Watcher
"Ah, that was fun!"
At the mission-clear message that finally bloomed across the monitor, I stretched out my stiff body and tipped my chair back.
It had taken me about an hour to clear Mission 2.
Under normal circumstances, it was the kind of mission that should have taken a great deal longer, but the traps the developers had hidden everywhere and the ambushing anti-tank infantry that kept springing out of nowhere as I played had been enough to seize up my momentum again and again.
I figured the point was to show players just how dangerous urban warfare could be for a tank, and if that was the message, then it seemed to have gotten through to the audience just fine.
The condition of my tank in the ending cutscene was, frankly, beyond saving.
The block-shaped reactive armor had all been blown apart, with almost none of it still clinging where it belonged. The paint on the tank’s hull had been scraped and peeled away, and bullet holes were left all over its surface, a miserable wreck through and through.
It had been hit by RPGs, torn up by IEDs, and pounded by 30mm cannon fire from an infantry fighting vehicle.
The only reason I’d cleared it so quickly was that my playstyle was so aggressive and brutal.
I’d just rammed straight through obstacles with the hull, and the moment I suspected enemy infantry might be hiding in a building, I turned it into a sieve and pushed forward without hesitation, which cut the playtime down by a huge margin.
[Thank you for playing]
And so our T-72M1 tank, after one long and eventful journey, vanished into the darkness along with the ending credits.
"This game’s tank combat isn’t bad. My first impression was pretty rough, but once I got into it, it got weirdly addictive."
Especially when you were taking on light infantry with a tank.
I liked the rush of it, the sense that I’d become invincible.
Of course, if I got careless, one anti-tank weapon fired from somewhere would flatten me in an instant and leave me clinging to life.
"It’s not for any special reason... It’s not like bullets come out forever, and once you’re in a situation where only a few infantry need to be dealt with, I just thought I’d run them over."
It was the sort of thing tank crews in both Gibro and Solomon did all the time.
Crushing people under your tracks saved ammunition, and it was good for rattling the enemy psychologically, too.
Would that count as a war crime, though?
But then again, had there ever been a single case of tank crew members from either the Gibro or Solomon armies being punished for war crimes after the war?
It was unethical, sure, but the war had been so utterly hellish that everyone had probably just let it slide.
Still, there was no point agonizing over it now. It was all in the past.
I shook off the stray thoughts and focused back on the stream.
"Anyway, now that we’ve cleared this mission too, all that’s left is Mission 3."
"Mission 3 was air combat, right? So why is everyone reacting like that?"
I tilted my head at the viewers, who were already cringing the moment I brought up Mission 3.
What was so bad about air combat?
The most graceful and beautiful battlefield there was, where fighters sliced through the blue sky at supersonic speed, dancing in white arcs as they tried to get onto each other’s tails.
Honestly, I thought it sounded pretty appealing.
"If you mean the tutorial..."
Reading the donation message, I rummaged slowly through my memory, and the tutorial from that training-camp-style game came back to me.
The tutorial had progressed in the order of infantry, armor, then aviation, so of course it had included fighter controls as part of the game content...
"Ah."
The problem was that those perverted developers had implemented the actual fighter controls and functions exactly as they were.
I’d forgotten this was a game made for true military degenerates, the kind of people who wanted to spend an eternity just starting a fighter’s engine.
"...Should we skip Mission 3?"
As I recalled how I’d never even managed a proper takeoff or landing and kept driving the nose straight into the ground, I cautiously made the suggestion to the viewers.
"Okay, then we’ll skip Mission 3."
Since they already knew what Mission 3 in MILSIM was about, the viewers readily accepted my suggestion.
The viewers were happy because they didn’t have to watch a boring mission, and I was happy because I didn’t have to memorize some headache-inducing fighter manual.
Not a bad deal.
.
.
.
.
"Then that’s it for the game... Should we just kill time with some chatter?"
After shutting down the game, I decided to kill the awkward bit of leftover time by telling stories, so I opened Paint on the monitor.
"All right, ask me anything. Even small stuff is fine. I’ll tell you whatever I can answer."
I leaned back in my chair and looked casually at the chat window.
With a story stream after so long, the viewers began tossing out the questions they’d been stockpiling one by one.
There were a few over-the-line comments mixed in here and there, which was a little irritating, but aside from that there was nothing much to complain about.
As I quietly read through the messages flying up the screen, it was obvious that questions about my appearance were by far the most common.
