The Military Chef of a Ruined World

Not a bad process,

but it wasn’t without issues.

‘While Production reads manuals and upgrades the Protective Set... the assault squad upstairs just twiddles its thumbs.’

Now,

we’d tuned it a little.

Around when we were wearing the No.4s for the assault,

by chance, the headcount needed for the push dropped a bit.

Fewer people needed meant extra suits on hand.

Result: we altered the pipeline.

Repeat ad infinitum.

Obviously—

‘it’s a punishing schedule.’

We’d cut rest to the bone,

a very busy tempo.

But

luckily it wasn’t a big problem.

As said—

the number of people needed for the push had dropped.

—It seems the passage keeps narrowing.

—We may need to reduce deployed personnel...

The spiral passage that curled along the outer wall

got narrower the deeper we drilled.

‘It’s called a mine, but... looks like this world’s mining method is quite different from what we know.’

Thinking on it,

the environment itself isn’t Earthlike to begin with.

“On Earth, once you dig this deep, you’d be smothered in extreme heat. But here—”

“The miasma intensifies, but the temperature doesn’t rise and the pressure doesn’t spike.”

“Right. Different world, different rules.”

And with a different world,

the environment and the mining method differ drastically.

‘It’s not like Earth, tunneling multiple galleries deeper and deeper.’

Like turning one gigantic drill,

they kept widening this huge shaft

and bored downward.

‘Even the mine’s shape ended up resembling a drill.’

Unlike the massive opening up top,

the deeper we went

the giant shaft pinched inward.

The passage shrank with it,

until it became an environment where large-scale fighting was impossible.

‘And... the deeper we go, the stronger the monsters get.’

With fewer troops insertable to begin with,

the monsters got stronger the deeper we went.

So the ordinary soldiers all returned to their primary duties.

Instead,

we picked only the elites remaining in the unit and rotated them through the assault.

With a smaller insertion headcount and a relay-style rotation,

the assault team’s fatigue dropped sharply.

If anything posed a problem,

it would’ve been Production—running that brutal grind with no rotations at all.

They should have been the ones to crack, and yet...

—You sure you all don’t need rest?

When I asked,

the Production soldiers answered like this:

—Sir? Sergeant Shin? What kind of nonsense is that?

—If you’ve got time for jokes, please hand over the next materials...!!!

They didn’t ask for rest—

they told me to stop wasting time and cough up another book.

—Okay, okay—calm down, you animals...

Grueling schedule or not,

Production was blinded by the manuals we kept bringing back.

They almost seemed more energized the longer it went on.

Anyway—

thanks to Production demanding we spin that cycle even faster, without any “rotations” for themselves,

our pace accelerated further.

To the point that—

“Sergeant Shin... were you seriously doing all this while we were on occupation ops?”

“Aren’t you here on leave? You could rest a bit.”

“After seeing with my own eyes that you’re hard at work even inside the fortress, how could I rest!”

“...Uh—right.”

A soldier who’d been focused on occupation ops with most of the others—

Corporal Jeon Gwangil—joined in.

“That underground—visibility’s terrible, so I can’t say I like it...”

Most squad-leader-grade elites still belonged to the occupation force,

but add in Corporal Seo Suhyeok—who already worked with the assault—

and now, aside from Staff Sergeant Lee Minjae (out cold with the mages),

the absolute top tier of our soldiers

ended up committed to this assault team.

‘For a place that demands a small, elite push... we’ve got power to spare.’

Thus,

at a blistering pace,

we bored into that underground mine.

To find, somewhere in those depths,

the cause of this miasma.

****

As the mine assault proceeded,

we did have another gain.

“Sergeant Shin.”

After one bout against the slave-thralls ended,

while we were taking a short reset, Corporal Seo Suhyeok came to me.

“Take a look at this.”

“What’s...?”

In his hand—

a blue stone that shone with its own light.

[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]

[Mana Stone]

[A common stone that, for some reason, has begun to mutate as powerful mana lodged within it.]

