Bang!
“No way—does that mean you’ve gained an ability to restore communications......!”
“......Calm down.”
When I sprang up and drummed the table in excitement,
Minjae just looked up at me, unruffled.
“Even if you tell me to calm down......!”
“You know this too. ‘Restore communications perfectly’? That’s not an easy job.”
“That’s—”
......True.
Another region—
No, to be precise,
The thought that I might find out what happened to my family—
I must have gotten a bit too excited.
“Hoo.”
Getting worked up is useless.
I exhaled and sat back down.
“Right. If that were possible, you’d have told me already.”
“Regrettably, getting intel on other regions still seems hard. However.”
......However?
“I did find out why communications became impossible.”
“......What?”
At that,
I opened my eyes wide and looked at Minjae.
“You learned about the thing that’s blocking communications?”
I’ve never said this to anyone, but—
The entity that erased humanity’s communications network.
I had suspected that entity was the same malice that tried to wipe out military bases.
The one that tried to suppress humanity’s force of arms.
If it was that kind of thing, it could have blocked communications too.
But—
“No. I get what you’re guessing, but unfortunately, that’s the wrong answer.”
“The wrong answer?”
Going by Minjae’s words,
Apparently not that.
“To be honest, until recently I thought similarly to you.”
“But now you don’t?”
“That malice you’re imagining...... probably isn’t that knowledgeable about communications or Earth’s tech.”
It placed strong enemies where strong power gathered.
But there’s no guarantee those enemies were well-versed in human information.
“Communications failed for another reason.”
“Another reason?”
When I tilted my head in puzzlement,
He silently raised a hand toward the air—
And shifted his gaze there.
Staring at something, he spoke.
“Mana.”
“......Mana?”
In Sergeant Lee Minjae’s eyes as he looked at empty air,
There was something I couldn’t see—
But he clearly could.
“You said it yourself. Earth didn’t have mana originally.”
“I did.”
Which is why humans have little resistance to mana.
Eating a monster’s meat and becoming a monster—
That’s a phenomenon that happens from such exposure to mana.
“But after the monsters started appearing, mana emerged in this world. And the amount is very slight, but—”
“......?”
“It exists in the air...... without a doubt.”
Clench.
That hand—
Grasped something invisible.
“That mana is twisting radio waves.”
“......!”
“Right now I can see the flow of radio waves, Youngjun. And even the mana worming between them, collapsing the shape of the waves.”
Only then did I fully grasp
What Minjae was trying to say.
‘On Doomsday, mana first appeared in this world.’
That mana affected the flows of invisible energies,
Like the radio waves used for communications.
“Every kind of contact getting cut is because of that.”
Well.
With mana, there’s more unknown than known.
It wouldn’t be strange if it caused phenomena like this, but......
“No, but. What about wired networks......?”
“Even if it’s a wire, it’s the same. Once mana intrudes into it, the signal can’t be conveyed in its proper form.”
“What about electronic devices? If we supply electricity, they do turn on.”
“Raw electricity as simple energy and communications that must carry content inside it are different.”
Minjae pulled out the smartphone he’d charged last time.
Powering it on, he said:
“Like this. If the distance is short enough, device-to-device radio inside the unit is manageable.”
A smartphone also displays by shuttling data back and forth inside the device.
At that level, it’s passable.
He opened the phone app—
And dialed someone.
The result, of course:
[Can’t connect to network......]
“The farther it gets, the closer to 100% the odds that the wave collapses.”
“......So that’s what it was.”
Hearing it laid out—
It was an incredibly simple reason.
Mana was the cause.
Right.
An absurdly simple reason, but—
“There’s still no solution.”
Because by Minjae’s account,
To restore communications, mana across the entire world would have to disappear.
If not that—
We’d have to design an entirely new communications system
That accounts for mana-corrupted waveforms.
“......Maybe if civilization were intact.”
“Right. For now it’s impossible. Even if it were possible, it’d take forever.”
His saying there’s no way to revive communications—
That, I could fully accept.
“Ah, to be clear. I mean it’s impossible to restore them completely.”
“?”
But—
That wasn’t the end of what Minjae had to say.
“Restoring them imperfectly—I think that might be doable.”
“......What?”
“No, with high probability, it is doable.”
What was this now.
The person who just said radio revival is impossible was Minjae himself.
As I looked confused—
“I told you my new class is Mage of Waves.”
Minjae chuckled.
His class: Mage of Waves.
“As I said, radio that spreads far loses its shape under mana’s influence. But my class can interfere with radio, at least a little.”
“Which means—”
“If it’s just taking measures so radio won’t suffer interference from other mana, I think I can manage.”
Insane.
“You’re saying that’s possible?”
“Alone, of course not.”
Then—
—Scree.
The transparent serpent slipped from Minjae’s chest and circled his body.
[Salmo-neus, the Lightning-Eater]
Stroking that formless snake, Minjae said:
“With this guy, even fine-grained magic I couldn’t manage before becomes perfectly doable.”
“I see......”
“Unless there’s another case like me out there, receiving others’ transmissions would be hard. But...... sending transmissions from our side is more than possible.”
Maybe we can’t restore communications perfectly.
