Quarantine Zone Chicken Genius
Swoooooosh....
June 19, 2053.
A shipment of extraordinary value had arrived at Roseberry.
"Bawk?"
"Ch... chickens!"
Chickens were the stars of the show. The kind that laid eggs and could be fried into chicken dinners.
Having judged that carp and catfish alone were hitting their limit as a protein supply, they had spent no small number of Tokens airlifting thousands of birds—including breeding hens—in by rocket.
"Stand back! I said stand back!"
"Anyone who steals a chicken and eats it will be expelled on the spot by order of the Commander-in-Chief!"
The sight of the garrison, bayonets fixed on their rifles, standing guard over a procession of thousands of chickens was almost farcical—until you saw the greedy looks on people's faces, and then it made perfect sense.
To survivors who had been living on potatoes, onions, carrots, rye, oats, barley, and beer brewed with hops, carp and catfish had certainly been precious sources of protein. But even that had its limits—psychological ones, at this point—after days and weeks of the same thing.
"Potato stew onion stew carrot stew rye bread oat porridge carp soup catfish soup beer potato stew onion stew carrot stew rye bread oat porridge carp soup catfish soup beer potato stew onion stew carrot stew rye bread oat porridge carp soup catfish soup beer potato stew onion stew carrot stew rye bread oat porridge carp soup catfish soup beer....."
"Tomorrow's menu is potato soup with pickled onions. Day after tomorrow is braised onions with boiled potatoes. And today's menu is stir-fried shredded carrots and potato soup...."
The monotony of the diet had the residents one step short of losing their minds.
And the players were no exception.
Koreans—slaves to salted napa cabbage, people whose dietary identity was built around kimchi fried rice with more kimchi on the side—had gone months without so much as a single scrap of kimchi, let alone a proper bowl of rice. Their minds were starting to leave the building.
Truly terrifying!
Hwi-hyun had paid through the nose for those chickens precisely because the craving for something—anything—new had hit its peak. What kind of Commander-in-Chief couldn't even get himself a plate of chicken and beer?
"What? We can't fry the chicken?"
Insufficient oil for frying.
"NO!!! This can't be happening!!!!"
Would you like to use the Shop function?
Ta-da! Turns out "absolute" is a relative term.
Faced with the spectacular bottleneck of having chickens but no oil, the Commander-in-Chief's mental state simply left the premises. He wanted fried chicken. He did not have oil to fry it in.
And then the brilliant Commander-in-Chief had a stroke of genius. They had greenhouses, right? Grow soybeans or peanuts, press them for oil—problem solved.
But the real trouble started there. Neither soybeans nor peanuts existed anywhere in the quarantine zone. At which point the extremely brilliant Commander-in-Chief had yet another stroke of genius: just buy the seeds from the World Union.
Then another headache appeared. Chickens and oil alone do not a fried chicken make. You need batter. And with neither wheat flour nor cornmeal available, he was ready to lose his mind entirely.
At which point the Commander-in-Chief produced yet another flash of brilliance. All you really needed was starch, so he powdered potatoes, mixed them with baking powder, and manufactured his own frying flour.
And so, at last, the survivors of the quarantine zone could eat fried chicken.
[Screenshot of chicken and beer]
Kimchi??? Rice???? Nah~ in the face of chicken and beer, everything else is just a sidekick~
Hwi-hyun took the rage of the forum goons as his pickle side, tore into the chicken, and washed it down with beer.
The taste of an everyday luxury he hadn't known in so long. The exact flavor of the ordinary life he had lost. Compared to the chicken he'd eaten before being isekai'd—well, he didn't give a single thought to how it stacked up. Months had passed. Who would remember that kind of detail?
All that mattered was the faint aftertaste of potato starch, the juicy meat of a bird brined in nothing but salt and pepper, and the pure extravagance of cold beer.
For now, this chicken existed for Hwi-hyun alone. But he hadn't done the cooking himself. And once things loosened up even a little, it wouldn't take long at all for a fried-chicken franchise to rise from the ashes right here in the Roseberry Quarantine Zone.
"This right here... is guilty pleasure."
Crunching through the skin he'd saved for last, Hwi-hyun fell asleep with a look of pure contentment on his face.
The chicken he'd tasted for the first time in ages was so overwhelming it made him forget his dignity for a while.
July 1, 2053.
At last, the first walker rolled off the arsenal line.
"Assault Walker. Height five meters. Weight twenty tons. Fitted with a high-capacity battery good for one hundred sixty-eight hours of continuous operation. Armament: a pair of twenty-millimeter gatling guns, one on each arm, plus a thirty-tube sixty-six-millimeter rocket pod on the upper chassis. Walking speed twenty kilometers per hour. Sprint speed forty-seven."
"Looks damn solid."
"Roseberry finally has proper armor of its own."
The Assault Walker. The most basic model in the walker series, the cheapest, and a dedicated infantry blender.
The twenty-millimeter gatlings spoke for themselves, and half a dozen sixty-six-millimeter rockets could silence even a large BT—but in absolute firepower, being a walker, it still fell short of a proper tracked armored vehicle.
Though at this early stage, even an Assault Walker was treated as something close to a final weapon.
"All right, get inside."
"Whoa... so this is the inside of a walker..."
Roseberry had begun selecting refugees with heavy-equipment licenses and training them as walker pilots. The flavor text said piloting a walker wasn't particularly difficult, and true to that claim, the rookies were soon moving the twenty-ton frame around without much trouble, swinging the gatlings this way and that.
Vroooooom~
KABOOM! KABOOOM!
"Woo! Filthy hot!"
"With these, it won't matter how many BTs there are!"
And they were right. The walker's whole advantage was mounting a bunch of mid-tier weapons and dumping them all at once. Against tanks and other hard shells, several mid-tier guns were less effective than one big, heavy gun—so walkers didn't shine there. But infantry?
Against BTs, whose only armor was hardened spore matter, a twenty-millimeter gatling that killed a man on contact would rake through them until their spines arched like drawn bows and they dropped dead. A silver bullet if there ever was one.
"So how many of these are you planning to build?"
"Fifteen at each of the four directional gates. And thirty for each company of the recon regiment... for a total of one hundred eighty."
"Thirty per company... if that's the case..."
"Yes, sir. Nest assaults will begin soon. The Commander-in-Chief believes a large-scale BT offensive is coming early next year."
"Then we follow."
Colonel Jeremy didn't ask for the reasoning. That humans hated BTs and wanted them dead was the most natural thing in the world. The nests that had infected what were once human cities and towns, spewing their foul spores—every last one of them deserved to burn.
"So when will production be finished?"
"We're building APCs at the same time, so full deployment should be complete in about one to two months."
"Looking forward to it."
"Truly."
Watching a walker take on a fresh load of ammunition, the two soldiers smiled.
It was time to pay them back.