seemed normal.
However, as Adam and the others on the elevated walkway, as well as the three teammates who had sparred with Long Zhan before, all assumed he was going to shield the High-Value Target (HVT), Long Zhan raised his arm without hesitation and delivered a precise elbow strike directly to the target's face.
Seizing the moment while the HVT was stunned, he placed both hands on the target's shoulders. Leveraging his superior strength, he lifted the target effortlessly. Finally, with a powerful twist of his waist and legs, he executed a suplex, slamming the HVT face-first into the ground.
The landing was impeccable.
The target's body landed squarely over the grenade, perfectly covering it, effectively turning the HVT into a human shield to absorb the full impact of the explosive.
The sequence left the HVT dazed from the elbow strike and incapacitated from the hard slam onto the ground.
The target lay there motionless, unable to recover from the twin blows to his body and mind. If it had been a real grenade, he would have been utterly incapable of moving off it in time, inevitably becoming shredded by the blast.
Fortunately, this was only a training exercise using a simulated electronic grenade, which merely emitted a pre-recorded explosion sound.
Long Zhan's actions were swift, decisive, and without the slightest hesitation. The entire sequence—from the strike to the slam—took no more than two seconds.
There was even enough time for Long Zhan to ensure a secondary layer of protection.
He dove toward the corpse of a nearby "assailant," attempting to use it as a human shield to guarantee his safety.
Safeguarding his own life had always been Long Zhan's top priority. He had mastered countless survival techniques to an almost instinctual level.
Unfortunately, his time calculations betrayed him.
"Boom!"
Just as Long Zhan was mid-dive and still in midair, the grenade "detonated."
Witnessing this, Long Zhan felt a chill of fear.
Luckily, he had chosen not to waste time retrieving the corpse as a shield. With the grenade detonating in under two seconds, he wouldn't have had enough time to place the body on the grenade, leaving him directly exposed to the explosion.
In the confined indoor space, facing a grenade blast head-on while standing would have left negligible chances of survival.
The outcome was unexpected, and even Adam, the instructor, stood frozen in disbelief, mouth agape.
The other instructors were equally stunned.
The simulated results were crystal clear: the grenade's energy and shrapnel had been entirely absorbed by the HVT, leaving Long Zhan and his three Bravo Team members completely unscathed.
In terms of team survival rate, Long Zhan had outperformed all the other trainees.
However, the mission required capturing the target alive. Long Zhan's actions had indirectly caused the target's "death," marking this as a highly controversial performance in the evaluation.
Among the six trainees who completed the evaluation, various scenarios had unfolded:
- Some panicked at the sight of the grenade, forgetting to issue commands to their team and only focusing on self-preservation. This led to severe injuries to both teammates and the HVT.
- Others remembered to warn their team but neglected the target, resulting in similarly poor outcomes.
- Then there were trainees like Brian, who adhered strictly to the training manual, issuing warning commands while shielding the HVT. Although the HVT sustained minor injuries, the result was considered optimal as everyone survived.
This latter approach was what instructors like Adam deemed the most reasonable solution.
Another extreme approach, rarely seen and frowned upon by Adam and the entire DG unit, was the sacrificial method.
In such cases, trainees impulsively shielded grenades with their bodies to protect their teammates.
This act of self-sacrifice, though glorified in some military units and often posthumously awarded, was strictly prohibited within DG.
The rationale was simple.
As Chief Instructor Malcolm put it: "The U.S. government didn't invest so much into training you to become elite operators just so you could be buried under a flag with a medal.
Your mission is to bring back the hostages or the target, alive. You're not here to sacrifice yourself for anyone, and no one else should expect you to. Your priority is to protect yourself."
Though pragmatic, Malcolm's words resonated with reason.
With advancements in personal protective gear like ballistic helmets and vests, as long as operators hit the ground promptly and avoided the grenade's immediate blast radius, the likelihood of fatal injuries was minimal.
Even hits to unprotected limbs were unlikely to be life-threatening in the short term.
Moreover, with DG's high standards, every operator had the skills to respond appropriately to sudden threats like grenades, rendering such self-sacrificial actions unnecessary.
What one might consider a heroic act of saving the team often turned out to be needless—teammates would already have taken cover effectively.
Perhaps for these reasons, DG strictly prohibited this approach.
Among the six trainees preceding Long Zhan, two had developed such bad habits during their time in other units, throwing themselves over grenades.
Both were harshly reprimanded by Adam on the spot.
Beyond these four common responses, no other variations had ever been documented.
In DG's decades-long history of Green Team selection, every response to this scenario, no matter how varied, fit within these categories.
Whether due to differing leadership styles or other factors, final evaluations always fell into one of these four groups.
Until today.
History was made.
Long Zhan's approach—using the mission target as a shield to protect his own life—was unprecedented. His overly cautious "self-preservation" method became a first in Green Team's history.