[A mineral that holds a considerable amount of mana. A very valuable material usable for all purposes: cooking, magic, tech development, and more.]

“A Mana Stone?”

Our reason for assaulting this mine in the first place was to obtain the mana the Vimana demands.

In short,

this Mana Stone was the target.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Part of the wall got smashed in the fighting. I thought I saw something and went closer—this was in there.”

At his words, I looked around:

sure enough, a section of wall had been destroyed by the battle.

‘So the inner wall isn’t actually that hard?’

Meaning—

“If we strip that wall and start mining—”

“We might be able to extract Mana Stones.”

The catch...

“Even apart from the miasma, proper mining won’t be easy.”

“Right.”

We didn’t have many suits that could resist miasma.

We’d had very few fights against that kind of monster to begin with.

‘Fifty suits at most.’

Of those, fewer than twenty could resist at the deeper levels.

Trying to mine this whole place with that headcount—

too grueling, too dangerous.

‘In the end, the condition hasn’t changed.’

Only after we resolve this miasma

will full-on mining be feasible.

****

While we continued the push—

“...Hm?”

“Sergeant Shin? Something wrong?”

I

stopped on a strange impulse.

“No... nothing.”

“...?”

A feeling hard to describe—

a sense like instinct was warning me.

‘What is that?’

I tilted my head and looked down.

Something down there—

‘as if it were trying to pull me...’

No—

more precisely—

[Divine power of 8 activates.]

something inside me

was trying...

to drag me there.

“So you felt it too, Benefactor.”

“...Huh?”

While even I was bewildered by the sensation I couldn’t identify,

our unit’s martial arts instructor, who had set aside her main post to join the push,

“I pride myself on sharp senses, but... for you to notice before me.”

“?”

Miho spoke up.

Sniff, sniff—

even with a gas mask on,

she made a gesture like she was scenting the air.

“You felt it as well, Benefactor—the miasma has changed.”

...The miasma changed?

Miho here,

and Seohwan—waiting topside as the next rotation—

our unit’s two martial instructors

were Beastkin, not human.

‘By their own account, compared to life on Earth, their kind sits a bit closer to beasts than to humans...’

So—

call it a feral sense still alive inside them.

Their qi-sense was keen in a strange way.

Seohwan, for instance—

the moment he met me, he scented out the presence of Ariella and Kkamang to some extent.

“Instructor? Sergeant? What are you two talking about?”

“It’s best you all know. I can’t say from exactly how many meters up, but from somewhere mid-way down the rate of intensification spiked.”

“Sir!?”

That’s how keen their senses are—

Miho could feel it too.

“I suspect we’ll see resistance pierced much earlier than the surface technicians projected.”

At that,

the soldiers murmured with uneasy faces.

“Does that mean... the engineers’ math is wrong?”

“No. Rather—”

Miho looked around and said,

“this miasma itself feels fundamentally different from before.”

“...?”

“Not to boast, but since I manage the Heavenly Mountain Sect’s martial arts... I do know a bit about poison. What we had above, though quirky, was certainly corpse-born miasma.”

“And now it isn’t?”

“Yes. Similar to miasma, but certainly not corpse miasma.”

At that,

I widened my eyes and stared at the drifting wisps around us.

‘The miasma here used to be named... [Corpse Miasma of Those Who Could Not Properly Die].’

But now,

it was different.

[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]

[The Pain, Grief, and Resentment of One Who Could Not Properly Die]

“...So it’s real.”

Just as Miho said,

the miasma’s name had changed.

‘...Huh?’

No—

did it change name?

‘The word “miasma” dropped out?’

Judging by the Protective Set holding up to an extent,

it’s certainly something classified as “poison” or “miasma,” but...

“Why would the type change all of a sudden?”

“That I do not know. I wondered if you might know something, Benefactor...”

No.

Miho thought I’d sensed the change in the miasma—

‘Damn. I had no idea.’

If not for her words, I would’ve missed it entirely.

Anyway,

why the sudden shift...

‘Ah. Come to think of it—’

When I appraised [Corpse Miasma of Those Who Could Not Properly Die],

there was a System note embedded there.

