World Collision - The Sixth: Famine as the Ultimate Weapon
Biin had been extraordinarily unlucky, but in the fifth match he finally encountered an easy opponent. That didn't mean everyone was so fortunate, however.
At the current stage there were objectively more weak opponents than strong ones, but a cold assessment revealed a great many opponents wielding quite convincing strategies.
Player Beriben was one of those with a genuinely persuasive approach. After listening to the game rules, he hit upon a brilliant idea.
“If I smash the bastards who reach out for cooperation in the early stages and turn them into subordinates, I can rack up points easily and advance to the next round, right?”
Of course, most players understood the logic. Yet most still pursued cooperation strategies anyway, while another large group prepared for war by exploiting exactly those openings.
So the real question was how to achieve overwhelming victory. Simply gathering excellent troops and waging war was no solution. What if the opponent did the same?
“Asymmetric power. I need to assemble forces the enemy cannot possibly match. And if we’re talking asymmetric power in the early game…”
Beriben came from a world with extremely strong gravity, so he was weak against “height.” In his world, falling even a single meter could be fatal.
But this world’s gravity was far gentler. In other words, aerial combat was possible from the very beginning—a concept that had only appeared in the later eras of his home world.
By sheer luck, the first terrain Beriben received contained birds capable of flight. He granted them intelligence, raised them carefully, and allowed them to complete a civilization.
During the first collision, his flying units each clutched a single stone in their talons. They dove from the sky and hurled the rocks at enemy soldiers, smashing skulls. The tactic brought victory.
The opposing player acknowledged that he could not defeat Beriben’s airborne slingers and was forced to surrender. Since Beriben was not a Demon King, he naturally accepted the capitulation.
“Civilizations will eventually develop anti-air weapons like bows and catapults. So I’ll pour every resource into aerial combat before those weapons become widespread, then exit the moment they do.”
In short, Beriben had built an extreme short-term build designed to exit at the second descent stage of the sixth round.
He won four straight rounds using nothing but aerial stone-dropping. Every race that surrendered became slaves.
“You lot can develop civilization on your own! I’m just going to live off aerial cheese strats!”
“B-but Lord Beriben, you won’t be able to reach the late game like that…”
“Doesn’t matter! I never planned to reach the late game! I’m cashing out at the second or third descent stage!”
“?!”
Even during the shop phase he bought common traits optimized for short-term builds instead of expensive, long-term ones.
If he saved his points well and kept winning until the end of the sixth round, he would walk away with at least 100,000 points.
Using his one-trick strategy of aerial slings and arrow rains, he also claimed victory in the fifth round and arrived at the disaster section.
Naturally he only took the single mandatory disaster. Thanks to his extreme short-term build, Beriben currently held 160,000 points in hand. It was no small sum. Winning the next game would likely bring him to around 200,000.
He felt a little sorry for the subordinate gods who would retire after developing civilization in his stead for a pittance, but the overall level of the game was simply too high. He doubted he could reach the ninth round.
“They say the top ranks have scores well over 200,000?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
His own world score was barely one-fifth of that.
Therefore his rational strategy was simple: upon meeting an opponent in the sixth round, immediately request cooperation. If accepted, he would declare his exit at once. If refused, he would continue indiscriminate terror until cooperation was accepted.
“200,000 points is plenty. With that I can retire with an immortal life, outstanding intellect, beautiful appearance, wealth, and a powerful body. It’s a shame I can’t buy superpowers… but it can’t be helped!”
And so, immediately after the world collision began, Beriben sent a cooperation request to his opponent—Sesaisa.
It was rejected. He had no idea why the other party would refuse when cooperation was clearly advantageous, but there was nothing to be done.
“No choice, then. Launch the flying squadrons.”
The moment both dimensional gates opened and each side sent their “flying units” across—
“I surrender! Surrender!! Surrender!!!”
Beriben’s skill at cutting losses was lightning-fast, yet the opponent immediately blocked all communication.
Then the clouds in the sky were turned viscous, the flying units were shot down, and the enemy remained utterly unfazed by a few falling stones. A corps of elephants—each one equivalent to a great mage of the era—charged forth and began literally tearing the world apart.
Beriben’s vision went black.
Player Andantara had, in a sense, built a similar template to Biin.
In the first round, instead of creating a civilization he created monsters. He saw no immediate need to establish one.