It made sense that the most talked-about feature would be my hair, since it was the part of me that stood out most sharply from ordinary people.
Then, after that, the next most common topic was the color of my eyes.
I could understand the viewers’ interest in my looks well enough.
White hair and red eyes.
What was this combination, some anime or manga character?
My appearance hadn’t always been like this, of course.
When the war first started and I was thrown into the battlefield as infantry in the international legion, I had been nothing more than an ordinary man with black hair and black eyes.
Not this white-rabbit nonsense, just the face of an ordinary Korean man.
But as the war dragged on and I kept getting thrown into harsher and harsher situations, it became harder to find a place on my body that didn’t have a scar than it was to count the scars themselves.
Eventually, around my first year at the front, I suffered a severe eye injury and found myself on the verge of spending the rest of my life disabled. But then I accepted a proposal from the Solomon government and became a test subject in a program they had been conducting in secret for veteran disabled soldiers.
The experiment turned out to be a massive success, and I became a member of the Cerberus Squad, overcoming my disability and returning to the battlefield.
The problem was the side effects of SINS, the stimulant that had come out of that experiment.
Generally speaking, when soldiers take medication on the battlefield, it’s usually a sedative to help them stay calm during a mission, or a stimulant to help them push forward faster.
As for rebel groups or terrorist organizations, sure, they might take drugs, but that’s another matter entirely.
From the usual point of view, the drugs soldiers take are mostly there to temporarily push back fatigue or help them remain calm in extreme situations.
Of course, taking such medication doesn’t meaningfully boost combat ability or anything like that.
Drugs are just expendable tools meant to support a battle.
But the Solomon government wanted to go beyond the limits of those battlefield drugs.
The superhuman soldiers who sometimes appear in science fiction—the one-man armies.
The Solomon government had been experimenting with whether it was possible to create Enhanced Soldiers through medication, and I was one of the test subjects they put into that line of research.
The details of SINS’s ingredients and refining process were top-secret, so I didn’t know them either.
All the researchers explained to us test subjects was the mechanism by which the drug worked.
The single biggest feature that set SINS apart from other drugs was that, when taken, it induced extreme stress.
When the human body senses overwhelming danger—in other words, when it experiences intense stress—it secretes adrenaline and temporarily pushes its physical capabilities to the limit.
In that state, a person’s senses sharpen, muscle strength rises, and pain almost disappears.
It is, in a sense, the body’s defense mechanism, like a Nordic berserker going into a battle frenzy and briefly gaining superhuman strength to escape danger.
Quite literally, it temporarily turns a human being into a body optimized for combat.
Of course, that only means it lifts the limiter on human physical ability; it doesn’t pull out power that goes beyond the human limit.
If you get shot or stabbed in that state, you can endure a little longer, but you still die or are incapacitated like anyone else.
Some people even end up thrashing around because they can’t control their own bodies under the flood of adrenaline, only to collapse from exhaustion.
And if there was one major drawback, it was that this effect couldn’t be consciously controlled.
You can’t keep throwing a person into an extremely dangerous situation every time, so the conditions for entering that state alone were hard to meet, and even when they were met, the actual period of adrenaline secretion was pretty short, making it unsuitable for extended combat.
But what if there were a drug that could force the human body into a state of extreme stress and stimulate adrenaline production?
What if there were a drug that could artificially regulate the period of adrenaline secretion?
A human injected with such a drug could become a human weapon—an Enhanced Soldier—capable of drawing out the maximum of what the human body could produce until the drug’s effects wore off.
And after countless experiments, SINS made that supposedly impossible dream of the Enhanced Soldier a reality.
And the result of that was us, the Cerberus Squad.
Of course, since this kind of military stimulant had never existed before SINS, there were several unexpected side effects, and one of them was this white hair.
I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know the details, but apparently if a human is exposed to an environment of extreme stress for a long time, their hair can turn white.
SINS is a drug that forcibly subjects its target to intense stress in order to artificially pump out adrenaline.
So the more I took it, the more my black hair naturally turned white.
Well, that’s basically the story behind my hair.
The question now is how I’m supposed to explain that to the viewers...
Of course, leaking information about SINS to the outside world would be impossible.
Should I just say I took a stimulant?
As I momentarily looked away from the monitor and tried to organize my thoughts,
"...?"
A strange username that slid past the chat window sent a chill crawling up my spine.
"Huh...?"
I was sure...
That I’d just seen a username written in Hebrew in the chat.