The Pay-to-Win Begins
The principal, too, had finally grasped how serious this was. The meals at Starlight Elementary had always been ordinary at best. But just yesterday the cafeteria staff had walked out on strike, and what came out of the kitchen in their place was food so appalling it left Hana horrified.
Solving it, in the end, would take money. The school was already spending its budget down to the bone, and there was nothing left to spare for the meals.
The principal was not a man who could make the impossible possible. He would have to borrow from the foundation. He asked, and the answer came back maddeningly vague: wait for financial support.
Which meant that for as long as the strike dragged on, the food was only going to get worse. The meals already coming out were, to put it bluntly, garbage. Now they were promising something even more garbage than that.
He paced, unable to sit still. Browbeating the people under him wasn't going to produce an answer anyway. And then a savior appeared. Kim Sehee herself had descended upon the school, come to see with her own eyes whether things were getting better or not.
Barely a day had passed, and already she was moving. That alone was proof of how deep her affection for Hana ran. What she found was a cafeteria that hadn't improved in the slightest. She hadn't expected a miracle overnight, of course. She had only wanted to see that something, at least, was underway.
The sluggish pace ate at her all the same. If this had been one of her own companies, she would never have tolerated a crawl like this... And then the solution came to her. The moment it did, she acted. She pulled out her phone and placed a call. On the other end was the youngest of the family, Kim Semin.
"Hmm-hmm~"
Kim Sehee strolled into Starlight Elementary with a delighted look on her face. As of today, she was chairwoman of the board.
That was right. After pressing a generous show of goodwill into her younger brother Kim Semin's hands, she had become chairwoman of the school run by the Starlight Group. Now she could keep Hana close even after elementary school. The middle school and the high school belonged to the same group.
Kim Semin had never cared much for the place anyway. His interests lay in sports, not in anything so educational. They simply couldn't send the youngest off empty-handed, and so the school foundation had been handed down to him as a consolation.
Kim Sehee started with the cafeteria. First she sat down with the strikers and bargained them back to work. The walkout had been about wages, and a single, simple raise was enough to bring them in.
Then she tore the cafeteria apart and built it over. To finish fast, the crews worked day and night without pause. The bill was considerable, but from where Kim Sehee sat it was pocket change. Set against what she was earning now, it didn't amount to so much as a splash of wash water.
Real-life pay-to-win had officially begun.
I couldn't stop myself from marveling at the lunchbox set in front of me. This was no ordinary convenience-store bento. It was a lavish boxed meal, packed tight with an enormous grilled short-rib patty and cut after cut of other meat.
"What's all this?"
Jiyu and Yumi, beside me, looked just as stunned. The other kids, too, couldn't hide their shock at the boxes laid out before them. The meals had fallen so far that most of them had been ready to abandon the cafeteria for the snack shop.
But a lunchbox like this was more than worth eating. No—they were simply going to eat it. It looked far more appetizing than the junk food down at the shop. The teacher explained why the boxed lunches had appeared.
"The cafeteria's under construction, so we'll be having lunchboxes for a while~ Everyone finish your side dishes, all right? No leftovers."
Leaving food of this quality uneaten would have been a crime. The moment she finished, I picked up my chopsticks and spoon.
"I wish they'd just give us lunchboxes like this from now on, instead of school lunch!"
"Me too! Compared to that fried fish last time, dried out to a crisp, this is hundreds of times better!"
I nodded along with Jiyu and Yumi, thoroughly in agreement. Honestly, the last meal had been beyond the pale. When I'd shown Chairman Kim Sehee the photo, even she had been struck speechless—proof enough that the quality had truly cratered.
Bang! Bang!
Gunshots loud enough to split the ears rolled across the grassland, and the acrid stink of gunpowder spread on the air. The fire, though, was not aimed at people.
Heavily armed soldiers poured rounds into the animals charging them. An animal-rights activist would have fainted at the sight. They were gunning down creatures that looked, on the face of it, perfectly sound.
But that had been the world before the gates. Animals drunk on the mana the gates spewed were no longer ordinary animals. They were beasts that fell on people without mercy.
Creatures addicted to gate mana showed stamina, bulk, and savagery a full step beyond what they had been. An ordinary person stood no chance of surviving them. Even the rabbit, judged the weakest of the lot, was more than a grown adult could handle. Animals like these had to be put down the moment they were seen, or they would come back to haunt you.
"Clear!"
"This sector's cleaned up too!"
The special-forces team of ten let out a short breath. Ever since the gates had appeared, fighting other human beings on their missions in Africa had all but vanished. In a way, that was a mercy. Nothing is as cruel as people killing their own kind.
Facing animals poisoned by the gates was a different kind of grind. Not every animal was affected. Scientists estimated that somewhere between five and ten percent had been intoxicated by gate mana.
Africa, though, was home to animals beyond counting. Even ten percent was a staggering number gone bad. They didn't all den in one place—they were scattered across the land—but it came to the same thing.
"Closing in on the target village!"
A swift recon team swept the surroundings and sent coordinates the moment a village came into view. From those coordinates, the unit dispatched however many soldiers the job required. Word traveled slowly in Africa. There were still people who didn't even know the gates existed.
Helicopters and fighter jets were an option, but in an Africa where gates cropped up constantly, you launched them only by accepting the risk. Gate mana ran especially strong here, and aircraft sometimes got caught in it and fell out of the sky.
"This is the place!"
The village was a small one, home to about twenty people. The residents watched the American troops with open favor. Their savior had arrived. There were villages that wanted to flee somewhere safe and couldn't, because the distance was too great. An animal attack on the road meant slaughter to the last soul. Pulling the people of such villages out was this team's mission.
"We're saved!"
"Oh, God!"
The villagers broke into cheers at the sight of the Americans coming in. They were grateful for a way out of a place locked in fear.
The troops quieted them and set about preparing to get the village clear.
Krrriiiik—!
Then a grotesque sound split the air, a chill like fingernails raking a chalkboard. The villagers stared in bewilderment and clapped their hands over their ears. The Americans knew exactly what it meant.
"A gate's forming! Get inside the houses, now!"
"Goddamn it! Why now, of all times!"
With practiced speed, the soldiers herded the villagers into their homes. That was the standing order the moment a gate appeared. The hideous noise cut off, and monsters began pouring from a gate burning red—beasts the size of elephants, and every other kind besides. Every last one of them was hideous to look at.
"Fuck! A gate wave, now?!"
Gates came in many kinds. This one was the vicious sort that vomited monsters almost as soon as it appeared. Had it opened in a city, Hunters would have swarmed it at once and wiped out a wave this low-grade in moments. Here was different.
The number of Hunters working in Africa was vanishingly small.
"If we step outside, I think we're in serious trouble."
These were monsters guns could not kill.
Fortunately, a gate like this came with a countermeasure. A gate could exist only by endlessly devouring mana. In a crowded settlement it charged itself on the mana of people, but Africa could not feed that hunger. Left alone, such gates tended to collapse on their own.
How long that would hold, though, was anyone's guess.