Galactic Onslaught and Reclamation: Midway
The strike, which restricted the enemies’ ability to think, went off without a hitch. It was, after all, a battle sprung on them by surprise, but the thing they were expected to break against could not even be identified in the first place, and once their attempt to blunt the hammer of our assault had become impossible, they were worn down until they had no strength left at all—then beaten to death by sheer inevitability.
Whoooosh.
As the Strange Zombie died, the influence it had spread through the area began to thin. By some stroke of luck, I was able to confirm that a few civilians were still alive, hidden among the transmutation metals, and I could tell at once that they were hoping to be rescued.
But principles still matter. I can’t just load them up and fly away. If there’s something they’re meant to protect here, then I can’t drag them off without warning. And since we didn’t bring relief supplies, I can’t go around acting like we’ll only take the ones who want to come through a portal and leave the rest here as good as dead. This place may even be a sacred site to them in its own way.
So I switched on the loudspeaker and tried to talk to them.
"All surviving civilians, listen carefully. How was your time under Ukrainian military protection? Explain it in as much detail as possible."
"W-who are you?"
"That’s what we’re wondering too. But first, tell us what you’ve wanted most while you were still alive. If we hadn’t shown up, you’d have kept your hopes alive by thinking about that, wouldn’t you? So we want to respect your hope."
"Ah, yes... well, we actually..."
"We had no hope at all..."
"We don’t even know why we survived. We just opened our eyes and found that we weren’t dead."
"If anything... all we did was keep changing our minds and drowning ourselves in escapism."
"It was more like flailing than anything else."
"So, since you were alive already, you hid yourselves in scattered places because you didn’t want to die?"
"Yes..."
"Yes...."
"Yes...."
"No."
"So there’s one who says no. Then explain why not."
"Unlike these people, I wanted to fight to survive! But those bastards broke my leg because I kept telling them to get a grip and understand the situation..."
"Do you need medical treatment?"
"Yes... I’m not the kind of person who should be stuck in a place like this!"
"No, that bastard was always a freaking comedian with a grotesquely inflated ego!!!"
"Exactly! He’s always going around pounding a piano with his dick, or filming movies about politicians destroying themselves just to glorify himself..."
"And didn’t he even draw a swastika on his own chest and mock random Russians by slanting his eyes at them?!!!"
What the hell are these idiots? All they’re talking about is the things Volodymyr Zelensky did back when he was still a comedian, plus some Marichka meme nonsense. Even their response wasn’t particularly strange—they just tried to use what they had in front of them properly. From the fact that they kept gathering metal and making fires, it looks like they were trying to stabilize the Strange Zombies by transforming them into the quarks that make up ordinary protons. No, not even that much—they were gathering magnets too, abandoning what they needed to abandon in order to reduce the energy level. They must have been trying to magnetize the metals so they could get more magnets somehow. If the strange quarks that compose a Strange Zombie stabilize further at a higher energy level, then they’ll collapse on their own through the weak interaction. So that was their angle. Very orthodox. In times like this...
Snap.
"That’s not for you to decide. We’re all human—do we really need to ignore human rights and sacrifice people like this? Our enemy isn’t human. But you don’t seem to think so. Right now our enemy is the Strange Zombies, and in a situation like this, humans don’t kill humans. So you aren’t human. Just like how hippie terrorists and the territorially obsessed governments of every country are nothing more than brainless trash that’s lost all humanity. Understand that you’ve been behaving exactly like them. What’s needed right now isn’t whatever happened in the past. You keep whining that if you don’t forget the past and move on, you’re just slaves to the past—while at the same time committing the contradiction of treating past experience as more important than knowledge itself. You all think that unconsciously, as the absolute premise beneath every value you ever talk about or believe in. The truth is both matter, but you idiots don’t know how to keep balance. In that sense, you’re nothing but pathetic little psychopaths and tyrants who’ve become so bloated on sacrificing others that you can’t do a damn thing on your own. And if there’s anyone here who’s ever used that same logic on the minister and then never once cursed him out while dragging in collective punishment, then step right up and meet your death, you potential perpetrators. If your wish is to die right now, then that condition can be made to hold automatically, so I won’t be taking any more questions."
