The Build Still Wasn't Even Ripe

"Hmm."

Hwi-hyeon still wasn’t producing armored units yet. There was no need for them yet.

Armor in this world generally had legs, wheels, or tracks, and weighed at least several tons. Having the spare capacity to field that kind of hardware was pretty damn hard in the early game.

As of June 12, 2053, one might ask: so when exactly did the early game end?

The benchmark was more obvious than you’d think. It was the BT great offensive on January 15, 2054, the start of year one.

BTs generated from every nearby spore colony, along with BT packs that spawned separately and came swarming in, would all converge on the quarantine zone.

Not the squishy corpse parasites they’d dealt with so far, but Stage 2 BTs—formed entirely from spores from beginning to end inside the spore colonies—had bodies covered head to toe in hardened spores, making them extremely difficult to stop with anything weaker than rifle fire. They could even chew through shotgun pellets and keep charging, so if all you had were regular infantry, the quarantine zone could get utterly overrun. A real big event.

There were still about six months left until the BT great offensive, so maybe he should be preparing now. But since he already knew an attack was coming, there was no need to get all worked up.

No matter what he did, if they came on January 15, then by extension he could burn every colony in the area to the ground before then and nothing would happen.

Lay Claymores in every direction, add more turrets on the wall, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠concentrate firepower with light armored vehicles and walkers—the million-plus BT swarm would just get mowed down.

That was all they were: BTs with no long-range attackers and no giant BTs, just literal hordes of tough little bastards rushing in. Of course, without prior intel, he’d have to throw everything into the defense and fight like hell. But Hwi-hyeon already knew everything, so there was no reason to panic.

He was fond of the survivalist maxim that only the prepared could avoid being ruled by the situation.

"That’s about right."

Roseberry’s current population was 13,210.

With losses under fifty in total, they could absorb that without breaking a sweat.

What raw infantry needed was only half of them standing still and firing their rifles, while the other half moved out of place to somewhere else. The required skill ceiling wasn’t all that high, which meant refugees could be shoved right into the line.

Walker pilots and armored-vehicle drivers would need additional training, sure, but this wasn’t a main battle tank. A walker was only about five meters tall and twenty tons, and the Wiesel Light Armored Vehicle was just a ten-ton light armored vehicle. Both fell under the light armor category, so if they got four weeks of training under the standard curriculum, they’d be ready for deployment.

Four weeks was a month—wasn’t that a little tight? Honestly, yeah, it was. With only six months left, the sensible choice was to train pilots as quickly as possible and grind their skills up through actual combat.

But don’t worry.

He could just buy the pilots with tokens.

*

"Wow. Sick."

Now that the newbies were starting to get a feel for maintaining and developing the quarantine zone, the number of bizarre builds had started to increase as well.

Not that bizarre was really the right word—most of it was trial and error, and some of it was less rational planning than trauma-induced convulsions. Still, if they stacked enough troops like that, they could probably hold off the year-one great offensive no matter what.

Of course, if he set out to optimize things properly, there were also absurd builds like that one—outsourcing the whole thing to the World Union, for example.

Air power was just less efficient because of the spore clouds. If you were willing to run your maintenance crews into the ground, you could still use aircraft, which was why they were selling CAS rights for a high price. At the very least, with 300,000 tokens, you could call in gunships hard enough to kill a third of the Union Army’s maintenance department.

"There are a lot of builds like this, huh."

They were hard to copy and their returns weren’t that great, but now that the game had become reality, these builds had instead become the mainstream. The reason was simple: they were just doing the same things they’d tried in the game.

Rather than half-assing some orthodox build and failing, they’d rather sharpen the weird little gimmick build they’d been polishing since the game days and ride it all the way to the end. In its own way, it was a rational approach.

Right now, Hwi-hyeon himself was following the early-game build he’d refined, and even though the world had become real, most events were still unfolding exactly as they had in the game. You could say that didn’t make any sense, but then—did it make sense that the players had fallen here in the first place? That argument could be countered forever.

*

"Upgrade the armory."

After the fuel refinery came the armory. Once the armory reached level 3, it would finally become possible to produce walkers and armored vehicles. Production had technically been possible before too, but now it would truly be mass production.

Three days was the kind of time that would pass before you knew it, once you kept poking at this and that.

"Ohhh."

And with beer involved, it would pass even faster.

They’d successfully made clean beer with no additives from barley and hops grown in the greenhouse, so for people who’d been surviving on rye bread and oat porridge, it was practically a godsend.

"What’s the output?"

"Nice... Build a pub too. Beer should be drunk cold."

"Build three dedicated barley greenhouses and three dedicated hop greenhouses, then assign people to making only beer. Reassign the greenhouses we’ve been using so far to spice production."

"Set the beer output for those three greenhouse pairs to 30,000 liters."

Common sense would suggest that this little city, with a population just barely around 15,000, couldn’t possibly swallow that absurd amount of beer. But there was one thing they were overlooking: every single person in the city was an adult.

If each person drank even one bottle, most of it would disappear in a single day. Naturally, even the boosted 30,000 liters couldn’t really be called that much. Sure, by post-apocalypse standards it was a flood of alcohol, but it wasn’t the kind of quantity you’d seen before the possession—like a convenience store where you could sweep up all the beer you wanted and some part-timer would just restock it from the back room immediately.

Of course, this too could all be solved by throwing more people at it.

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