The Fourth Collision: Candy Cataclysm
Surviving the fourth collision meant you ranked in the top 12.5 percent.
Only the truly capable advanced to the next stage. Anyone genuinely incompetent would have been culled by the third round. Those still standing in the fourth collision were, by definition, competent.
Soon’s world had chosen not to challenge any of the “dropout” worlds. Two major reasons lay behind the decision.
First, the number of dropouts was far smaller than anticipated. With sixty-seven million players remaining, they had expected roughly a third to fall. Instead, only a hundred thousand worlds had been eliminated.
Among those hundred thousand dropout worlds, none were particularly tempting. They were all barren wastelands, ravaged by endless war and stripped of population. Every last one looked like a ruined hellscape that explained exactly why its owner had given up. The terrain was equally unappealing.
So instead of targeting the dropout worlds, they chose to face other active players—players who could, reasonably speaking, be persuaded to cooperate. Good or evil, weak or strong, the policy was simple: cooperation. That had been the plan.
Unfortunately, every game has its “unreasonable players” who live for combat. Meeting one of those lunatics was, ironically, a perfectly reasonable possibility.
Which was why they had prepared a “reasonable response.” Using their exceptionally high Politics stat, they maintained ironclad control over their created beings. They had moderately elevated Technology and possessed the Industry that came with a large population. With those, they had built wooden palisades, earthen ramparts, and other defensive structures. In dangerous situations, the weak would be evacuated inside while the warrior class emerged to meet the enemy in disciplined formation.
In other words, the villages they lived in were essentially fortresses, and they possessed a professional class of trained combatants. On home ground, even if the enemy’s raw combat power was three or four times greater, victory was still possible.
Simply reading the explanation up to this point made it clear how systematic and excellent Soon’s preparations had been.
Soon, along with the seven allied gods who were effectively his subordinates, had also judged the countermeasures and the completed system to be perfectly rational. They acknowledged his behavior as their leader and allowed him to wield his political power without restraint.
Yet even Soon, who had prepared so meticulously, had never imagined an enemy this unreasonable.
“Enemy sighted!”
The trained scout shouted the warning. He belonged to one of the eight tribes—a bipedal, rabbit-like species chosen for reconnaissance because of their keen eyes and swift feet.
He was an elite scout. He did not flinch at the enemy’s appearance. The opponent’s Charm was practically zero, making it easy to drop one’s guard, but these insane spiky round things had already impaled and killed several people.
And now one of those spiky round things—the carnivorous dessert that its Creator, CamelEatingCandy, had brought into existence—came hurtling toward the rabbit scout. It appeared to have multiple leg-like appendages. It was faster than it looked.
Still, at that speed, it shouldn’t be impossible to dodge…
The moment the thought formed, the candy suddenly accelerated to two and a half times its previous speed.
Seventy kilometers per hour. Not an impossible velocity. Good reflexes could evade it.
But the thing was thirty centimeters in diameter—nearly the size of a human head. The spikes and horns that could tear flesh with the slightest graze spread outward during the charge, accepting air resistance for the sake of maximum lethality.
And it was moving at seventy kilometers per hour.
CRUNCH!
It struck him square in the chest. The candy itself weighed only four kilograms. Yet factoring in its shape and velocity, the impact was no different from being hit by a four-kilogram greatsword, dumbbell, or weight hurled at seventy kilometers per hour.
One priceless elite soldier died just like that.
“More incoming!”
Around ten of the candies charged at once. The rabbits used their powerful legs to tumble, roll, and evade—textbook elite maneuvering.
Once they had dodged the first wave and regained their stance, they discovered a horrifying truth.
“What the…?”
All the candies that had charged lay dead. Or rather, they still seemed alive, but only their mouths moved feebly. The rest of their bodies had gone completely limp, as if every muscle had lost all strength.
The elites drew the obvious conclusion.
“These things are one-and-done after a single charge?”
“Looks that way.”
“They exist only to kill with one suicidal rush. What a nightmare of a creature.”
If that was the case, dealing with them was relatively simple. Lure the charge and dodge.
The countermeasure spread quickly. They managed to stop the first wave of roughly fifty candies that poured from the dimensional gate with only minimal losses. A few elites were injured by mistake, but that was all.
The next day, the gate opened again. Another fifty candies. Some livestock died, but every invader was eliminated.
The day after that, fifty more. These ones bounced around randomly and failed to kill anyone.
They never did find the corpses. No one understood why.
Then, on the fourth day after the gate first opened—right around the time the initial candies had fed, split, and successfully reproduced into adults—they faced not only the new fifty but another two hundred that had multiplied on their own by devouring water, grass, and even rocks.
“Huh…?”
They desperately dodged the charges, beat the creatures to death, and the following day they counted three hundred and fifty candies roaming their world.
Livestock were slaughtered in droves. The defenders frantically smashed the candies apart, but the larvae, the moment they were born, bounded away at incredible speed and vanished. They hid inside corpses, manure piles, even inside the fortified homes, nibbling on meat, chewing on the wooden palisades—consuming every organic thing they could find and growing at a terrifying rate.