His monster army destroyed the enemy civilization in the first round, after which Andantara finally granted them intelligence and turned them into humans.
“It’s fortunate that the mysteries for training the body are so common. Let’s build a monster-based civilization on that foundation.”
It was quite successful. The ultimate predator of the game became the dominant species. Slave races would develop civilization while the main species focused solely on honing strength.
Displaying strength became culture itself, and the system was completed as a thorough political structure in which superior predators ruled inferior prey.
“Let us make the strong ruling the weak into an actual virtue. Rights for the strong, but mercy and compassion for the weak… I have no desire to raise a civilization of psychopaths.”
The term “lower species” sounded better than “slave species.” Once the system in which the superior species cared for the inferior was completed, it functioned far better than expected.
In fact, with a level of 8 and a score exceeding 150,000 points, it was a fairly high-ranking civilization. Andantara had built and perfected a system, culture, religion, and ultimately an entire civilization upon a foundation of powerful races.
“Then the next opponent is… Mihun. What a violent fellow. He doesn’t even have any fellow gods.”
“Excuse me. Lord Andantara.”
“What is it, Angel?”
“This is one of the rare exceptions in the game, so I must inform you—the player ‘Mihun’ will not suffer soul annihilation even if he is defeated.”
“What?”
Before the explanation could finish, the heroes who had crossed to the other side of the world encountered a mad dinosaur whose total stats matched their own world.
The insane being called Yeondan-u swung his arm, and an entire army was sliced apart. The demons or whatever they were that entered his world were monsters that could shatter houses with raw strength and hurl stone walls.
Andantara’s vision went black.
Meanwhile, the player who had held rank one for so long—Terasion—had tasted hell during the previous disaster section.
“Good heavens, Angel. This was purely luck, right?”
“Of course. Completely random.”
The disasters he drew were [Water Pollution] + [Epidemic] + [External Parasites], and the mandatory disaster required him to perform rituals of a certain scale toward the sky until the disasters ended.
All the disasters seemed designed to reduce population. He was already overwhelmed, yet he had to build altars and perform ceremonies? The triple biological disaster combo reduced his population to a mere 1/20.
Even though he was rank one, he had boldly taken three disasters and they had all overlapped. He felt like crying, but his base specs were so high that he gritted his teeth, performed the rituals, overcame the epidemic, and his dominant species—resembling Homo sapiens—became far more resilient.
Somehow restoring the devastated world (his rank had naturally plummeted from first place, but he refused to dwell on it), he arrived at the sixth world.
“First, I should seek cooperation with the opponent…”
The opponent was a madman who had laced every dominant species, every livestock animal, and every cultivated plant in his world with poison.
“Ah.”
He appeared to have obsessively learned only the mystical spells of the , , and lineages. If the opponent had not been a based race it would have been an instant loss, yet this lunatic had stubbornly gone all-in on the “I only kill living things” tree while possessing the heart of a beast…
Still hoping negotiation might be possible, Terasion tried talking. The reply was pure insanity: “There will be no cooperation. If you do not surrender, I will fight until I die. If it seems I am about to lose, I will scatter poison across your entire world and perish gloriously.”
“H-how… how can someone have such terrible luck…!”
Former rank one Terasion, now second place after the life-score leader Biin. His main build was a nature-harmony and ecology concept based on .
His life score, which had once approached 30,000, had plummeted to a mere 1,300 after four disasters and the sixth collision. On top of that, the enemy’s infinite poison terror and invasive species had wrecked the ecosystem to the point of near-irreversible collapse.
“Ah…”
“How disastrous.”
“I’ll have to change my build… The population has shrunk too much. I have no choice but to focus on and …”
He knew that an agriculture build based on was the strongest. He had been a gamer, after all.
But… most of his crops were rotting, and the bodies of his people had become terribly inefficient from resisting poison. Terasion’s world could no longer pursue that ideal build.
In a sense, this was the largest turning point not only for Terasion but for the entire game.
The other clones had scattered to edit the enemy ecosystem and achieve harmony with his own. Biin himself took charge of the breed improvement required for the main plan.
The Angel had also split among the clones, but the one beside him approached cautiously with a curious expression.
“So, shall we finally hear what this ‘main plan’ is? What exactly did you find?”
To summarize, the “main plan” was the objective, while the “main build” referred to the various strategies used to achieve that plan.