But one-way transmissions from us, at least, might be possible.
‘Hold on. If that’s true—’
The man standing before me—
Sergeant Lee Minjae is, right now,
The only person in this world
‘with the ability to send communications elsewhere.’
I may not be that smart,
But there’s one thing I can say for sure.
The value of such a person—
Would be beyond imagination.
“......My god.”
I gaped at that fact.
But the person in question,
Sergeant Lee Minjae, seemed unmoved by it.
“So...... about the favor I wanted to ask.”
Only then—
Did he get to the point.
Come to think of it—
He’d come to ask me a favor.
“After I realized I could send communications with this ability...... I spent a while thinking how to use it.”
That troubled look he’d had until recently—
It must have been about this.
“And the conclusion is what you’re going to ask me?”
“Yeah.”
On Minjae’s face as he said it—
There was a hint of tension.
“There’s a transmission I want to send to the world using this ability.”
“......It’s your ability. Can’t you just do it? Why the word ‘favor’?”
“There’s a reason.”
What came out of his mouth next—
Was something I could hardly believe came from Minjae.
“The transmission I want to send could cause major loss to the Legion.”
“......What?”
****
After my conversation with Minjae,
I left the Dining Hall and went to find the unit members waiting nearby.
But—
The troops were talking about something.
“What’s up?”
“Ah, Sergeant Shin.”
Wondering what it was,
I saw they were fussing over some machine.
“So, with the power restored, we brought in a bunch of machines.”
“Right.”
“This is a boiler too, they say. But we don’t know how to use it.”
“Ahh.”
Since these are things scraped together from here and there—
The types vary, and many are old.
For now, without a manual,
It’s hard to figure out how to use them.
“Well, we can ask the engineers about this later. So, what brings you?”
“Actually, I was wondering if you know any place nearby equipped to send a transmission.”
“Sir? Hmm. Not sure.”
At that,
The gathered troops thought a moment, then spoke up.
“In that case—don’t you mean a broadcast station?”
“KBB, MCC, SBB—places like that?”
“That’s too grand. In the provinces, there ought to be at least a radio station, right?”
“Well, Chuncheon’s a decent-sized city, isn’t it? Seems like it’d have at least one such station.”
“Ah. There used to be one.”
At that,
One soldier who’d joined us in Chuncheon muttered in the past tense.
He pulled a map from his jacket—
And pointed to a corner.
“It was here.”
“......Ah.”
The spot he indicated was the center of Chuncheon City.
More precisely—
Back when it was dungeonized,
The center where every building vanished.
“The place where that building stood is gone without a trace now.”
“Tsk.”
“There’s no way there isn’t one somewhere nearby. We just need to know where.”
In the past, this wouldn’t even be a dilemma,
But now it’s the kind of thing that makes every soldier rack their brains.
“In the old days, you’d just search ‘broadcast station’ on the internet and be done.”
“Right.”
Those boiler instructions they were groaning over earlier,
And this info too—
All of it would’ve been one quick internet search.
But now that every kind of communication is blocked—
In this world, even tiny pieces of information have become painfully hard to get.
......Heh.
“Hm? Why are you laughing, sir?”
“No, it’s nothing.”
In an age where a single scrap of information is precious—
Thinking of that made me laugh under my breath.
‘It just hit me how absurd the thing I’m about to do is.’
It popped back into my head, that’s all.
“Well, if there’s nothing nearby, it can’t be helped.”
If I could call it “fortunate”—
There was a place I knew that could transmit radio.
“Can you gather some troops? Include engineers and medics.”
“Yes, sir. What are we doing, if I may ask?”
“It’s been a while—let’s go home.”
After the world collapsed,
There’s something I sometimes hear from survivors we meet.
Ordinary survivors—
Stories about how they lived.
Like with Jung Sua or Lee Sanga—
Many tried earnestly to carve out a way to live.
And yet—
Until they ran into us, they said they turned the radio dial every day.
Waiting for
A message of salvation from somewhere.
“We’re returning to the Ammunition Battalion.”
What they were waiting for was, from the government or—
A radio transmission from the military.
“Over there. The transmission gear was intact, right?”
****
The distance between Inje County and Chuncheon City is far from short.
Especially now, when most roads are wrecked and unusable.
Traveling long distances isn’t easy.
‘Good thing we secured the railway for a reason.’
The station and tracks that were under construction—
Because we secured those, even if it’s not like the past,
We can travel between the two cities fairly freely.
Food production by farming is especially active on the Inje County side.
Those harvests are being ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ supplied to us via this railway.
With supply runs back and forth that often, mopping up nearby monsters along the way,
The road toward Inje County itself had become quite clean.
Saving fuel meant walking, which was a pain—
But with an Awakened’s physical abilities, we could make decent time.
“Arrival!”
“It’s been a while here too. But...... huh?”
Thus—
It was the [Ammunition Battalion] of Inje County we were returning to after a while......
As the Ammunition Battalion came into view from afar,
What showed first was the huge wall the engineers had built.
And—
“......There.”
“Is that really the Ammunition Battalion we knew?”
Climbing that wall—
Were gigantic tree vines.
