Déjà Vu (2)
Once I’d finished proving my credentials to the viewers, the stream had become a lot easier to run.
Anyway, people are suspiciously sincere about this kind of stuff.
As I bantered away, watching the chat settle down a little, a cheerful notification chimed.
"What does it feel like to be in a war zone?"
"How I feel... it depends on the situation, but usually, I’m too busy to think straight."
When a battle is unfolding right in front of you, it’s pure chaos. Bullets are flying everywhere, explosives are going off, and chunks of human flesh are falling from the sky like rain.
You have to scream until your throat gives out just to communicate over the gunfire from every direction and the nonstop roar of explosions.
And if enemy air support or armor shows up in the middle of all that, you get to experience the end of the world secondhand.
Everyone learns, in the face of a calamity advancing while scouring everything clean in its path, just how fragile and helpless human beings really are.
If the fighting is happening far away, though, it’s a little better.
At least then you don’t have to worry about dying to some stray bullet.
When you listen to the low, distant murmur of battle, your heart actually settles a little.
Maybe it’s because your instincts recognize the threat as being far off, and your body relaxes on its own.
Either way, it’s far preferable to having the fighting erupt a stone’s throw away.
Of course, with long-range strike weapons as advanced as they are, there’s no such thing as true safety once you’re on a battlefield, but at least psychologically, you can find some footing.
At the viewers’ reactions, I nodded and added, "It’s very scary. Especially in urban combat. You never know what’s going to jump out at you, so it makes you instinctively shrink back."
Solomon was a nation that had amassed considerable wealth through its oil industry.
In an economically stable country, vigorous urban development was only natural.
No one there had imagined that those towering buildings and maze-like city blocks would end up making urban warfare twice as horrific.
Most buildings were plastered with snipers and anti-air missiles, and the sheer number of structures, alleys, and blind corners dragged everyone who stepped into the city toward a swamp of death.
"Now that I think about it, most of the battles I remember happened in the city."
Until Cerberus Squad was formed, I’d been assigned to urban recapture operations as part of the volunteer forces.
Even after we retook the major cities, we still had to deal with Gibro forces probing forward whenever they could, as well as rebels trying to stab us in the back inside the city limits.
There were units fighting outside the city, too, but ours wasn’t one of them.
If anything, our job was closer to rooting out the rebels hiding in the shadows.
"Well, we tried to avoid using grenades as much as possible."
"There were often civilians still inside buildings who hadn’t evacuated. If you lob a grenade in because you think someone’s inside, and a civilian gets caught in it, that becomes a serious problem."
I’d actually witnessed this with my own eyes.
The squad leader next to us had thrown a grenade to clear a shopping building and blown a little girl and an unarmed woman to pieces.
A grenade’s killing radius is roughly fifteen meters, which is wider than most people think.
And if you include the danger radius, it’s at least fifty meters.
Because of its small size, people tend to underestimate it, but a grenade is far more powerful than games or movies make it seem.
The fragments that burst outward at the moment of detonation will tear apart anything nearby.
So what happens when you throw something like that into an enclosed interior?
It doesn’t matter whether they’re civilians or rebels—everybody’s limbs go flying together in a very equal arrangement.
Most of the viewers responded with a lack of sympathy for the people of Solomon.
War had broken out, enemy forces were pouring in, and yet they were just sitting there and enduring it without doing anything.
For a country as wealthy as Solomon, it was a pretty hard story to wrap your head around.
"If civilians stayed behind in the city, there were usually two reasons. Either they had too much they’d have to abandon if they evacuated, or the rebels had threatened them into staying."
Sometimes there were people who stayed out of patriotism and helped the regular army.
But there were also those who would occasionally expose the terrain and our positions to the enemy.
From our perspective, suddenly forced into a self-imposed hard mode, they were nothing but complete sons of bitches.
The only consolation was that Solomon’s citizens, and the government itself, dealt with them aggressively.
Those who actively collaborated with Gibro’s army usually ended up fleeing to enemy lines, and the unlucky ones who couldn’t escape were lynched by civilians until they were a bloody pulp, then dragged off by Solomon’s counterintelligence agency, the NIA.
Word had it that anyone taken by the NIA never came back.
As for what happened to them, I preferred not to imagine it.
As I forced those unpleasant memories away, a donation alert rang out from the speaker.
"Ah, right. Did I forget to explain the rebels?"
I checked the chat and, sure enough, a cold sweat prickled at me.
"Oh, damn."
Judging by the viewers’ affirmative reactions, I really had forgotten to mention them.
Where the hell had my mind gone wandering off to?
"Sorry. I must’ve skipped it because I was nervous on the first day. Want me to explain now?"
Maybe because it was such a tiny mistake, the chat stayed quiet.
So the crazy stories I’d heard about internet broadcasts were just legends after all, huh?
Damn it, Jennifer.
You scared me silly by telling me stream chats were a modern-day Colosseum.
Next time I see you, I’m stuffing a whole plate of fermented skate into your mouth.
Feeling a little relieved by the viewers’ calmer-than-expected reactions, I opened Paint.
I should be able to explain it the same way I did on the first day.
"The rebels had existed all over Solomon even before the war. Their goal was regime change: to bring down Solomon’s long-entrenched dictatorship and break free from American interference. To achieve that, the rebels carried out scattered armed struggles all across the country."
As I kept talking, I dragged the mouse around and started sketching out a simple mind map.
"At the time, President Ariel Harad had been wielding power for seven years. He’d stacked all the key ministerial posts with his closest allies, controlled the press, and lined his pockets through corruption."
While I took a breath, one of the viewers raised a question.
I could only answer with a bitter smile.
"The Harad administration was pro-American. On top of that, they were also a valued customer who kept buying piles of American weapons."
There was a reason most of the guns and equipment we used were American-made.
If Harad had accomplished only one thing, it was military expansion.
By replacing old Cold War-era gear with shiny new models and expanding conscription, he bought us enough time to reorganize after the front was pushed back one-sidedly at the start of the war.
There was also the matter of him siphoning off part of the defense budget to build a private resort, but that wasn’t important right now, so let’s move on.
"Anyway, with a dictator who openly monopolized power like that, public resentment began to grow. And riding that wave, various terrorist groups started moving."
It began with terrorism by extremists scattered across the Middle East.
Attacks targeting government institutions and key figures became the spark that gave bottled-up public anger a way to erupt.
"The terror groups quickly read the situation and began promoting themselves as movements to overthrow the dictatorship. And at their center, as always, was her."
An entity that absolutely had to be captured during Operation Cobra.
"The rebel leader who plunged Solomon into chaos."
The one who’d screwed over me and my comrades more times than I could count.
"The devil who dragged countless comrades down into hell."
The black wolf of the desert.
The black scorpion.
The reaper.
So many names had been given to her.
Everyone knew the demon’s face, and yet no one had ever seen it.
"...the craziest bitch in human history"
Natali "Alpha" Arties.
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