It was not a one-tool strategy that would fail the moment a single approach didn’t work.
The main build had many weapons. What he had discovered now was merely one axis that would constitute the main plan.
The significance lay in the fact that he had been able to identify and establish one of those many axes at this stage.
“I understand. So what is it, really?”
Biin showed the Angel the grasses he had found in this world’s wetland terrain.
Not one or two kinds—five or six completely different species. He estimated they had invaded the enemy ecosystem during the disaster section.
“Um. So. This is the main plan? They just look like ordinary grass.”
They were indeed ordinary grass.
“Huh? Really? But grass already existed, didn’t it?”
Not all grass was the same. Biin’s ecosystem had grasses that grew in deserts and grasses that clung to life in the dry air of grasslands, but it lacked grasses that could proliferate massively across diverse terrains—wetlands, plains, meadows, mountains, and more.
“……?”
Did she understand? The key was “proliferate massively.” The survival strategy of these different grasses was exactly that.
They reproduced like crazy. Wetlands, swamps, fields, paddies, meadows, mountainous regions—even floating islands above the clouds. This ecosystem was covered in such weeds.
“Uh… I see. And then?”
“What do you mean, ‘and then’? This is the end. We win with this.”
“E-ehhh…?”
Why couldn’t she understand? Should he explain it step by step like he had during the first collision?
“Hey, Angel. What is the number one condition required to establish the concept of civilization?”
“Huh? Isn’t it technology?”
“Before that.”
“Before that? Intelligence? Or society?”
“Correct. Society. Then what is the number one condition for building society?”
“The number one condition…? Something like shared consciousness or systems…”
The very first essential condition was not that.
“The first condition is a large population. You need many people to form a society. Three people don’t make a society or a civilization.”
“That’s true.”
“Then how do you support that large population?”
The Angel answered immediately.
“Agriculture.”
Then she let out a gasp.
“Huk…! W-wait a second. So you mean…”
The strategy from the first collision and the main plan were not fundamentally different.
It was about starving them to death…! There was no need to destroy 100% of the enemy’s farmland. Simply lowering efficiency was enough. In other words, by using these “weeds” that were difficult to remove, parasitized fields, stole nutrients, and reproduced in massive quantities.
A mere 10% drop in annual food production brought famine. At 30% starvation deaths appeared. Once it exceeded 50%, the apocalypse arrived.
This held true for every single civilization without exception…! The amount of food living beings required was fixed, yet population could not be freely reduced. Therefore, merely reducing food supply would utterly devastate , , , —everything.
“W-wait, is that even allowed? Is that a valid strategy?”
It was. He had played the game himself. Even at the highest levels—past level 30—no civilization, no society, whether built with magic or superscience…
Not a single one that bore the name “civilization” avoided farming. There were no exceptions. Where in the world would you find a civilization that didn’t farm?
“Lord Sesaisa…?”
…….
“……”
That was why he had implanted the concept of agriculture into him.
“Whoa…”
Whether they used swords, magic, guns, or superhumans who could collapse castle walls alone, the method didn’t matter. Just as occupying the enemy capital with infantry won the war, to fundamentally destroy a civilization you only needed to cut the opponent’s agricultural output by exactly 50% and then exhaust all their stored food.
The goal was one, but there were dozens of ways to achieve it. Mobilizing weeds, occupying land with monsters, massacring population with epidemics—anything that lowered food production worked.
Then the stored food could be spoiled and depleted by rats, cockroaches, bacteria, and every other means.
Cultivating life forms for exactly that purpose and starving the opponent to death was the “main plan” of the anti-intellectualism build.
“W-woaaaaah…”
That was why monsters still had to be raised. Not to destroy civilization directly. Those creatures were tanks—in other words, bait.
While the opponent focused on the impressive and terrifying monsters that stormed cities and slaughtered civilians, Biin would fill the enemy’s fields, forests, lakes, and seas with useless, inedible, yet extremely survival-specialized trashy desserts.
The dessert apocalypse did not begin when the monsters started their massacre. It began the moment the opponent became so distracted by the monsters that they failed to notice the year’s harvest and stored grain counts.
“It’s ironic that the name makes it sound like you’d never go hungry…”
Wait, would it be better to call it Affogatolypse?
“The name doesn’t really matter…”