Coffee, Boasting, and Gallery Warfare
“Huuu...”
Robert Lane, a man in his mid-thirties who held the rank of colonel in the aviation corps, was basking in the sheer pleasure of drinking proper coffee for the first time in nearly five years.
For pilots, caffeine addiction was practically a basic qualification, but Robert had always been a true coffee lover. In recent years, he’d been surviving on ersatz brews made from roasted barley and chicory, slowly wasting away like a man starved dry.
And even that had been a privilege, granted to him because he was the oldest rotary-wing pilot of the bunch. The other pilots didn’t get that much and had to suck it up.
Ssshhh... whooosh.
“Aah...”
Who would have thought he’d be drinking real coffee here, of all places?
And with an actually well-made handmade cigarette, too. Colonel Robert was close to tears.
He’d heard they were preparing a welcome, so he’d expected maybe a few bottles of liquor or something—but he’d never dreamed he’d be met with something this precious.
Plunk. Plunk. Glug-glug-glug.
Two sugar cubes, fifty milliliters of warmed milk.
He couldn’t even begin to guess how long it had been since he’d last had his favorite coffee mix.
The coffee poured into the two-liter electric kettle was now more valuable to Robert Lane than a fortune.
“Huuuu...”
It took him only twenty minutes to drink all two liters.
In his own mind, he’d been restraining himself to preserve the dignity of a field-grade officer, but to anyone else he looked like a caffeine-addicted junkie fueling up like a man possessed.
“When I got my transfer orders, I thought I was dead for sure. Never thought I’d hit the jackpot instead.”
Robert knew very well that quarantine zones were humanity’s frontline. Hell, even this Roseberry was in a red zone inland, twelve hundred kilometers from the coastline.
So he’d figured he’d be meeting his dead family before long, but he never imagined he’d get to live the kind of life people had enjoyed before the Bloom War.
“Commander-Minister Lee Hwi-hyun, was it? Looks like the big shots really are big shots.”
*
And in the control tower.
Watching Colonel Robert Lane sleep with a blissful expression after downing two liters of coffee in less than an hour, Hwi-hyun spoke up.
“The situation here is worse than I expected. To think we can’t even give a field-grade officer a single cup of coffee.”
The basic rule of the post-apocalypse was that materials themselves could usually be scrounged up somehow, but the whole thing would go to hell during distribution.
The commoners were starving to death while the higher-ups held wine parties and the like.
But here, the absolute amount of supplies was simply too low.
No matter who you were, if you weren’t starving, you were lucky.
Things that could be sped up by throwing manpower at them—like rocket production—were in a slightly better state, but food was another story. Food had to be left alone until it ripened, and there was no workaround for that.
No matter how much GMO, aquaponics, and greenhouses you had, it still took a month to grow crops—and humans died if they went a month without eating. That was why supplies were always short.
Still, that was that, and first he needed to post his bragging rights.
36 Hermes Gunships. Blew my Token savings on them. Praise me plz
Seeing the flood of praise, Hwi-hyun could confirm that he was clearly in the upper echelon.
Honestly, his micromanagement skills and various parameters weren’t all that spectacular, but he did know a tremendous amount of information, and most importantly, he had an unbreakable mentality. That, in turn, gave him the resolve that made him into a genuine veteran.
Did I just become the first on the gallery? Hell, this was a pain in the ass.
That’s first, right? Please tell me it is.
Still, there was no way around it.
On November 17, 2053, Hwi-hyun was reduced to nothing more than an ordinary man by the post from HumanZoo, a veteran who had appeared like a comet—no, like a meteor.
Roseberry, which had been steadily feeding on refugees, had only just reached 320,000 people, and he had no idea how HumanZoo had managed to create a population of one million.
I admit defeat.
I was a rookie, not a veteran.
I’ll submit myself to the gallery’s judgment.
And as always, the WWE continued.
In front of a true veteran, the so-called “young players who were good at games,” the ones who had strutted around the gallery calling themselves veterans, all at once declared defeat and became kindling to keep the gallery lively.
But because the gap in skill was so huge, Hwi-hyun didn’t really feel all that defeated. Did Koreans feel inferior to Americans?
The world is wide, and there are a lot of veterans out there...
With a monologue that sounded like something out of a martial arts novel, Hwi-hyun closed the gallery window.
*
December 4, 2053.
If even I myself cannot recognize that I waited,
then from the perspective of this entity known as me, it is no different from not waiting at all, isn’t that so?
If, as each day passes, my memory of that waiting becomes impossible to recognize,
then in my reasoning I can no longer distinguish it from the One-Year Full Offensive beginning without waiting a single day at all.
The thought that the One-Year Full Offensive begins after only one day of waiting makes it hard to hide my fear.
As the final month of 2053 drew near, the players lost their damn minds.
The One-Year Full Offensive was right around the corner, and they had no way to confirm whether the offensive they would face would be the same as it had been in the game.
Unfortunately, even the smart players had no brilliant solution, and so the gallery became stuffed with boastful veterans writing joyful mountain-climbing diaries of their own glory.
“Why are all the posts on the gallery just bragging?”
The only thing the players could truly agree on was one thing.
Any commander-ministers who could enjoy Christmas Eve and Christmas should be hauled up onto a burden pole.
---