Tank!
The second campaign mission in MILSIM was simple enough.
You were a tank crewman, breaking through a battlefield where urban combat was raging, fighting alongside friendly infantry.
The tank took point, absorbing the enemy’s attacks and clearing a path forward, while the infantry following behind protected it from enemies and explosives hidden throughout the city.
It was, in a sense, a symbiotic relationship.
Back when I’d been on the battlefield, I hadn’t had much reason to move with tanks because of the hard-kill system mounted on the Solomon tanks.
It was a system that automatically intercepted rockets and missiles fired by the enemy, but the problem was that the shrapnel and blast overpressure it produced were more than enough to wreck any infantry standing nearby.
So instead of sticking close to tanks, we usually moved with infantry fighting vehicles.
Of course, that meant I’d never even ridden in a tank, let alone spent any time around one, so this mission—finally getting to control a tank myself—felt like it might be a refreshingly new experience.
"...That’s a T-72, isn’t it?"
The problem was that the tank I was driving was a T-72M1, the very model the Gibro army had used as its main battle tank.
It felt strange, somehow, to be piloting an enemy tank that had spent its days getting its hatches blown off by RPGs or friendly air support and reduced to scrap metal.
"S-Suppose... this is fine...?"
While I was briefly experiencing an identity crisis, the game kept moving.
The protagonist’s tank in the cutscene advanced into the city where fighting was already underway, with a string of infantry trailing behind it.
Watching the tank commander and the rest of the crew seal the hatches shut in preparation for an ambush, I nodded silently to myself.
These days, most tanks weren’t commanded with the tank commander leaning out of the hatch and exposing their upper body anymore.
Under normal driving conditions, they might keep the hatch open for better visibility, but once combat started, the proper procedure was to get inside the tank and take cover.
That was especially true in a city battlefield, where every possible variable was packed into the terrain.
Nothing was more disastrous than having your body exposed outside and getting sniped.
Of course, there were cases where a tank commander would fight with the hatch open depending on their style, but those were rare.
So the crew’s behavior in the game cutscene was entirely accurate.
It really was a game made by total military nerds.
"Is this for real?"
The issue was that they’d gone out of their way to preserve realism even in the most pointless places.
That grotesque observation window now showing on my monitor was proof of it.
As if I were seeing things from the tank commander’s point of view, the turret’s upper superstructure intruded into my field of vision.
Looking at the desolate road barely visible through that narrow slit, I swallowed a dry laugh.
How exactly was I supposed to play this?
"I can’t open the hatch, right?"
Just in case, I asked the viewers, but the replies weren’t exactly comforting.
"Ugh... well, let’s try playing it for now."
There was nothing I could do about the awkward visibility if the developer had designed the game this way.
I scratched my head irritably, then placed my hands back on the keyboard.
Clank—
The moment I pressed W, the tank’s tracks began rolling forward and the hulking steel beast roused itself from slumber.
The fact that the view in the observation slit trembled ever so slightly with the tank’s movement only convinced me that the developers were madder than I’d imagined.
Who in the world bothers with this kind of tiny detail in a game?
"Yeah, no kidding... Honestly, you could use this as a tank driving simulator in the army and nobody would complain."
Agreeing with the donation message, I hit Shift to increase the gear.
The tank growled and surged ahead faster than before.
In urban combat, if a tank rushed ahead too quickly on its own, it became vulnerable to ambushes; but if it moved too slowly, that had its own problems.
For one thing, it gave the enemy time to brace for the tank’s assault, and moving at low speed made it much easier for them to land an unguided rocket.
The only way to improve your odds of survival was to move at a moderate pace and break through the city as quickly as possible.
Following that principle, I began maneuvering quickly, and the viewers reacted with a strange excitement as they watched me.
"Hm?"
The chat’s reaction seemed suspicious somehow.
The “that part.”
Was some trap section the developers had built to torment players about to appear?
Still, once a tank entered a city, being exposed to all kinds of traps and ambushes wasn’t exactly unusual.
There was bound to be minefields, IEDs, or enemy troops armed with anti-tank weapons hiding in alleys and the like.
I drove on, paying closer attention to the scenery beyond the observation slit.
Unluckily for me, my tank in the game was passing between high-rise apartment complexes.
Were there enemies hiding somewhere behind all those windows overlooking my tank?
If they decided to attack from above and aim for the tank’s upper armor, I’d be done for.
No matter how much people called the tank the king of ground warfare, it still had weaknesses.
Just as Achilles, nearly invincible in myth, had his heel, no matter how sturdy and powerful a tank might be, the turret’s upper armor had to be one of its weakest points.
There were probably issues of hull weight, and of cost as well.
I wasn’t a tank crewman, so I didn’t really know why, but from ancient times to the modern era, the turret’s upper armor had always been one of the tank’s deadliest vulnerabilities.
"It’s not like an RPG’s going to suddenly fly out of one of those apartment windows, right?"
Feeling needlessly uneasy, I kept stealing glances at the apartment windows that were barely even visible outside the observation slit and drove the tank forward at speed.
It was a dangerously hostile environment for a tank, so when I shifted up another gear to get out of there quickly and tore forward, the viewers cheered.
"No, seriously, what’s up ahead that has all of you acting like this?"
"Tch... this is making me nervous..."
No matter how many times I asked, nobody would answer, and I was left with nothing but a growing sense of unease.
Just as I refocused on the game and was about to turn right along the apartment wall,
"Huh?! Right! Right!"
An enemy soldier hiding between the wall and the wreckage of an abandoned vehicle aimed an RPG warhead straight at me.
I remembered, too late, that my tank’s side armor was exposed to the enemy and yanked the hull sharply to the right, but...
BOOM—!
You have been hit!
"Ah, fuck!"
The RPG warhead struck near the wheels, and the whole tank shuddered violently.
Ta-ta-tang—!
The RPG gunner was quickly suppressed by the fire of the friendly infantry that had followed behind us, but the problem was the tank’s condition.
Commander, the right track has been damaged!
Repairs are required!
"I’m going to lose my mind."
I’d twisted the hull, thinking I could absorb the impact with the reactive armor, only for the blow to land on the right track instead.
In an instant, my tank had gone from king of ground warfare to a fixed gun emplacement with its legs chopped off, and I let out another hollow laugh at the sight of it.
"Ahaha..."
Even with the viewers chattering excitedly and donation messages exploding one after another, I couldn’t force myself to smile brightly at my wrecked state.
With the situation already going south fifteen minutes into the game, I was starting to worry in earnest about whether I could even keep playing.
Could I really clear this on my first try?