[Because the resentments of multiple beings are mixed together, its essence is hard to discern; for ordinary lifeforms it bears toxicity strong enough to kill in an instant...]

“Hard to discern its essence.”

That phrasing—

‘Miasma is miasma, but the essence lies elsewhere... that’s what it sounded like.’

By contrast,

this new miasma we were facing—

[The Pain, Grief, and Resentment of One Who Could Not Properly Die]—was different.

[A very long time ago.]

[A once-great being met death for some reason.]

[Beings of high rank do not die easily even when slain.]

[Though it should by all rights have reached death, now—unable to die properly—]

[that once-great being has fallen into a miserable thing that does nothing but echo the pain, grief, hatred, and resentment it felt before dying.]

“...”

Only after reading that message

could I see it.

‘No matter how many monsters die, corpse miasma alone shouldn’t form this strong.’

Even if bodies piled in a sealed space could brew up a formidable miasma,

at the end of the day it’s ordinary corpse poison—no special technique.

Normally,

Prototype No.1 of the Protective Set should have been enough to block it.

‘The essence that was hard to discern.’

That is—

down below—some being that could not properly die.

Before it died, it felt

‘pain, grief... and resentment.’

I don’t know how lofty it was,

but the emotions it bled as it failed to die even in death

wreaked enormous influence around it.

The corpses and moving corpses littering this underground mine—

the corpse miasma spewing from their bodies,

in that miasma,

the slave-thralls who couldn’t properly die also kept venting their own pain—

concentrating and aging over time,

until it turned as vicious as it is now.

“I get the cause of the miasma well enough.”

But

that raises a question.

‘Why did I react to it?’

That sensation that hit me mid-assault,

something inside me...

‘Divine power.’

It definitely

felt like it was tugging me downward.

I frowned, thinking.

‘Why now?’

It’s warned me of external threats, let me do the impossible—

useful in many ways.

But for me, Divine power remains a stat whose identity I can’t fully grasp.

‘The stat has climbed a lot since before. Maybe that brought out another effect?’

Even so—

now it’s trying to lead me somewhere.

That in itself is absurd.

But why,

of all places,

is it guiding me there?

‘...No idea.’

I couldn’t know.

It’s called Divine power for a reason.

Maybe a miracle fired off, like Taejun’s.

If I had to interpret the sensation I could feel at all—

‘I get the feeling I have to see whatever is down there.’

Even so,

it was a very faint, tricky feeling.

“Whew...”

“Hm?”

Wasting time worrying about what I can’t know felt pointless,

so I dropped it.

Just then,

a few soldiers sighed.

“What’s wrong? Why the sudden sighs?”

“Ah, well...”

“If the miasma’s getting stronger, doesn’t that mean the assault difficulty goes up again from here?”

That the miasma intermingled with the monsters’ corpse miasma above

had gotten much stronger—

no matter how the engineers upgraded the Protective Set,

it meant we’d inevitably spend more time boring deeper.

“...The fighting’s getting harder, and this place is tougher than it looks.”

“Even now we’ve already pushed past ten kilometers.”

And that’s not even measuring along our spiral descent,

but a straight line from surface to here.

‘Humanity’s deepest borehole was around twelve kilometers, wasn’t it...?’

We’d somehow arrived

at a depth comparable to the deepest point humans ever reached.

And from here we had to go deeper.

And slow our pace.

Many soldiers grimaced—

but not all.

“It’s not all bad.”

“Huh?”

The one who’s usually more pessimistic than me—

Corporal Seo Suhyeok—spoke.

“Usually, miasma thickening like this... means we’re closer to the source.”

“Ah...!”

Corporal Seo leaned out,

peering down into the cavern below.

“Sergeant Shin. I should have reported sooner.”

“Hm?”

The best sniper we have,

with the sharpest eyes in the unit—

“It’s so... so far ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ and dark I can’t make it out clearly, but—”

his eyes went wide.

“Something... has started to come into view.”

To reach the source of this miasma—

now,

there wasn’t much left.