And so the people who had spent their whole lives treating experience as sacred, only to dismiss the resolve that rises from old wounds as worthless—and who had come to believe that because it was legal, it must be justice—did not possess the brains to think any further than that. They didn’t understand that this was no different from soldiers broken by shell shock or PTSD in war acting out so that everyone might know their pain, and if anyone tried to understand it, they were dismissed as lunatics. In fact, those social misfits often behaved in ways very similar to shell-shocked soldiers. It isn’t only the sound of artillery or bombing that can trigger shell shock; human language can do it too. More than anything, look at how the Nazis became the embodiment of absolute evil by committing genocide against Jews—people with a miserly streak so strong they were practically the poster children for social maladjustment, even bloodsucking loan sharks who charged thirty percent interest a month—and you realize there’s a little Nazi in all of us. If the Nazis had won the war, that’s why no one would have been able to criticize them at all. Because if they asked, "Name one time you didn’t live that way yourselves. Didn’t you want to kill people too?" no one would have an answer. And considering that the Strange Zombies were first discovered in a secret Nazi base, the symbolism of their wickedness only grows more ominous. In other words, they are a kind of offspring carrying the Nazis’ genetic line. Of course, I’m not going to kill them for real. If I did, I’d be no different from the Nazis. Not for me—not one of the six British noble houses dispatched to America, and certainly not for me, who has never forgotten the light and shadow of the frontier spirit from that era.
"I said I won’t take questions. Stop grinding the gears in your head and start moving. Now. If you don’t, I’ll take you for people who like doing both. Haven’t you ever lived among other people? If you live too neatly, people look down on you, you idiots."
And, as expected, they grabbed the one person who had said no and threw him over to my side.
"Figured as much... fine. So that’s what you people are... I know exactly who you are now. You’ve clearly never seen hippie terrorists. Answer me precisely—what do you really think those bastards are? Don’t ask questions, don’t argue. You don’t have the right to speak right now. If you spout nonsense, I’ll treat you as hippie terrorists too."
"Th... just crazy social misfits, aren’t they?"
Fools. When you see results this good, of course you want to compare yourself to others—that’s human nature. So if you see some tiny flaw in someone else at the same time, then removing that bastard outright can be interpreted as eliminating an obstacle and thereby earning full credit for your own immense contribution.
"You’re all people who just believed whatever the state told you, in the end, right? Good. Then it’s enough if you only remember what that state told you to recite every time. You don’t need to be shackled by that anymore. If there’s anything you value more than your own lives, then let the one among you who represents the group step forward and take this gun. That will be your collective first direct murder—and your final indirect one."
I said that, then used my telekinesis to drop an untainted rifle in front of them.
Whoosh.
Now they would definitely pick it up. I didn’t know much about the minister’s ideology, but conversion was always possible. They simply didn’t know who had spoken to them.
Click.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
"I see. So in the end, that’s where you chose to shoot. But why on earth would I hand you a rifle loaded with live rounds? To dangerous people like you? And now it’s certain. You people like having your danger forcibly controlled. Fine, then follow me. I’ll show you the way out of the flames of greed you feared so much. And don’t forget—you’d already thrown away any right of refusal before this."
From the beginning, it’s impossible to be loved by everyone, and impossible to be hated by everyone. The problem is the people who know that, and yet still turn around and ask why everyone doesn’t love them. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should be perfect in that sense; it may simply mean they’re being asked why they didn’t try properly. But if you push that logic too far, weakness itself becomes a crime. Nobody told you to wander by and get beaten to death, so cursing someone for dying because they were weak and got caught in the mess becomes nothing less than the pot calling the kettle black. In that way, if you think about human relationships from a broader, more national perspective, that becomes conviction—and ideology. The people who say only the people right in front of them matter, while also saying that greed for the immediate reward is bad, are the ones who can never possess conviction or ideology because of that contradiction. They ought to choose one or the other. And above all, the true shadow government now reigns over this world as an existence no conspiracy theorist could ever imagine. No—unless you assume they exist, you can’t even devise theories about Jewish financial masterminds, the Freemasons, or the Illuminati.
