Chemical Warfare (3)

The post came from a forward scout keeping watch ahead of the impending Wave. It was a simple report noting that the approaching monsters were behaving bizarrely. At first, the response was overwhelmingly positive; users rejoiced at their sudden stroke of good fortune, relieved without caring to question the cause.

Yet before an hour had passed, the anomalies took a far darker turn.

When the monsters had merely been stumbling about in a daze, it was cause for celebration. A Steel Golem was a siege-class monstrosity capable of battering down fortified stone ramparts single-handedly. Having such beasts weakened was a godsend. But watching every last one of them drop dead in under an hour was a completely different nightmare.

Hordes numbering in the hundreds, the thousands, had silently ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠perished, their corpses piling into grotesque mounds across the earth. Every animal in the vicinity had succumbed. Even the scavengers that flew down to feast on the carrion died the moment they touched the flesh.

It was the primal terror of the unknown. Far from celebrating their miraculous survival, the mood across the Gallery curdled into paralyzing dread.

"I'd better put up an announcement before this gets out of hand."

Modern firearms were awe-inspiring, capable of drawing gasps of pure admiration, but chemical weapons belonged to an entirely different dimension of horror. Before full-blown hysteria gripped the community, I sat down and typed out an official notice.

"Well, that should settle it, right?"

I had explained what the substance was and made it abundantly clear that it wouldn't be turned on any human settlement. The moment the post went live, comments began flooding in by the thousands.

While some shivered in existential dread, others quickly latched onto its undeniable lethality. To their minds, something so ruthlessly effective ought to be weaponized for continental defense and frontline warfare.

I had entertained a similar thought at the start. But having actually used it, I had witnessed the grim reality firsthand: any beast caught in the plume would throw itself outside the rift in its frantic death throes, scattering the poison as it fell.

"Man, how am I even supposed to explain this to them?"

Evidently, the Gallery denizens had zero concept of how horrifyingly indiscriminate chemical weapons were. I agonized over how to put it into words, but as it turned out, I never needed to. Time delivered the explanation for me.

One week had passed since the deployment of the nerve agent.

Even as the days passed, the land showed no signs of recovery. The only saving grace was that the VX contamination had remained confined within a radius of a few hundred meters around the rift, largely because the rift itself had vanished after vomiting out the Wave.

"I am never touching chemical weapons again."

Never, under any circumstances, click the chemical weapons tab in the system store. The sheer aftermath was beyond anything I could responsibly manage. If I ever had to deploy such a horror in the future, it would require completely walling off the rift's perimeter beforehand.

"Still, I need to clean up this mess."

The rift's disappearance brought no peace of mind. Leaving the area as it was meant an unsuspecting traveler might stumble in and perish instantly.

"The problem is, who's going to do the job?"

This was fundamentally different from deploying Gallery Doctors during the Black Death outbreak. Even the towering, impenetrable Steel Golem hadn't lasted twenty minutes before writhing in agony and dying. Who in their right mind would volunteer to step into that blighted zone to clean up something called VX?

"Well, might as well throw up a recruitment post just in case..."

I posted the notice with low expectations. After all, the entire Gallery was currently paralyzed with terror over the weapon.

In an archaic era where physical strikes and blade clashes formed the backbone of combat, the concept of dying from a mere breath or a single droplet on the skin was unthinkable. It was a miracle rumors hadn't already spun it into an ancient demonic curse or the wrath of a vengeful god.

I posted the notice expecting dead silence.

"Wait, what the hell?"

In less than a single minute, the applicant counter had effortlessly shot past triple digits.

The earth had turned a sickening, ash-pale gray.

It had been an entire week since the corpses were abandoned to the elements. By all accounts of nature, rot and bloat should have taken over, yet not a single fly buzzed above the piles of flesh.

"If hell is real, I reckon it looks something like this."

"Nah. I'd bet real hell doesn't hold a candle to this sight."

All of this was the handiwork of the Head Moderator.

A few days prior, a recruitment post had appeared on the forum.

The listing had been brief. In fact, it was shockingly sparse. Yet the men chosen for the dispatch hadn't even bothered reading the description before submitting their names. The reason was exceedingly simple: the pay was astronomical.

"Still, I never imagined we'd be doing something like this."

As one of the men clicked an ignition trigger, a heavy flamethrower roared to life, spewing a violent torrent of blazing liquid fire. The roaring tongue of flame swept across the ground, greedily devouring the blighted corpses and rotting brush.

Their task was straightforward: burn every single thing across the contaminated plains to cinders.

"Gives you goosebumps, doesn't it..."

If this was indeed a glimpse of the underworld, as the youngest worker claimed, humanity would surely flock to salvation. Drag anyone out here to witness this spectacle for just five minutes, and every soul would become a devout zealot out of sheer desperation to live. Yet despite the gruesome reality of the work, not a single one among the chosen laborers had fled.

"So, lad, what brought you out here?"

"Yeah, you look barely old enough to shave. You're not scared?"

One of the older workers tossed a question toward the boy. The youth simply shrugged, his expression calm and unbothered. He didn't carry himself like someone forced into labor against his will.

"Going hungry is way scarier."

"Well, you're not wrong there."

"Back during the Great War, they dragged me to the front lines by the neck and didn't pay me a single brass coin. Compared to that, this job is nothing..."

If anything, the boy felt a swell of quiet pride. At the very least, the Head Moderator never assigned tasks that were impossible to survive. The bizarre, rubbery suits they wore were shielding them perfectly from the lethal air, weren't they? And above all else...

"Yee-haw! Burn it all down!"

A staggering sum of wealth injected pure vigor into their veins. Amid the joyous shouts of the working crew, one man paused, lifting his gaze to take in the desolate horizon.

The entity that had annihilated an army of monsters that an entire empire couldn't manage with a single flick of his wrist was the Head Moderator. The entity that provided impenetrable garments to protect ordinary laborers in the belly of that very death zone was also the Head Moderator.

The man, once an ardent worshipper in the Church of Judddak, let out a dry chuckle beneath his respirator.

And they dare claim he isn't a god?

With time, the aftermath of the chemical deployment was brought under control. Whenever a similar contaminated carcass managed to stumble out of another rift, the part-time cleanup squads promptly took care of business.

"As long as it never reaches an innocent civilian, we're in the clear."

Fortunately, the casualty count among humans remained firmly at zero. But complacency was a luxury I couldn't afford. I diligently scanned every single thread on the Gallery boards, watching like a hawk for any signs of trouble.

That was when a particular post caught my eye.

"Wait, don't tell me..."

A chill ran down my spine. Could it be a secondary symptom of the nerve agent? Perhaps a trace amount had diluted into groundwater or hitched a ride on some stray carcass, eventually finding its way to a human? There was no other logical explanation for someone's health to deteriorate so rapidly while faithfully taking medicine.

I immediately hammered out a reply to the post, desperate to trace the source of contamination. But the author's response was something entirely unexpected.

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

It was the quintessential medieval classic number two: mercury.