Build the Facilities Like Your Life Depends on It

March 21, 2053.

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Biiip— biiip— biiip—

Hwi-hyun watched drone rollers grind out a rocket landing pad, pressing down layers of high-performance concrete until the surface gleamed like a fresh scar.

You might wonder why the hell a rocket pad was suddenly needed, but every quarantine zone sat in a Red Zone or a Yellow Zone packed with Bloom Spores. That meant ordinary transports got fouled with the sticky spores every time they flew in or out, coating the engines and intake vents until they needed full overhauls. Costs skyrocketed, naturally.

Which was why it was easier to move supplies and people by rocket in the first place. Since they were one-way, single-use flights anyway, the long-term cost was apparently cheaper than aircraft.

There were practical reasons too. No matter how large a quarantine zone was, building even a tiny airfield meant an absurdly long runway, a control tower, a terminal, and the rest of the nonsense. In other words, there just wasn’t space.

If you wanted to wall the whole thing off and defend it like a fortress, fine, but by any normal standard it was horribly inefficient.

Rockets, though? They took off and landed vertically. As long as you had a landing pad sturdy enough to handle the exhaust heat, plus a spray system to cut down the noise, dust, and heat blast, there usually wasn’t a problem. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠In terms of making the most of limited space, they were overwhelmingly more efficient.

That was why, in-game, rockets were used for trade with the World Union and other quarantine zones, while fixed-wing aircraft beyond helicopters were all but unused. They showed up plenty as wrecks that had crashed or been abandoned, though.

"Control System. Information window."

"Hmm..."

The armory, which could already produce ammunition and weapons, was in place. So was the pharmaceutical facility for manufacturing medicine.

Over the past few days, they’d been gathering materials like mad and building those two facilities at the same time. There was no real need to construct them simultaneously, but it looked nice, didn’t it? And since both had to exist before either could really function anyway, it wasn’t as if they were losing anything.

"How much longer?"

"Two days and four days, huh..."

Since it was the unmanned drones doing the construction, there was no way to speed things up any further. In any case, these facilities weren’t complicated so much as brutally sturdy foundations—and facilities for blasting out insanely strong superwaves, not buildings in the usual sense. Even now, they were going up at a more than adequate pace.

Honestly, yeah, it was a brag post. But what were they gonna do about it? lol. They could only slam the downvote button like a bunch of mutts and run.

"Yeah, the gallery’s finally starting to come to its senses."

As expected, the greatness of natural selection showed itself in the little things. Once the grotesque, depression-soaked whiners that had been infesting the gallery at the start of the crisis were swept clean out, the players had snapped back to their senses and returned to their usual state as obnoxious jokesters.

*

And then there was the city far away from the quarantine zones, out on the coast.

In one of the safe zones under the World Union’s control, the Union’s senior officials were discussing matters while observing the quarantine zones in the Red and Yellow Zones through satellite imagery.

"Twelve percent wiped out completely... and the remaining eighty-eight percent are still grinding along somehow, huh..."

"We thought the BT Horde had swept them all away, but it looks like the commander-lords are pretty damn tenacious."

"They should be. That’s what they were sent there for."

It was background lore most players never knew, but the reason quarantine zones were planted in the Yellow and Red Zones was that the World Union had set them up as a kind of dispersal trap to protect the safe zones along the coast—and also because they intended to dump the grotesquely excessive number of refugees into those zones under the banner of “restoring human civilization.”

The game starting on January 15 instead of January 1 was for the same reason: those quarantine zones had been destroyed in the BT Horde’s all-out assault and left paralyzed for two weeks, only for the player, the commander-lord who’d barely recovered consciousness, to begin rebuilding again.

Building a 1,600-meter control tower and the like wasn’t that hard. They were essentially giant pieces of machinery with no expectation that anyone other than the commander-lord would ever live inside them. The hard part was clearing the land for the quarantine zone in the first place.

You could call the World Union cruel, sure, but they had no real choice.

With most of the interior already lost, grain—the very thing needed to keep the population alive—was always in short supply. Meat? They didn’t even have cultured meat, and people kept dying in droves from eating seafood they shouldn’t have touched, twisting their intestines into knots. Even in the heavily administered safe zones, absolute material shortages were killing people by the day.

All because there wasn’t enough to eat.

Thinking about it that way, it was hard to condemn their plan to install quarantine zones in the Yellow and Red Zones and disperse the population there.

*

"And once contact is restored again... the population bomb’s gonna come raining down."

That was only natural, since the quarantine zone had been built to take in population in the first place.

The main cause of quarantine zones collapsing early—before BT had even launched an invasion—was that after all that rebuilding, they’d just stuff people onto rockets and send them there in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a random, “You suffered through reconstruction? Great. Suffer some more,” kind of way.

The quarantine zones had only been designed for a few hundred people at most, but when several waves of migrants suddenly arrived in the hundreds, the population ballooned past ten times that size in an instant. Housing, food, and medical needs skyrocketed, riots broke out, and the whole thing went to hell.

To prevent that, Hwi-hyun had already started expanding residential facilities in advance and was now building greenhouses and breweries to prepare for rye, oats, and barley production. Why not wheat, rice, and corn? Because they were too vulnerable to Bloom Spores and could only be grown on the rare islands that were safe from them.

Rye could be turned into bread, oats into porridge, and barley into beer. It was the perfect triangular distribution.

"How’s CCAR production going?"

"Good."

Thanks to the survivors putting in some intensely dynamic labor over the past few months, the current CCAR stockpile was overflowing. Even if they took in several thousand migrants now, food production would rise faster than supplies could be depleted.

"Yeah, this one’s going up as a brag post too."

Take notes, bastards lol. We’re going for one million ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠combat rations~~~

"Hmm. No moderators around. Nice. I can shit out brag posts and not get banned."

With a satisfied grin, Hwi-hyun looked out at the slowly darkening world beyond the walls.

In two more days, the superwave transceiver would be complete, and not long after that they’d fill the place with a crowd of oddballs being sent here as so-called “colonists.” But that was fine. Right now, they needed every cat’s paw they could get. More manpower meant more production.

And all the preparations for that were already in place. All that was left now was to wait.