Chapter 133. Nuclear Explosion.
Chapter 133. Nuclear Explosion.
"Mm...?"
"Sihu, are you awake?"
"Yeah."
"Is anything bothering you?"
"No, it's not that..."
I'd had a pleasant dream about meeting someone I'd been missing for a long time, but I couldn't remember the details. It had been quite a while since the North Korea matter was wrapped up, but there was still no sign of any particular movement from the Chinese side.
"Sihu, breakfast is almost ready, so hurry up and wash up and come eat."
I washed up, finished eating, and stepped outside for a stroll. The sweltering heat that had been draining the villagers' energy for so long had gradually subsided, and before I knew it, autumn had arrived. With autumn's approach, I could see the villagers busily moving this way and that, bringing in the harvest.
The people I'd discovered while wandering aimlessly back then greeted me one by one.
"Representative, where are your ladies off to today, leaving you to wander about alone?"
"I just came out for a walk. Nothing in particular in mind."
"Well, of course. I've raised children myself, and even a married man needs his time alone."
At some point, the villagers had started calling me Representative and referring to Chaeyeon and Jia as my ladies. Not that the women themselves liked it much — they said the title made them sound far too old.
The faces of the people I met in the crop cultivation district were so bright you could almost forget the apocalypse had broken out.
"Take it easy. Getting hurt on the job makes things hard for everyone."
"Yes, understood."
Aside from the agricultural district handling crop cultivation, we'd divided the zones in a fairly systematic way.
The research district, where the dwarves and the research complex people resided.
The livestock district, for raising animals.
The fish-farming district, for aquaculture.
The armory district, where the soldiers lived.
The workshop district, which handled vehicles and helicopters, as well as village repair and maintenance.
The medical district, where the doctors and nurses stayed and cared for patients.
If enough time passed and the population grew through pregnancy and childbirth, we'd have to build educational facilities for all the children, too.
Truth be told, we'd thought about naming a place for entertainment and pleasure as well, but since it wasn't something you could call out in public, we didn't give it a separate name.
A wall roughly three meters high already encircled the village, so unless a special variant showed up, we were quite safe from zombie incursions.
'Not that long ago, people were threatened by zombies, but now zombies have become nothing special.'
Objectively, zombies were still dangerous. But any of the villagers could handle themselves well enough to escape on their own as long as they weren't surrounded and kept their wits about them. Feeling the weight of how much things had changed, I let out a wry laugh.
'Since when did zombies become "just zombies"...'
— Screeee!!
Kkamangi, who had been soaring overhead, descended and perched on my shoulder. The bird sitting there was now bigger than my head. Every time I took a walk alone, it would swoop down like this, wanting to play.
"Alright... give me a second."
I picked up a suitable pebble, infused it with my mana, and threw it hard enough to break the sound barrier.
— Fwsssssssh!!!
The instant the pebble left my hand, Kkamangi shot after it at incredible speed to catch it. Not long after, the bird returned with the pebble clenched in its beak.
'Am I raising a bird or a dog...'
I'd spent about an hour playing with Kkamangi when I saw someone sprinting toward me from a distance.
"Hah...! Representative, there you are."
"...?"
"The United States sent an urgent request for help...!"
"Why did you come running all the way here? You could have called."
"Cough... I did call, but you didn't answer, so... hah..."
Come to think of it, I'd set my belongings down in a corner while I played, so I must not have heard it.
"Ah... sorry about that."
"The others are already gathered."
I thanked him and apologized at the same time, then headed to the Assembly Hall. By the time I arrived, the video call was already connected—they'd apparently finished the preparations.
"I heard you requested help."
"My apologies. I don't have the presence of mind to exchange pleasantries right now..."
"What's happened?"
"An immense level of radiation has been detected in Washington State."
"Pardon...? Then aren't you in danger right now?"
"No, we're currently safe here. We're quite far from that location."
I'd never been to the U.S., so I hadn't known, but Washington State and Washington, D.C. were apparently entirely different places.
"The location is the Hanford Site."
It was a name I'd never heard once in my entire life.
"Where is that?"
The U.S. President hesitated for a moment, as if silently asking, 'Is it all right to say this?' Then, still reluctant, he opened his mouth.
"It is the site where the United States stores the largest volume of radioactive waste."
"..."
I honestly hadn't been thinking much of anything, but he must have interpreted my expression as deeply serious, because he began explaining in excruciating detail.
"It was constructed in the past as part of the Manhattan Project, the nuclear weapons development program during the Second World War."
"Nuclear... nuclear? You mean like Little Boy and Fat Man...?"
"Yes, that's correct."
"But if radiation was detected there... did the zombies mess with something...?"
"I will stake my presidency on this: absolutely not. It is not the sort of place with lax security, and there has not been a single accident there in the entire course of its history."
"Then something from Titan..."
Which meant some unknown entity had, through some action, disturbed the radioactive waste at that site. Faced with this grim reality, both the U.S. President and President Min Seok-woo furrowed their brows and let out sighs.
"Do you have any detailed findings?"
