The Tenth Collision

World Collision — Tenth Round.

Thinking back, this fight marks the tenth round. A full third of the way through the tournament already.

“Indeed. Considering this is before the tournament proper, reaching this point alone proves Biin’s excellence.”

Right. At this stage, everyone’s main plan—the core framework of their strategy—should be complete, and now it’s time to clash with those finished builds.

“What do you mean by that, exactly?”

“Hmm… Not sure if the analogy will land, but think of deck-building board games, RTS titles, or auto-battlers that rely on synergy combos. Games where you start with almost nothing and gradually assemble something functional. In those terms, we’re at the point where your ‘deck’ or ‘build’ needs at least a working draft.”

In other words, you need a main plan.

TCG games are different, of course. You bring a finished deck from the start, so the main plan is already set and what matters is execution.

But with deck-builders, RTS, and auto-battlers, you begin weak and branch out in response to the situation, making optimal choices until everything converges on a single strategy.

That is, you construct your main plan and build as you go. Even then, it’s never truly finished.

Right now we’ve only sketched the initial draft of the main build. From here we keep adding cards, units, whatever, refining it into something solid before we collide.

“Hmm. I see. So each world’s direction must already be ‘locked in’?”

“From what I can tell? The rules have changed a lot since my gaming days, but by this point every world should have a firm direction and strategy.”

That’s why I didn’t prepare anything special between the ninth and tenth collisions.

If I had to mention anything, two more legion commanders appeared. The Fourth Commander was always planned for when resources allowed, and Wafflach-Nacha simply left behind his legacy, ranked up on his own, and literally ascended.

None of that was intentional on my part. I genuinely didn’t care whether Jumito joined us, killed himself, or got sold off to another world.

Wafflach-Nacha itself is useful, but it’s just an extra piece that wandered into my main build… not something capable of twisting the entire strategy.

“Hmm. So you intend to settle this with a straightforward contest of scale?”

“Exactly. How we win and how we finish them off—that’s something I’ll figure out once I see how well my main plan performs.”

The opponent would have matched the Meteor Cartel’s scale at the very least. Otherwise the match wouldn’t even be fair.

So just how much skill would they display? I was looking forward to finding out.

Dindinaron, the man who boldly declared war on the Meteor Cartel after receiving massive crowdfunding, was the classic gamer type—someone who had poured his energy into being a fantasy world creator before joining the real game.

But the game didn’t just summon shut-ins who only played. Dindinaron’s real-world job had been president of a trading company. Quite the contrast to the previous opponent, Mitomok.

When it came to management and business sense, Mitomok was clearly superior. The same went for placing the right people in the right positions.

Yet Dindinaron understood far better how civilizations grew, how management worked, and how the game’s systems functioned.

Their personalities were similar yet different. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Mitomok’s defining trait was “backbone.” He would crawl on the ground for customers, but never bowed to outside pressure. Once he believed he was right, he walked that path without wavering.

Dindinaron’s defining trait could be summed up as “boldness.”

While Mitomok had built his business steadily from initial capital, personally handling sales and growing it through honest effort, Dindinaron had mortgaged his only asset—his house—to take out a loan and poured every last cent into a venture he believed in.

That gamble paid off spectacularly. Afterward, he continued making bold, near-all-in investments whenever he felt certain, while still observing certain lines.

Thanks to that aggressive style of investment, acquisitions, and—most importantly—his refusal to ruin himself with shady dealings or perverse indulgences, he achieved enormous success.

His business was on a much larger scale than Mitomok’s. The reason this busy president participated as a gamer archetype was simply that he had grown old while continuing his work and was enjoying his remaining years.

Yes—his remaining years. By the time Dindinaron joined the game, he was already an old man…

He had lived ninety percent of the average lifespan. Playing a civilization-themed game in his twilight years reminded him of his business days, and because the game itself was quite fun, he participated despite barely being able to walk. That was how he had been summoned here.

Once he joined the gods’ game, both body and mind returned to their prime. He became the clear-headed, energetic young man he had once been.

And if he lost here, his soul would be erased? He had already believed there was nothing after death anyway.

Dindinaron could have exited quietly, but since he didn’t fear death, he made the boldest investment of all.

‘Let’s take down the Meteor Cartel.’

They were madmen who had crushed every opponent with two mythic-grade traits. But if he could hunt them instead, he would stand at the very top of this game’s largest faction.

The problem was scale. Dindinaron had wanted to buy mythic-grade traits, but lacked the points. He only had two legendary-grade ones. The gap between mythic and legendary wasn’t insurmountable, but it was still significant.

So he began crowdfunding. Dindinaron believed his issue was purely one of scale. With two mythic traits, the cartel must have sold off a great deal from their world.

How much could they have earned through consulting? By this stage, every survivor was an expert; there wouldn’t be much left to consult on.

Therefore, even with two mythic traits, their scale would still be lacking. And if their scale was lacking, then simply overwhelming them with raw stats should be enough.

‘The best part of this strategy is that I can receive enormous resources from outside that I normally couldn’t obtain through investment.’

There was a limit to how much one could earn through trade and commerce. But external investment could multiply that amount several times over.

His original score wasn’t particularly low—3.9 million points. On top of that, crowdfunding had scraped together a staggering 40 million more.

Ah, but did that mean he now possessed a 43.9-million-point world? Not quite.

