Don’t Ever Make Them Angry
-Kyaaaaaaak!!!-
"Approaching from twelve o’clock! Walkers! Tear them apart!"
-Come on, you BT bastards, what are you so cocky about? You can’t even keep yourselves together!-"
Whoooom!
Ratatatata!
August 5, 2053.
By now, most of the hives in the quarantine zone had been purged.
Once the expedition regiment had finished mechanizing its entire fighting force of over a thousand troops with Weasel armored carriers and Assault Walkers, the enhanced BTs that still hadn’t produced proper later-stage spore forms were nothing more than meat to be shredded.
Command types that could issue complex orders, mortar and thorn types that could attack from a distance, giant types that shattered the front line with sheer stubborn bulk, assault types that climbed walls or lurked in ambush before striking, drop types that flew through the air and plunged down from above...
The BTs were the ones mutating a zombie apocalypse into an alien apocalypse, and after the one-year offensive, they’d started showing up in earnest. Even then, they didn’t pour in all at once. At first they appeared in threes and fours, like boss-class units; by around the third year, they were flooding in by the platoon.
Now I’m not scared of shit anymore lol. It’s the one-year offensive—what exactly can you even do? What, besides sprinting at us really fast and hitting us? Lmao.
-Someone who knows Command Types: "Yep-"
-Reply from OP: What the hell is that.
-Someone who knows Mortar and Thorn Types: "Yep-"
-Reply from OP: No, seriously, what even is that?
-Someone who knows Giant Types: "Yep-"
-Reply from OP: Why won’t anyone explain it?
-Someone who knows Assault Types: "Yep-"
-Reply from OP: Just explain it already.
-Someone who knows Drop Types: "Yep-"
-Reply from OP: You people are really awful.
Of course, once battle after battle kept ending with a few sacrifices and a mountain of BT corpses on the other side, some players got a little too full of themselves. Players like Hwi-hyeon, who had dragged the game forward for the long haul in his own way, knew perfectly well there were all kinds of other mutated BTs out there, but...
The beginners and newbies who didn’t know that simply assumed these were the only weak BTs they’d have to deal with. It wasn’t a situation you could infer through induction, so it wasn’t really fair to blame them.
Think about it.
We’ve got equipment and manpower that are way weaker than the regular military, and yet we’re wiping out dozens of hives without much trouble.
The mutated forms only started pouring in after the one-year mark, so early on it must’ve mostly been parasitic types.
Just how incompetently did they handle this to lose everything except the coastline and the islands?
[Upvotes: 142 / Downvotes: 331]
-Reply from OP: Why the hell are people downvoting me?
-Fuck off, idiot.
-Reply from OP: ???
-I’m posting a write-up, so if you don’t read it, I’ll ban you.
So what, the Bloom Spores came from space—did you think they rode in on a Siberian air mass or something? An Okhotsk front?
Obviously they hit Earth in a meteorite and got in that way.
Then the meteor shower wrecked recovery efforts, the administration froze up, and the Bloom Spores seeped into staple crops like flour, rice, and corn starch, contaminating the food supply. What happens then?
Obviously, nothing happens. Who the hell eats raw rice or flour? People boil it, bake it, or cook it somehow—heat it up before eating it.
But the spores kept forming hives, and those hives kept spreading more spores, and the local ecology got trashed, so everyone started shouting that it was alien spores, no, it was a biological attack from a rival state, and the whole thing turned into chaos.
Even while corpses infected by the spores were coming back to life and raiding towns, the spread in local communities continued because people were saying it was AI-generated fake footage, fake news, just some YouTubers pulling a stunt again.
Then the mass infection finally exploded, and rumors spread everywhere that, like classic zombies, you’d mutate if bitten or mutate if you inhaled the spores. In the end, small cities fell one after another, and the golden time was completely lost.
Meanwhile, huge spore hives that had fully established themselves inland spread across the world via atmospheric circulation, and food supply rates turned into a complete dumpster fire. The supposedly safe coastal cities filled up with refugees, and to feed them all, the UN was reorganized into the World Coalition.
