The Eighth World Collision - 7
The Gamchi poured through the dimensional passage in an endless, writhing swarm. They flew straight into the city in a relentless line, ripping civilians apart and devouring their flesh.
This was exactly what he had expected. So why had he believed it would never happen?
A trap within a trap. These were the tactics Wahando had taught him for when the opponent was definitely not an idiot.
Anyway, it was an emergency. The scene was reminiscent of a locust plague—if those locusts were raptors that tore people apart and ate them.
The Gamchi that poured out in insane numbers tracked the soldiers and military aurochs who had participated in the previous battle with terrifying precision. No matter how the prey hid, fled, or dodged, the creatures found them, tore them to shreds, and greedily ripped away their flesh.
“Damn it! I get it now. It’s the pollen. These bastards are obsessed with the stuff in reverse!”
Because of the nature of the scent, anyone who had come into contact with the army was marked as a target.
If it had simply been powerful monsters chasing them, they might have found a way to deal with it. But when bird-sized Gamchi descended by the hundreds from afar, pecked a farmer working in the fields into minced meat in a single second, devoured him, and flew off again, the civilians were too terrified to even step outside their homes.
The fortress city had long since lost air superiority. After all, they had sent most of their forces outside to recapture lost territory.
That didn’t mean they held air superiority outside either. There were simply too many. Even the mystics couldn’t handle them all.
Free terrain editing was meaningless. The creatures weren’t tracking “location”—they were following “scent.” No matter how much you reshaped the land, you couldn’t rebuild the city, the roads, or the people.
Not every movement had been done via teleportation. Since the army wasn’t confined to barracks, they had spread pollen everywhere they marched. And because the scent transferred through contact between people, even if faint, the entire city had become saturated with it over two years. The roads themselves had become trails of scent.
“Please! Just let us out of this city!”
“It’s even worse outside!”
“Then what the hell do you want us to do?! Are we just supposed to die here?!”
The chaos continued without end. The Lazy Sugar Lumps were left neglected. The Dark Rim spread across the territory, and the jellies that fed on Cream multiplied endlessly.
Almost every type of Gamchi and jelly in the Dessert Legion reacted, mercilessly ravaging the enemy world. On top of that, Sugar Lumps that wanted to hunt the Gamchi or sensed greater profit by following them intelligently joined the destruction.
“The devil birds have appeared!”
“Again?! They were quiet for a while!”
【KNEEL BEFORE ME!!!】
“The bubble demon keeps firing magic from the dimensional passage!”
“Oh god! What are we supposed to do now?! How do we deal with all of these things?!”
How would he know?
Ogolraeot had no countermeasures other than delegating military operations to his subordinate gods. All he could do was believe they would command well, then fight, kill, and eliminate the invading creatures.
Ogolraeot squeezed his eyes shut and could only pray that the situation would improve, that this insane army of demonic creatures would finally end, and that the enemy world’s forces would be completely exhausted.
In a way, he was like a king who stayed off the battlefield and prayed for his generals to do their jobs.
“Aaaaaah! I don’t want to die!”
Haina, who had crossed over as part of the vanguard, and the knight order that fought desperately with him were completely overwhelmed by the legion of monstrosities that filled their entire field of vision. They were annihilated.
It was a gruesome end. Not even a single bone fragment remained—only bloodstains. And even those were sucked up by passing jellies along with the dirt.
All because the “scent” had gotten on him while he lived. That was the only reason he died. He perished buried beneath the very jelly creatures he had cursed and loathed so deeply.
He had endured five whole years in the Dessert Desert, only to return to his home world and be killed by the Dessert Legion.
Haina wasn’t the only one. The soldiers stationed outside were also losing their minds under the relentless assault of the Dessert Legion.
The fleeing knights screamed, but there wasn’t enough holy power left to save them.
Birds were faster than aurochs. The magic knights riding them hurled fireballs behind them, but whether the flames were meant as threats or fired with full intent, the monstrosities ignored them and charged madly.
They pecked and bit at the aurochs and knights alike, tearing into living flesh and devouring them on the spot.
It was horrific. But they had to hold. Most of the numerous aurochs had died. The elite soldiers were gone too. Yet the conscripts still had some fight left. The mystics were growing stronger through repeated training. The surviving aurochs were just enough to maintain a cavalry force.
And so, in the second year of the Affogatolypse, Ogolraeot and his people miraculously endured the endless Dessert Legion offensive pouring through the dimensional passage.
“Hey. You actually blocked that?”
It was a miracle, or perhaps inevitable. Still, the resources they had stockpiled were enormous. Top-tier civilizations had the tenacity to endure even when it looked like they were about to collapse.
First, they discovered that the Dessert Legion creatures ate each other. They began grouping predators with predators. They used Dolgoon’s ability to detect Yogur-tosoth’s suspicious movements early and closed the space-time passage. They deployed large-scale magic that pulverized tens of thousands of clustered jellies at once.
They used terrain editing to drive enemies into kill zones perfect for the aurochs knight order’s charges, grinding them into paste. They took every possible measure to kill.
