Truck Requisition
February 11, 2053.
-Welcome to the Quarantine City Gallery-
"Huh. The gate hasn’t changed at all, has it?"
Hwi-hyeon muttered as he opened the gallery window.
It had already been three days since Jeremy’s unit had left. And not a single word from them.
He knew, in theory, that Bloom Spore interfered with communications, but still—at the end of the day, they were just spores. Every division-level piece of equipment had ultra-high-frequency radios that could punch through Bloom Spore interference. Of course, as the words division-level equipment implied, that wasn’t something a present-day force that was, generously speaking, only battalion-sized could realistically expect to have.
"So the gallery has finally started to normalize in its own way."
There were still plenty of complaint posts, sure, but the madness from the first days of the disaster was gone. That was, in its own way, a good thing. Better to move than sit still, wasn’t it?
And looking at the comments, it seemed like the survivors were finally starting to pull themselves together and absorb one survivor group after another. Maybe, before long, neighboring quarantine zones would even be able to trade with each other.
"They’re already building an ultra-high-frequency transceiver?"
It wasn’t a bad call. Since they’d sent out a scouting team, they clearly weren’t ignoring their resource stockpile either. It was just a build you didn’t normally see.
"So a population of 500 is the soft cap at this point."
They were already busy rebuilding the ruined quarantine zone and constructing all the essential facilities. If people suddenly started pouring in, that would be a massive headache, so maybe the system was, in its own twisted way, being considerate.
Of course, nobody knew whether the developers or the game company actually had the authority to do that, or whether Hwi-hyeon and the others had simply been dropped into another world and the situation had happened to line up that way.
"Still... what should I do next?"
If Jeremy’s unit failed, then there’d be nothing he could do about that, so leaving that aside, what kind of production facility should he build once they came back loaded with materials? At first, he’d planned to construct a fuel refining facility, but after looking through the gallery, the ultra-high-frequency transceiver didn’t seem like a bad option either.
In the game, the World Union was the faction that handed out quests and served as the game’s mechanism for selling all sorts of equipment the player couldn’t easily produce—or couldn’t produce at all—at a steep price. But what that would look like here, Hwi-hyeon had no idea.
Would they really just act like a neutral shop that handed out annoying quests, the way the game did? Or would they become an overreaching public authority, strong enough to strip players like him of their power? Or maybe they’d just be a realistic relationship in which they took contact information and sold nothing at all. For now, there was no way to know.
"Hmm... for now, the fuel refining facility."
One of the gallery’s advantages was the ability to see the future. Not just the posts that were already up now, but the fact that multiple players were probably already building ultra-high-frequency transceivers. Watching their reactions in the gallery and thinking through how to respond seemed like the smartest move.
And besides, they needed a fuel refining facility if they wanted vehicles running. The mobility of BTs and the speed at which the spores spread outstripped the pace of human walking and driving, which meant that if they wanted rapid strikes and withdrawals—and beyond that, large-scale transport of supplies—they absolutely needed vehicles.
As far as Hwi-hyeon was concerned, all he could do was wait for Captain Jeremy to do his job properly.
*
-Kieeeeeeek!!!-
"A BT swarm! I count about fifty of them! They’re coming from the eleven o’clock direction!"
"Throw grenades first! Save the bullets as much as you can! What’s the underground team doing?!"
"They found a car with fuel, but there’s no key! They’re hotwiring it right now!"
"How much fuel do we have?!"
"Not much, sir, but we’re scraping together every last bit left in the other vehicles! It should be enough to get us to Roseberry!"
BOOM! RATATATATATA!!!
"Squad leader! We need more ammo! We’re out of 7.62mm!"
And if he looked away from the screen for a moment and watched Jeremy’s unit, they were currently fighting to seal off the entrance to the parking tower and hold the line, doing everything they could just to secure the trucks.
Logically speaking, there was no way to manually haul the supplies needed by a massive facility like a quarantine zone. They needed vehicles first. And in the basement of the parking tower, which was connected to the department store, huge twenty-ton trucks sat in rows, all there to make deliveries to the store.
Most of them had been left in the damp, spore-infested basement, so they looked beyond saving, but the trucks parked near the air-handling systems were still in condition to run.
"Grenade!"
BOOM!
-Grrrraaaah...!-
"Cease fire! Cease fire!"
Fortunately, no proper BT nest had formed yet, so only the weakest parasites had come swarming in. It was a city, yes, but the infantry company’s firepower was enough to wipe out the thousands of BTs.
Of course, unless they burned every last one of them down—and unless they used proper military incendiaries, not some improvised nonsense—the spores would just mutate the cells again and bring them back.
And the ones that were damaged so badly they couldn’t even do that would be swallowed by the spores and turned into fruiting bodies that spewed spores everywhere. That was exactly why human civilization had retreated all the way back to the coast, where Bloom Spore couldn’t reach.
"Hahaha! Captain! We got a truck! It runs!"
VROOOOM!
About three minutes after the fighting stopped, three huge trucks finally emerged from underground, wrapped in a faint veil of spores. They didn’t look like they were in great shape, but at the very least, they moved. And right now, that was the most precious thing any of the unit could have.
"What’s inside?"
"Nothing, sir! They’re empty."
"Good. Then let’s sweep the area and fill them to the brim. Roseberry’s waiting for us."
"Understood!"
"Kill the engines! You’ll waste fuel and the noise will draw the BTs in."
"Yes, sir!"
Captain Jeremy smiled for the first time in ages as he watched his men haul concrete rubble, bent rebar, shattered glass, and fragments of their hastily built barricades into the trucks.
They were nothing but worthless debris in the most literal sense, but once they went into the reprocessing facilities beneath the control tower, they would become valuable raw materials. And those raw materials would become the starting point for more facilities and equipment, which meant, in turn, that their chances of survival would rise.
"How long do you think this’ll take?"
"It’s all rubble on every side, sir. If we’re being generous, we should probably count the whole day as lost."
"Is that so? Then we’ll set up camp. Tell everyone to move up to the upper floors and stay above the spores. And strip the spore film off the vehicles while you’re at it."
"Understood."
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