What he received was resources worth 40 million points. Quite a few game stats fundamentally couldn’t be raised through investments from other worlds.

To fundamentally raise stats, you needed consulting, not crowdfunding. Receiving knowledge in Tech, Culture, Politics, and so on from others was extremely difficult.

So what he obtained were simple points, or factories (excluding manpower, equipment, and technology), skilled workers, vast quantities of raw materials, food, or truly fundamental knowledge that would strengthen the world—condensed flows of magic stones, and so on.

With those, he massively expanded his world’s capabilities. In the end, it wasn’t an allied army brought in from outside, but a world that had grown through investment. By continuously ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠accelerating world time and building upon the received resources, he had constructed an even more efficient world.

The two legendary-grade traits he already possessed had also played a major role.

Because they never made unintended mistakes, all the absurd errors—forgetting things, misjudging situations, entering wrong numbers or orders, or issuing incorrect military commands—were prevented at the source.

Furthermore, even as external personnel and volunteer forces from other races continued to flow in, which would normally cause Politics to plummet, this trait corrected it. It wasn’t a trait that prevented resistance to the system; rather, it effectively criticized unreasonable or inefficient systems, guiding them toward healthier directions.

Thanks to this, he ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could absorb external manpower without distorting social order and still maintain a sufficiently excellent army.

Honestly, even the weakness Dindinaron himself had worried about—his inability to truly understand his subordinates’ hearts—could be overcome with this trait alone.

Thus, Dindinaron’s current world score had surpassed his target of 20 million and approached 29 million at level 15. Of that, Military alone accounted for 7 million points. Since he had no intention of negotiating peace with the opponent anyway, he had poured everything into it, filling the rest with agricultural and industrial infrastructure to support that military power.

“Honestly, military power only ever gets consumed.”

The world collision process already spanned several decades. During that time the population would grow and new recruits would be trained, but fundamentally, the early stages involved only light skirmishes while the later stages grew increasingly intense.

In that case, the ideal form was continuous expansion-style deployment from beginning to end, allowing peak combat power to be committed during the fissure phase.

“We have plenty of mysteries, diverse unit types, and they’re all elite. We have many hero entities. Supply lines, including farmland, are built in safe locations, stockpiled food is overflowing, and preservation technology is quite excellent… If we fight, we can keep fighting all the way to the fissure phase.”

World Score: 29,436,943 points. That was Dindinaron’s current strength.

He didn’t know what kind of world Biin possessed, but he believed it was more than enough to win. In the end, victory came down to scale. No matter how high the Meteor Cartel’s scale was without any decent allies, how high could it really be?

And so, Dindinaron’s mistake stemmed from exactly this point.

Dindinaron had measured the opponent’s power and composition against an average world, assuming Biin was merely several times stronger than average.

In other words, rather than caring about who Biin was or how he had built his world, he had only concerned himself with what social status Biin held and what rewards would come from toppling him.

Given his business-oriented nature, what the opponent actually did was more important than what they might be doing internally. On top of that, Biin had thoroughly hidden his own information.

Still, it wasn’t as if there had been no options. He could have paid enormous points to pirates capable of scouting other worlds, had them reconnoiter Biin’s world, and shared the intelligence…

Of course, calling it a mistake might be too harsh. How unfair would it be to say he deserved to die simply because he hadn’t anticipated the “Lord of Mass Extinction” reaching the tenth round without developing civilization?

He hadn’t been careless, but he had thought too lightly.

Greater scale was advantageous and could even grant superiority against opponents with mythic-grade traits. Everything in this world was ruled by power and capital.

It wasn’t a wrong notion…

But when the premise itself was wrong, it became meaningless.

Biin’s world total score: 31,222,799 points.

By selling ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠off the insane amount of resources plundered from other worlds and all accumulated points to the Pantheon Corporation, and through repeated consultations with his clones, he had elevated his world’s capabilities to the absolute peak.

When Dindinaron’s world held roughly 13,000 square kilometers of land (accounting for expansion into unclaimed territory), Biin possessed over 170,000 square kilometers.

To put it in terms a Korean could easily understand: even if Dindinaron received insane external support, he would be like the kingdom of Gaya facing the Goguryeo Empire at its height—with its vast territory and productivity—and would have to destroy the enemy’s capital located near Baekdu Mountain (the Nectar Well).

So if one looked at the process of Dindinaron attempting to break through the Dessert Desert toward the Nectar Well, the distance alone exceeded 1,000 kilometers. In reality, with jungles, swamps, deserts, mountainous terrain, and hellish beasts filling the path, it felt closer to 3,000 kilometers.

On top of that, Biin could perfectly track enemy positions with Deity-World Oneness and freely reshape the terrain with World Shaping, ensuring no one ever reached their destination. Even if they somehow overcame all that interference, they would still have to defeat all five Dessert Legion commanders waiting to slaughter intruders, maintain a continuous supply line from the main base to the Nectar Well, and then destroy both the Nectar Well fairy Abhojuth and the Guremmy Bear Reefs protecting it before finally occupying the well.

Only then would it be Dindinaron’s victory.

Biin summed up all of his opponent’s efforts in a single sentence.

“Go ahead and try.”

If he succeeded, Biin would die cleanly. After going that far, how could he refuse to acknowledge defeat?