Biin’s continuous pollen deployment was eventually countered through mysticism. They created soap from blood and excrement that solidified the jelly-like bodies of the Dessert Legion, allowing people to wash away the scent.
Biin had succeeded in his brute-force strategy of pouring vast numbers of creatures into the enemy ecosystem to completely exhaust its capacity. But it was, quite literally, a brute-force strategy.
The tactics Wahando had taught him were extremely effective, but in the end, once the opponent dug in, Biin could only push with raw mass. Against an opponent who used wisdom, he was bound to be pushed back.
“The real top-tier players really are on another level. So what now?”
Biin, who had used Shuc-rimmurath’s power to restore the depleted ecosystem, had also consumed an absurd amount of Nectar. The lake was now filled with water that didn’t even taste like Nectar anymore. Yogur-tosoth, that massive eater, was complaining about being hungry.
Compared to right before the collision, Biin’s forces had been reduced by about half.
In contrast, Ogolraeot’s condition was truly disastrous.
A world that had once scored 1.8 million points had fallen to a quarter of its strength. Looking at the individual categories made it even worse.
The population had dropped to nearly one-tenth of what it was before the collision. In other words, even those who survived had lost nearly all their family, relatives, and friends.
The Military score was relatively high, but that only meant the military had grown disproportionately large compared to the remaining population. It had already exceeded the world’s food production capacity. They were surviving by eating the Dessert Legion.
Don’t even mention Industry. The food they could harvest now wouldn’t even cover next year’s military rations. Weeds had grown so thick that the land was completely overrun by invasive species, and there was no manpower left to clear them.
Technology and Mystery had held on only because many mystics had survived, but they were now used solely for military purposes.
Culture and Politics were better left unmentioned.
Faith, which had once exceeded 300,000 points, had lost the people’s trust in a way that made that number feel like a lie.
On top of that, they had lost most of their epic-grade and heroic entities. All the high-quality talents the civilization had painstakingly nurtured were gone.
The truly astonishing part was that even after being reduced to this near-annihilated state, the world was still objectively around Level 9. Among all players, Ogolraeot had still reached the upper half of the rankings.
The problem was Biin. Biin currently sat at around 890,000 points. While resource consumption had been severe, he had suffered almost no actual damage. That was obvious. Ogolraeot had only been beaten back by the swarming monstrosities and had never managed to push into the enemy world.
The infinite Nectar spring and the nutrients spreading from Creamland were already preparing the Dessert Legion’s second wave. And Ogolraeot clearly wouldn’t be able to withstand it.
He had lost.
“Lord Ogolraeot…!”
His subordinate gods urged him. There was no other choice now. It made his stomach churn, but there was nothing he could do. He had no chance of victory.
Ogolraeot spoke with a heavy heart.
“Haa… I surrender.”
He really didn’t want to do this, but the matchup had been terrible. If he had focused on quality rather than quantity and territorial expansion, would things have been different?
He didn’t know. In that case, someone else from the Mythology Alliance would have been chosen as the target. From the beginning, among the ones who had deliberately come after him, the one who coveted his abilities and was a good counter to him had specifically chosen him. That was why he lost.
That was all there was to it. Ogolraeot cursed himself for falling into the trap and submitted the surrender request.
…….
“?”
Ogolraeot submitted the surrender request again.
…….
“What? The fight’s already over, isn’t it?”
Just in case, he submitted a negotiation request.
Conversation request.
Surrender request again.
Surrender.
Conversation.
Surrender.
Negotiation.
Surrender.
Surrender!
SURRENDER!!
SURRENDER!!!
You have been blocked by Player ‘Biin’.
“Aaaaaaaaah?!”
Ogolraeot couldn’t understand what was happening. Why wouldn’t he accept the surrender? There wasn’t a single reason not to accept his surrender right now.
Ogolraeot, whose theme was rational management, always accepted surrenders no matter how much he hated the opponent. There was nothing to lose by accepting.
Wasn’t that obvious? If you didn’t accept surrenders, how could you possibly manage a vast world?
Even the opponents he had defeated had quite a few subordinate gods.
The only times surrender wasn’t accepted were when the opponent had suffered a disaster and couldn’t be taken in even if one wanted to, or when the opponent was simply too repulsive.
But he had only been one-sidedly beaten—what could possibly be so repulsive about him? He couldn’t even begin to understand the criteria that side used to select subordinate gods…
…….
Come to think of it, when he had visited Biin’s world last time, had he seen any subordinate gods?
No… Of course, he himself had no reason to introduce his own subordinate gods, so he had kept them working elsewhere, but now that he thought about it, he realized he hadn’t seen a single subordinate god from Biin, Sesaisa, Mihun, or Wahando.
“Huh?”
And another thing—before the collision, had the enemy world’s subordinate gods even been listed? He had known his opponent was Biin and hadn’t paid much attention to the matchup details, but… now that he thought about it, he didn’t think they had been listed.
“Huuuh?”
Ogolraeot’s vision gradually began to blur.