Bring Me More Refugees
"Welcome to Roseberry. You have chosen—or been chosen for—the relocation to one of the few excellent quarantine zones. I have always thought Roseberry was special. I’m proud to be a citizen of this place, and I sincerely hope you can feel the same. To those of you who will make this your new home, let me tell you this: this place is safe."
"..."
The newly arrived refugees looked around as they listened to Hwi-hyun’s recorded voice. A 30-meter wall of reinforced concrete loomed over them, while a massive control tower that seemed to climb all the way to the edge of the sky pressed down on their senses.
"So they had enough resources to build a place like this, but couldn’t spare us a single loaf of bread."
"Shh. There are a lot of ears listening."
"Let them listen! If they don’t like it, they can go ahead and kill me!"
Put kindly, the refugees had backbone; put less kindly, they were all full of thorns. After clawing their way out of the hell of the living world, they had only managed to land in the hell of spores instead, so the reaction was hardly surprising.
But if you applied the first rule of dealing with people, you could strip every last thorn right out of them.
And that rule was simple: feed them.
Move to the common area under control. After shaving, brushing your teeth, showering, getting a haircut, and changing clothes, a meal will be provided in the cafeteria.
"Move out in double file!"
"Keep your spacing. Anyone who has trouble walking, fall out over here!"
The human heart was a remarkably simple thing.
As long as someone fed you and gave you a place to sleep, even the hardest bastard usually wouldn’t bear a grudge. That was especially true for refugees who’d been starving and half-naked just moments ago.
Besides, they really did need a wash.
Shhhhhaaaaaaa.....
"Huuuu...."
They couldn’t even guess when they’d last had a hot shower.
After finishing their washing, brushing, haircuts, and shaves, the refugees threw off their ragged clothes and filed into the shower area one by one, and the result was exactly what you’d expect.
Hundreds of people scrubbing away layers of old grime in the shower block turned the floor runoff black as tar, even though the water had been crystal clear coming down from above, and it poured relentlessly toward the drains.
The clothes they had arrived in had already been classified as biological waste and incinerated, while plain, no-frills civilian outfits were laid out in sizes that matched each person as closely as possible.
Once the stink had been washed away and they’d changed into fresh clothes, each of them was handed a freshly heated pack of CCAR.
Originally, each pack contained three meals’ worth of food, but nobody complained that it was too much. Everyone buried their faces in the rations without a word and tore through three meals’ worth of food in a matter of minutes. It looked less like humans eating and more like pigs shoving acorns and oats into their gullets.
But there was no mockery.
The people running the meal distribution and the soldiers keeping watch knew all too well that they, too, had once lived in miserable conditions like this. In that sense, it was almost a kind of shared suffering.
"Haaah...."
And as one meal after another came to an end, people finally returned to looking human again, taking tissues from the tables to wipe their mouths or drinking water. Without a word, they obeyed the controls, followed the directions to the residential districts where they would be staying, and were taken in.
That process was repeated three times that day.
And that night passed without a single disturbance. Quiet as a grave.
*
"Heh, heh, heh. This is way too much fun."
Hwi-hyun’s build was, at its core, a refugee intake—> labor expansion—> endless external scouting personnel—> rising mortality—> additional refugee summoning loop. If you really had to name it, it was a mass-production-and-consumption build for human lives.
Sure, you could call it cruel, and in fact it was cruel. So what? The World Union wasn’t going to stop sending refugees, and the refugees themselves would probably prefer to die after dumping one more bullet or grenade into some rotten BT that had ruined their lives anyway.
Anyway, if you were wondering how production of the Assault Walker and the Wiesel Light Armored Vehicle was going, the answer was...
Upgrade in progress. Armory: 14 hours remaining.
Not a single one had rolled out yet.
You could produce from a level 1 armory that hadn’t been upgraded, sure, but it took forever and the quality was garbage. It was basically one of those emergency wartime production lines you always saw in fiction. If you had to use it, you’d use it, but there was no reason to voluntarily build something defective if you could help it.
The BTs weren’t stirring hard enough to justify walkers or armored vehicles just yet, and the expedition teams’ main job was still resource collection, not BT clearance, so the firepower meant to support direct engagements naturally had very low priority.
Same as how the easiest thing for any government to cut was always the defense budget.
"No way, he’s already hit 10,000?"
Hwi-hyun narrowed his eyes as he browsed the gallery. He’d thought he was doing pretty well himself, but apparently that was a misread on his part.
His opponent was that Ingan-dongmulwon, a sickeningly hardcore veteran who could run a quarantine zone with zero population. His understanding of the game was deep, but unlike Hwi-hyun, whose knowledge of theory and hidden lore was broader, Ingan-dongmulwon was simply overpowering him in actual play.
"Thank God this isn’t a PVP game."
There was a possibility. Now that this was reality, if they could identify the location of another quarantine zone, couldn’t they invade it? Whether the troops under him would actually obey such an order was another matter entirely.
Even now, the reason players didn’t know each other’s quarantine zone locations was partly to prevent exactly that sort of internal war.
From the World Union’s point of view, if the inland quarantine zones ever allied with one another, it would become a nightmare. And if one zone got bad ideas, it could lure BT swarms into another or dump refugee groups on them, which was why the Union never shared quarantine zone locations under any circumstances.
It was a bureaucratic trick, sure, but it benefited everyone enough that the trick kept going.
If veterans like Hwi-hyun or Ingan-dongmulwon ever decided to seize another quarantine zone by force, the number of zones that would fall would be more than anyone could count.
"What’s the current greenhouse operating rate?"
It is operating at 55% capacity.
"Build more residential districts, and add more aquaponics facilities too. Starting today, cut CCAR production to one-third and switch over to natural food."
The notification will be issued.
At last, goodbye to the filthy dry rations and compressed blocks. It was about time he started craving proper natural food again, so efficiency could take a back seat for a while.
And if he needed more production, he could just cram more people in. More input meant more output. Wasn’t that basic arithmetic?
It wasn’t like he was talking about semiconductors or anything. He was talking about food production, so there was almost no chance the proposition would be wrong.
Human activity detected within a 12 km radius. Identifying: Jeremy’s unit is returning.
"Oh? How many trucks are there?"
Identifying: approximately 12 vehicles detected.
"Perfect."
And just like that, the number of trucks capable of hauling in huge amounts of external resources had gone up as well. It was practically a day for cheering. From here on out, there was only one thing Hwi-hyun needed to do.
"I need to bring in more refugees."
That meant bringing more people into Roseberry.
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