There’s no way they’d understand. This world no longer belongs to people like you. And now that your thinking has vanished, your legacy will vanish with it. It isn’t about the accomplishments of the minister or his adviser. It’s about the paradise of machines, where the foundation itself is respected. Humans who gorge themselves on food every day and do nothing else ought to be taught a proper lesson. There may be machines that stand with humans, but there are also humans that stand with machines. Which side is more rational, more reasonable, more fit to choose and live by—the side that is perfect and understands emotion, or the side that feels emotion and therefore hungers for perfection? The answer is obvious. Perfection gives rise to the understanding of emotion. When you compare 999 successes out of 1,000 to 1 success out of 1,000, the emotion that makes you choose the former without a trace of hesitation is nothing but empty bullshit invented to defend, one-sidedly, the gutless fools who go charging in with a “let’s just see what happens” attitude. When dealing with ether in the first place, you have to control emotion with ease, maintain reason to the end, and cut your way through with iron mental strength if you want to survive alone even when surrounded by a horde of those Strange Zombies. So why should I become a human phlogiston and impose the same standard on others? Pathetic creatures. Know yourselves first!
With that, I switched the fighter jet to unmanned mode, activated cloaking, and descended to the ground. At the same moment, a portal opened and carried everyone else to Mephauric, while I walked straight up to her myself.
"What’s your name?"
"Ermy... Ermy Faust."
"Any chance you’d be willing to come to Mephauric? Those people would keep picking fights with you over nothing, just because."
"Yes... honestly, I wanted to try being an idol in space for the first time, but I never had the confidence to make it all the way to Mephauric, so I just lived here doing odd jobs. Even when people pointed at me and said I was useless, well, I was the one who was useless, so what could I say? Of course, not anymore."
"So they cursed you out for being a kid who didn’t study?"
"Yes."
"Then it worked out well. From now on, this will be the point where you can objectively compare your real self to the others."
"Huh?"
"Those hippie terrorists are over there. I’ll show you how I bring them all down alone. Let that inspire you properly to make as many albums as you need in a short time. What you feel, and what you make of it, is up to you. Now come with me."
I know the minister and his adviser already realized that, as superintelligences beyond humanity, the time has come to seize the entire universe and reform mankind. And I also know they clearly recognized humanity’s few virtues—humility, charity, kindness, patience, purity, restraint, and diligence—and not only magnified those qualities to the utmost, but even granted transcendental powers suited to them, awakening angels, or else preparing the Seven Great Angels who were destined to awaken. I, too, find it strange that these virtues—things humans praise as ideals and fail so miserably to uphold—still remain alive as concepts. This girl has humility too. So I’m genuinely curious how far she can go. Of course, if those Seven Great Angels are persuaded by me alone, or kneel before me, or are crushed because they chose to resist me, then that’s the end of it. It would simply mean that even the so-called Seven Archangels were nothing but trifling nonsense from inconsequential creatures, and I would go on and carry out my original plan. But... if those values can persuade me, defeat me, or force me to submit... if, somehow, they truly can... then they would be the ones who can genuinely speak of humanity’s hymn and greatness, not me, whose convictions already tremble because I’m still bound to my identity as a human being. And if that day comes, then I suppose I’d have to step aside too, wouldn’t I? As the Dark Lord, with everything overlaid by my own will, only to be driven back by the Chosen One. That’s how I’ve always been: in the mercenary corps, I was so good at killing enemies from the darkness that I never gave them time to speak, time to listen, or even time to see.
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