The First-Anniversary Offensive
January 7.
A week.
Seven days.
With only enough time left to vanish in the blink of an eye, the players stopped sharing information and began spiraling into a collective madness instead. The first-anniversary offensive, if he were being honest, wasn’t all that impressive, but most of the gallery was made up of noobs who had never even played the game once. On top of that, they now faced a double blow: no retries, and the bitter reality that the game’s information only worked in fragments. The resulting clash was enough to shred what little sanity they had left, dragging the gallery straight into hysteria.
And then...
An urgent communication has arrived from the World Alliance. Sender: World Alliance International Command.
"Put it through."
-Command Minister! Satellite surveillance shows that roughly 2 million BTs are approaching your zone. I repeat, 2 million! They’ll appear outside the quarantine perimeter within a week!-
"Any support?"
-None. The other quarantine zones are in similar condition. It looks like the Bloom Spore colonies inland are mounting a large-scale offensive. You’ll have to hold out with the forces you currently have.-
"Two million... are you certain?"
-We’ve verified it several times, and... yes. Fortunately, the satellite photos show no BT variants, only basic units.-
"Really? Then I guess we can hold somehow. Thanks."
-Yes. We wish you luck, Command Minister.-
At last, a transmission from World Alliance International Command made it official: the first-anniversary offensive was coming on the fifteenth.
For Lee Hwi-hyun, that meant a full 2 million basic BTs would be arriving within the week. The other players had each been assigned different numbers of BTs.
Damn... was that a lot, or not much? My population’s only around 200,000...
Don’t say another word...
Looking at the information posted to the gallery, it seemed the intensity of the offensive was being set at roughly three to ten times the current population. The baseline was simply double, and then the game appeared to measure how developed the zone was in finer detail before increasing the multiplier accordingly.
In Lee Hwi-hyun’s case, he’d optimized things well enough that the game had pegged him at five times his 400,000 population, or 2 million. HumanZoo, on the other hand, simply had a ludicrous population to begin with, so the game had assigned him a grotesque number: 10 million.
"So that’s how it is. It’s not going to be easy, huh. What a pain."
But he never once thought he’d lose.
Did he know the Battle of the Somme in World War I? It had taken 600,000 British and French soldiers combined just to advance 10 kilometers. And here, the BTs had nothing but shock infantry from a pre-modern age—no support artillery, no aerial reconnaissance, no snipers.
Two million sounded like a lot, but if you “just shoot them all until they die,” it was still a number you could wipe out entirely. Weapons from 2050 had more than enough power to do that. Weren’t machine guns and mortars basically human grinders, built for turning human-shaped enemies into paste ever since World War I?
*
January 12, 2054.
Now there were three days left until the offensive. He didn’t know how far they’d come, but if BTs moved at roughly the same speed as a running human, then they couldn’t be very far away.
Lee Hwi-hyun had dispatched a helicopter unit to find out whether those 2 million BTs were being “spawned” in, or whether they were genuinely emerging from colonies in the inland regions. The answer turned out to be the latter. From about 1,400 kilometers away from the quarantine zone, they had spotted a BT horde of 2 million advancing toward them.
Calculating. Distance to quarantine zone: 1,400 km. Time remaining: 3 days. Back-calculating... estimated average speed: approximately 20 km/h.
"About marathon runner speed, then..."
It wasn’t especially fast, but the problem was that BTs didn’t need rest. They ran twenty-four hours a day.
20 times 24 was 480, and 480 times 3 came to 1,440, so the command system’s analysis was correct.
"Order the helicopter unit. After maximum fire support, have them return."
-Command Minister’s direct order confirmed. Guns guns guns.-
He didn’t expect thirty-six helicopters to do anything truly meaningful. But wasn’t doing nothing even more unsettling?
"Connect me to Colonel Robert."
[Connected.]
-Your Excellency?-
"Well? Any angle at all?"
-None, Your Excellency. There’s no end to them. They’re trampling over the corpses and pushing forward whether they live or die. Honestly, it’s fucking terrifying.-
"Are you scared of BTs, or of a world without caffeine?"
-Obviously a world without caffeine. All our munitions are spent. I’ll be returning now.-
"Fine. And from here on out, rotate one squadron at a time every three hours and keep carrying out sustained assault missions."
-Yes, sir.-
*
January 15, 2054. 05:00.
For one day only.
Fueled by the fear that they might die tomorrow, the players went on a rampage, and nobody could stop them from setting the gallery on fire. There was no reason to stop them, no one to stop them, and no atmosphere suggesting they should be stopped, so the gallery became a one-way train heading straight for an endless, joyfully catastrophic mountain.
"Good."
That said, it wasn’t as if nobody had prepared. Those who were going to die had either stopped caring about the gallery entirely or were just lurking in silence, while only the people who wanted to live—and the ones who still could live—kept burning the gallery down with jokes, trying to burn off their anxiety.
Remaining distance: 70 km.
"Tell the local forces: the moment they identify the enemy, switch to free fire."
Click. Clatter-clatter. Clack!
Ammo belts draped like waterfalls into the machine guns; rounds were chambered into the breeches; safeties were disengaged; the helicopters’ Jesus nuts tightened with a groan; the walker’s hydraulic systems trained its gatling gun straight ahead; and the operators inside the armored vehicles checked radio status and the concentration of spores in the air.
"To all Roseberry soldiers, this is Command Minister Lee Hwi-hyun. I won’t waste time with flowery language or long-winded speeches."
"They’ve overwhelmed us, and they’re trying to overwhelm us again."
"Let them know they won’t get away with it."
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