The Path to Ark No. 23 (1) -Engagement Begins!-
The Sweeper squadrons roared through the sky, their nose-mounted chain guns grinding monsters into paste. The route to Ark No. 23 wound through a tangled mix of urban sprawl and mountain ranges, where the creatures had nested beneath the slopes and launched endless assaults on the aircraft. For every monster the Sweepers vaporized to clear the path, another ten seemed to take its place. More than ten helicopters had already been lost to the relentless onslaught. The ejection seats performed flawlessly, allowing pilots to follow their training and bail out for rescue by other aircraft, but every lost Sweeper meant reduced firepower—and every reduction chipped away at the Ark’s dwindling stockpiles.
“Where the hell are these bastards crawling out from?”
“Anti-air monsters incoming! Disperse! Disperse!”
These days both monsters and humans were on a hair trigger. The moment helicopter rotors echoed across the sky, every creature within ten kilometers converged like starving wolves. Over thirty Sweepers answered with a storm of bullets and rockets, carving through the swarms. Daily sorties carved a corridor toward Ark No. 23, yet the cost in ammunition to secure even two hundred kilometers of safe passage was staggering. The Ark’s munitions reserves hovered on the brink of exhaustion; even with the expanded population working five-day shifts in the factory districts, production barely kept pace with demand. Modern warfare was a contest of firepower, and the Ark was learning the hard lesson of what happened when industrial capacity could not support it. The fact that even the most advanced facilities could barely sustain a few dozen helicopters spoke volumes about how prosperous pre-collapse humanity had been.
Progress remained agonizingly slow. As the corridor neared Ark No. 23, the cityscape gave way to mountains and open fields—fields that were anything but empty. Carnivorous plants, no, man-eating flora, infested every inch of ground. At least they were weaker than true biological monsters, small mercy though it was. The moment the plants detected a helicopter, they sprayed thick, viscous fluid with terrifying force, reaching altitudes that should have been safe. Several Sweepers had already been brought down when the sludge gummed their rotors; rescue crews barely extracted the ejected pilots. Black-box analysis revealed the liquid was highly corrosive. Its viscosity allowed it to seize moving parts within seconds, and even the military-grade armor on a Sweeper began to dissolve after a single minute of exposure. The sky route was effectively sealed.
If the plants could eat through armored helicopters, what chance did infantry in reinforced exoskeletons stand? And their numbers were overwhelming. Napalm rockets proved useless against them. “So that’s why Ark No. 23 never tried to break out,” I muttered. “Now it makes sense.”
Ark No. 17 had been the luckiest of the surviving human enclaves. Surrounded by dense urban terrain, it could replenish its population with relative ease. The city environment limited uncontrolled monster breeding, and timely intelligence about how communications attracted the creatures had allowed defensive measures to be implemented before it was too late. Ark No. 23 had enjoyed none of those advantages. If the ecosystem surrounding the Ark had already collapsed to this degree, the Ark itself could not possibly be intact.
Mountains and fields. And plants. There was no good answer. The first few attempts at defoliants had worked for a handful of days before the mutated organisms adapted completely. No concentration, however extreme, produced further results. The damned mutation factor had seen to that. Cutting them down only let the chlorophyll-driven photosynthesis resume at full speed. Was this nature’s way of flipping humanity the middle finger?
“Damn it. Can’t block the sun… Is there any clever workaround?”
A dozen theoretical methods for occluding sunlight flashed through my mind, none of them feasible with the Ark’s current resources. I shook the thought away. If sunlight could not be denied, the next critical requirement was water—the universal solvent essential to metabolism. Cut off the water supply.
“Wait. Where exactly are they drawing water from?”
The climate was temperate, yet the sheer density of the infestation implied either a nearby aquifer or long-distance water transport. “AI. Display all water sources and water/sewage infrastructure maps within the vicinity of Ark No. 23.”
> Displaying map.
The holographic projection flickered to life, revealing a tangled web of reservoirs and pipelines. My suspicion hardened into certainty. If the underground water mains feeding the fields and mountains could be severed, the carnivorous plants would wither and die. Since the monsters had originally emerged from underground, the water system had almost certainly been damaged in the process. Shutting down the pumps or sealing the ruptured lines would starve the surface infestation.
Before the collapse, humanity had built dedicated control facilities throughout every city to manage the water grid. These “Water Main Control Centers” featured massive subterranean access shafts and the mechanical means to isolate entire sections of the network.
“Therefore, the primary objective of this operation is to secure the four control centers and induce the death of the mutated flora blocking the route to Ark No. 23. The sites lie one hundred thirty kilometers from Ark No. 17, rendering short-term reinforcement impossible. Because the mission is underground, Walkers cannot be deployed. Success rests entirely on infantry.”
Commander Alfonso laid out the operation’s core to the assembled regimental commanders. In plain terms, lightly armed foot soldiers would have to complete the mission inside a monster-infested urban zone with neither air support nor Walker firepower. The heaviest portable weapon available was a recoilless anti-tank rocket—single-use after a few shots. The long, narrow utility corridors offered perfect kill zones; a single mistake could trap the unit between converging hordes with no escape.
“For reference, headquarters estimates a 44.52 percent survival rate for this operation.”
“Forty-four percent…”
Two men enter, one comes out. The projection was only an estimate, yet the implication was clear: without success here, Ark No. 23 would remain unreachable. Contact with other surviving human factions was essential if humanity’s sphere of control was ever to expand again.
“How many personnel per site?”
“At minimum, one company per location.”
“That’s four hundred men at the lowest estimate…”
“If anything goes wrong…”
The regimental commanders ran the numbers in their heads and remembered the nightmare of the urban clearance operation only months earlier. Even with hundreds of Walkers and Carriers providing fire support, and mortar batteries pounding the flanks, more than four thousand soldiers had died. Now they were being asked to send far fewer troops, with far less firepower, into the middle of an uncleared city, split those troops into even smaller elements, descend into pitch-black tunnels of unknown depth and monster density, locate and close specific valves, then climb back to the surface and wait for helicopters that might never arrive—all while maintaining radio silence to avoid drawing every creature in the vicinity.
The commanders exchanged glances. The plan already felt insane from their perspective. They could only imagine how it would feel to the soldiers actually ordered to carry it out.