By the fourth day, every elite in the world was mobilized solely to hunt the candies. Estimates placed their numbers at roughly two thousand three hundred.
“What the hell is this?!”
Dodging the charges physically was only feasible when five or six candies attacked together. When thirty of them gathered and exploded outward from every possible angle, there was no luring or dodging.
All anyone could do was run frantically to avoid the insane candies’ suicidal rushes.
“Shields up, everyone!”
“That’s right! The bigger tribes should wear armor and take the hits instead of dodging! You won’t die!”
But once the numbers reached two thousand three hundred, it became impossible to manage.
If you evaded a hundred and fled to the opposite side, another hundred came charging from that direction.
These deranged lifeforms ate rocks, plants, animals, corpses, and excrement. They could even survive underwater. After charging, they devoured anything in sight, laid eggs, and the newborns hid until they matured—then immediately hurled themselves at every visible target in a suicidal rush. There was no defense against such madness.
“Summon the shamans!”
The shamans attempted to control the enemy using every mystery spell at their disposal. The tactic worked surprisingly well. The candies appeared extremely vulnerable to magical damage; lightning strikes cooked them instantly.
Unfortunately, there were not many shamans. Even when every attack-capable shaman joined the extermination effort, their world’s level of power could not stop hundreds of charging candies.
“Reorganize formations by race! This is the gods’ decree!”
Resistance continued. Warriors were redrafted according to size, class, and species. Makeshift wooden shields were distributed. The new strategy was to lure a charge, roll clear, then club the creature to death with a cudgel before it could lay eggs.
It was fairly effective. Casualties still mounted.
“All able-bodied civilians, come out and fight!”
Thanks to their high Politics, they could conscript large numbers even for this desperate measure. Deaths increased, but the candy population finally began to drop.
Yet every single day, the enemy continued dropping fifty more candies. The creatures did not even need to eat people; they simply charged at every living thing that existed.
The only survivors were the flying creatures known as membrane-birds—bat-and-bird hybrids. Only they could take to the air and, being light, evade the charges.
None of the eight tribes possessed the ability to fly. Even the livestock were butchered without mercy, their corpses devoured.
This dessert apocalypse lasted ten full days.
At this point, the people’s concerns shifted from simple survival to something more fundamental.
“My lords… how are we supposed to farm this year? With those insane round things running everywhere?”
“……”
“Oh gods! Please answer us! What are we supposed to do?!”
The eight gods devised every possible countermeasure. They used divine power to grant mystery abilities to the untalented, to heal the wounded, and to strengthen the strong.
But unlike the protection period, time flowed extremely slowly during the world collision phase. Divine power therefore accumulated at a glacial pace.
In contrast, the dimensional gates opened like clockwork every single day. This side was forced into pure defense, while the enemy seemed to expend all its divine power simply to open the gates.
And then the true tragedy began.
“The insane round things have breached the village!”
A few that had slipped through must have fed on food scraps and multiplied inside the settlement. The explosively growing horde began slaughtering civilians within the walls.
At least they can’t cross the palisade. If we just wipe these out—
The thought had barely formed before the next wave arrived. These smaller twenty-centimeter candies could leap nearly two meters. Though individually weaker, their faster charges could pierce straight through a person’s stomach.
“Strong soldiers, meet them head-on!”
The following wave consisted of fifty-centimeter candies. These were far heavier. Even though their charges reached only fifty kilometers per hour, their eight-kilogram bodies smashed through shields and shattered the large-bodied warriors who tried to block them.
“Oh gods! What are we supposed to do about this?!”
“Please show us the way!”
“We will obey whatever you command!”
But there was no way.
Trained soldiers, untrained civilians, even children were now using their agility to block the jelly-like charges as best they could. They burned every corpse, granted mysteries at random, and wasted divine power without restraint.
In only thirty days, their world had become a candy hell. No matter where you went, the insane candies appeared, charging at everything in sight. This year’s harvest was irrevocably ruined.
They looked unlikely to even survive until tomorrow, let alone see the following year.
Even if we mobilize the entire army, we can’t catch them all. Mystery spells can’t keep up either. Miss one, and they multiply dozens of times over. We can’t farm. The defensive walls are meaningless—they leap two or three meters high without effort. Even if we conscript every civilian, their combat ability is too low. We’ll hit a limit. At this rate our stored food will run out and famine will follow. And even if we somehow killed every last one of them in a single day, the land is already so devastated we couldn’t survive the year anyway.
Soon’s thoughts continued.
And even if we miraculously endure that, this is still only the dimensional gate stage. Once the dimensional rift stage begins, that thing will come. That demon! The tentacled monstrosity that floated through the sky surrounded by bubbles! When that arrives, there will be nothing we can do. So what the hell are we supposed to do?
No answer came no matter how hard he thought.
Soon’s vision went black.