And right now? It’s the fifth year after the outbreak.
[Upvotes: 13,132 / Downvotes: 31]
-Great lecture upvote.
-Where’s the three-line summary?
-Reply from OP: If you don’t even want to read this, get the hell out and die, you fucking bitch.
-Reply from another user: Damn, immediate flame attack. What a meta.
-Reading this, it really seems like humanity had it coming lol.
-So I asked one thing: why don’t you get infected even if you’re bitten or inhale spores?
-Reply from OP: Our immune systems aren’t worthless. Even if the pathogen is alien, as long as it’s compatible with the human body it still doesn’t stray outside protein-based cellular structures, so if you coat the wound with something that ruins cell membranes or cell walls, like povidone iodine, or take antifungals, you can treat the infection.
-But then what are parasitic types? They’re mutated humans, right?
-Reply from OP: Idiot. Parasitic types are controlling corpses; they’re not “infected” in the usual sense. Once the motor functions of a living host’s cerebrum are paralyzed and blood circulation stops, the microspores inside the body or external spores use the corpse as a fruiting body and bring it back to life.
-Ah. I understand perfectly now.
-No, seriously, how are the alien spores even compatible with Earth life?
-Reply from OP: How the hell would I know, you moron? That’s literally why it’s called an apocalypse. You’re terrible at listening.
-Then how do the spores control the corpses?
-Reply from OP: That part can actually be explained. Since they’re alien, even though we call them spores, they’re not the same kind of thing as cordyceps or ordinary mold. Think of them as single-celled organisms mimicking plants, drifting through the air in spore form. When the spores gather on a corpse and take it over through predation, their mycelial networks link up, and, using the mummified musculoskeletal system as a base, they move according to a simple algorithm stamped into the spore DNA: spread spores -> find uninfected hosts -> kill them and use them as a bed for cultivation.
And in the end, when a lore-obsessed weirdo stepped in and wrote a wall of text, the gallery that had been burning hot finally went quiet again.
Truth be told, there was still plenty of kindling left to burn. But if they kept going, that brutally detailed, emotion-packed essay would just get shoved back to the top of the board again, and the vicious cycle would repeat, so the trolls had mostly reined themselves in.
There were simply too many people who were deadly serious about the setting to shout, “Let the gallery burn.”
*
Beer monthly production has reached 100,000 liters.
"Yeah."
And Hwi-hyeon, as if mocking the gallery’s brief lull, succeeded in reaching that miraculous production mark of one hundred thousand liters of beer.
Of course, even calling it “mass production” was a bit of a stretch, but with Roseberry’s population now approaching forty thousand, it was still a ridiculous amount. The problem was that the citizens of Roseberry were already guzzling down absurd quantities every single day, so production still hadn’t visibly overtaken consumption.
"Seriously, does that even make sense? By common sense, this would be the kind of place where everyone needs to empty several cans a day."
Each person is currently drinking 2 to 3 cans of beer per day.
"What the hell."
After thinking it over, that was the problem.
Right now, Roseberry still didn’t have much to do besides eat. Sure, people played board games and tabletop games in parks, gazebos, cafés, and residential facilities, but it was hard to call that popular.
More importantly, board games and tabletop games required a certain level of familiarity and connection with the other person, and since most of Roseberry’s citizens were refugees with fragmented relationships, that flimsy web of social bonds barely existed at all.
In the end, the mind drifts toward the easiest outlet, which is alcohol. As for chicken or other restaurant food, food production still wasn’t flexible enough to support that kind of demand, so chicken was out of the question. Even the lowly potato-onion-carrot stew often had to close one or two hours early because there simply wasn’t enough stock to keep serving.
The problem was that the population kept growing, and no matter how many more food production facilities they added, the increase never really felt like enough. It was, in a sense, a Malthusian trap.
"...This isn’t good."
Looks like it was about time to lock down the city’s airspace.
---