"The intense radiation has degraded electromagnetic waves past the point of attenuation — the signal is completely severed. We cannot send drones."
"So you've only been able to confirm it from a distance."
"Yes. The levels were high enough that merely approaching would melt a human being. The one piece of good news amid the misfortune is that no heat is being emitted, meaning it was not a leak caused by fire or some other disaster."
Listening to the detailed account, it turned out that no matter how much a special entity like the giant zombie clawed or thrashed, it could never breach those walls — they were specially constructed to withstand even missiles.
The U.S. President and President Min Seok-woo exchanged opinions back and forth without pause. Then, abruptly, President Min Seok-woo asked a question.
"But is there any reason a being from Titan would go there?"
"..."
The reason a being from Titan — a world with no connection to radiation — would go to that place. The U.S. President, silent for a moment in thought, looked at me and cautiously offered a hypothesis.
"This is purely my personal speculation, but... could it be a monster that is attracted to radiation?"
"I can say with certainty on this point: Titan's science and technology cannot produce nuclear materials. It's a world that developed magic rather than science, after all."
In a situation where no one could get a firm grasp on things, the door to the U.S. President's office flew open on the other side of the video call, and someone in a suit burst in urgently. Under normal circumstances, it would have been profoundly rude, but the look on his face was so grave that no one said a word and simply waited.
As he listened to the man's whispered report, the U.S. President's face went pale, and his hands began to tremble.
"Good God..."
The U.S. President rubbed his face in distress and groaned. At the sight of an expression he had never seen on the U.S. President's face before, President Min Seok-woo pressed for an answer.
"A colossal explosion has just occurred in Washington State... They say the surrounding area looks as though it was struck by a meteor — nothing but barren earth, as if there had never been anything there in the first place..."
The destructive force he described rivaled the 100-megaton nuclear bomb the Soviet Union had built in the past. The numbers alone didn't give me a sense of scale, so I asked again — he said it was a blast powerful enough to wipe out a quarter of Korea.
"No movement is currently being detected... but..."
"...?"
"There is no telling when another explosion of this scale might occur."
"First, we will consult with our experts and get back to you as quickly as we can."
"...Please, I beg of you, help the United States..."
The video conference ended, and I swiftly summoned all personnel from the research district — the researchers, the dwarves, everyone. I called them in regardless of whether they specialized in nuclear physics, nuclear engineering, chemical engineering, mathematics, or general physics. I gave them a brief explanation of the current situation. At that moment, one of the researchers raised a hand and spoke up.
"Representative, something seems a bit odd."
"Yes?"
"Even if an accident occurred at a radioactive waste storage facility, a large-scale explosion like a nuclear detonation would not typically take place. Of course, an accident would still cause extremely serious problems, but..."
"Hm..."
"We shouldn't dismiss this as a simple accident. That massive explosion was the result of someone utilizing the waste to produce some kind of effect. We need to focus on what that 'effect' was."
I'm absolutely hopeless at stuff like this. Once the researcher finished speaking, another person raised a hand and requested permission to speak — it was a dwarf, which I hadn't expected.
"Galrand?"
"Benefactor, if it's some kind of effect, could it not be 'mana'?"
"...?"
"Once before, I considered inscribing mana circuits onto something called an airplane to operate it, but lifting a craft of that weight required a staggering amount of mana. So we turned our attention to something called nuclear fusion."
As he spoke, he glanced over at Director Edwin.
"Representative, as Mr. Galrand mentioned, we are currently researching a model that applies mana to nuclear fusion. To supplement the stability of nuclear fusion and bring the accident risk to near-zero percent."
"..."
"By forcibly suppressing radioactive decay using mana, we aim to produce limitless energy — the dream power source. Of course, a small amount of heat would be generated in the process, but only the slight heat produced by the machinery operating."
'Ah, I genuinely don't understand a damn word of this.'
"I'm not a specialist, so I can't follow the details, but in short, you're saying there's a possibility that 'mana' was involved, correct?"
Galrand and Edwin both stared at me with slightly blank expressions, like teachers looking at a student who hadn't understood a single thing.
"Representative, that gives rise to two possibilities."
"What are they?"
"How it withstood the immense physical force of that detonation, and how many more times it can move on its own and produce such an explosion."
"The first case, well..."
"You, Representative, can handle that. But the latter..."
The first case wasn't a problem. Even I, right now, could muster power surpassing the force of a nuclear explosion.
"If it moves on its own, causing those explosions and contaminating the surrounding area with radiation, humanity's foothold will gradually shrink."
Up to this point, I hadn't really felt the gravity of it. America was enormous, and frankly, it wasn't my own front yard. But what I heard next made the severity hit home.
"If that entity were to cross the ocean, humanity would never be able to so much as glance at a fish again. And as long as a nuclear bomb that could detonate at any moment exists in the sea, most shipping routes that rely on maritime transport will be severed."
This wasn't something I could dismiss as some distant country's problem. In the future, humanity might end up seeing fish with three eyes and extra limbs sprouting from their bodies — and fresh food would probably cost a fortune to buy.