“...A familiar ceiling.”
When I came to.
It was a ceiling I’d seen so many times it felt familiar.
‘The infirmary.’
I turned my head.
“...I thought this last time too, but, Sergeant Shin—do you have a habit of talking to yourself when you wake up?”
“...”
Had he been nursing me?
Private Sa Eijun had heard my muttering as-is.
‘Dammit... why is this kid so diligent.’
When a patient’s asleep, most people just go “eh, fine,” and sneak in a little side task.
But he’d kept diligently checking his patient’s status.
So he’d happened to be there every time I woke.
This was already the second time I’d been caught talking to myself.
Utterly mortifying.
“Ahem...”
Anyway!
“I must’ve looked like hell... Sorry for the trouble. You’ve had a rough time too, huh.”
“Haha. This is my job, so no need to say rough. The one who really had it rough was Corporal Jeon.”
Huh?
Why is Gwangil showing up here?
“It was Corporal Jeon who carried you in, Sergeant Shin—soaked in miasma.”
“Ah.”
“The miasma was so strong the protective suit half-melted, and his shoulder was no joke. Honestly, treating Corporal Jeon was trickier than treating you with that unidentified regeneration of yours...”
“...”
At that, I couldn’t help but knit my brows a little.
‘This deep-mine run was, for all intents and purposes, something I did on my own desire.’
And yet.
The result was that I’d ended up hurting Gwangil.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“C’mon. Knowing Corporal Jeon’s temperament, he probably liked it. He’ll be delighted thinking, ‘I got to help Sergeant Shin—best day ever.’”
“Even so.”
“His treatment wrapped cleanly and well too. So try not to worry too much.”
Private Sa Eijun said that, but.
In truth.
The guy had been assigned to the occupation unit for area control.
‘He’d swung by the fortress to grab a short rest, and without resting, even joined the fight.’
Hmm...
I should probably throw the combat unit a team dinner soon.
****
After I’d gotten my head on straight.
A short while later—
“Sergeant Shin!”
The squad leaders came by the ward.
When Private Sa Eijun tactfully cleared out of the room,
the squad leaders finally spoke to me.
“How to put it... Minjae, it feels like it’s been a while.”
“...The moment I got discharged from the ward, you ended up like this, so it’s not just your imagination.”
Sergeant Lee Minjae let out a helpless laugh at my greeting,
then folded his arms and sat in the chair by the bed.
“What on earth happened.”
Right after my joking greeting with Minjae,
Corporal Seo Suhyeok fixed me with a sharp gaze.
“We’d already confirmed Mana Stone extraction was feasible. We tossed one into the Mana Reservoir, and it went up by three.”
“Three, huh... We need to fill ten million.”
“It’s not a big number, sure, but it’s not small either. Even if it takes time, it means we’ve got a reliable method. Why push further from there—I can’t comprehend it.”
Corporal Seo Suhyeok’s point was sound.
Even if the mana yield from Mana Stones wasn’t as big as hoped, you could just mine more.
Even if the mine had already been heavily exploited, time invested would’ve been plenty helpful.
“Mm. It’s, how should I put this.”
So.
I scratched my head and answered, sheepish.
“Just... call it a hunch?”
“...Sergeant Shin. I did say I’d listen to everything you say, but this is—!”
“I know what you’re thinking! I do!”
From his perspective, it had to be absurd.
Once Mana Stone extraction became possible, the goal of filling Vimana’s mana was, to a degree, secured.
‘Then I suddenly floored it alone and dove way down.’
If I’d gone and come back fine, maybe.
But I returned half a corpse, and then I say—
—Why?
—Just a hunch, maybe?
—Heh.
‘If it were me, I’d want to sock me too. Damn it.’
Still—
Saying something like “[Divine Power] led me” and so on... that’s not exactly easy to trot out.
While I was struggling with how to explain—
“A hunch...”
Minjae carefully opened his mouth.
“It’s just my personal take, but we shouldn’t dismiss Youngjun’s hunch.”
“...Sir?”
Even I found that a bit odd.
Don’t dismiss my hunch?
“This punk Youngjun—whatever twists and turns there’ve been, he’s consistently made the choices that kept us alive in this world.”
“That’s... true.”
“Not every one of those choices had a neat reason behind it, but even so, most of the time the result proved him right.”
Arms folded,
Sergeant Lee Minjae studied my face closely.
“He says it’s a hunch... but I don’t think we should treat it like an ordinary hunch.”
“What do you mean...?”
“It might actually be a judgment with its own basis. He himself just doesn’t consciously recognize that basis, so he lumps it under ‘hunch’ as a vague label.”
Eyes narrowing, he stroked his chin.
“For survival in this world—the reason only his instincts know, hard to explain by old logic.”
“...”
Honestly, to me it sounded like—
‘What kind of crap is that.’
But—
“Hmm.”
Corporal Seo Suhyeok, hearing that,
rubbed his chin and seemed to sink into thought, then—
“That could indeed be the case.”
“Eh?”
He said that
and dipped his head toward me.
“I’m sorry. When you said it was a hunch, I mistook it for you approaching it lightly...”
“Oh? Uh—no, nothing to apologize for.”
I might not fully understand it myself,
but the gist was that my intuition wasn’t just intuition—
that it was a choice with its own survival-grounded rationale in this world.
‘Even so, isn’t that overrating me a bit too much...?’
It felt absurd to me,
but seeing them accept it so matter-of-factly,
I couldn’t help thinking maybe it really was like that.
‘What led me this time was... [Divine Power].’
In the end,
it was my intuition that decided I should follow that divine pull.
“So—did you get what you wanted?”
After settling Corporal Seo Suhyeok,
Minjae asked, in a curiously gentle tone.
‘...?’
The tenderness didn’t suit him and threw me for a second,
but I was the patient here.
Maybe it was just consideration for the injured.
It made me cringe a hair, but I should answer.
“Mm, not yet.”
“Hm?”
“Come to think of it—what did you even go through down there.”
I’d only just woken from a faint.
The soldiers still didn’t know the cause.
Well, it’s not something I need to hide.
I spoke up, a little more solemnly.
“That miasma spread through the depths.”
“Yes.”
“I went and met the cause.”
“...At last! But met... it? The cause is a person?”
“Right? So what was it, in the end?”
The powerful miasma filling the underground.
Its cause, in the end—
“Exactly as the status window said. Something that was once immeasurably great... After it died, a portion of its flesh was left behind.”
“Flesh?”
“Even if you call it flesh, it was enormous—but literally that. If you compare it to a human body, looked like the thigh.”
The god’s remains, lodged in the deepest place.
And—
“The thoughts its corpse exhaled... combined with the grudges of the other ones who couldn’t properly die down there, and that made the miasma.”
The remains kept exhaling
thoughts steeped in pain.
The squad leaders’ faces stiffened,
and Sergeant Lee Minjae carefully asked:
“Say we’ve identified the cause—what do we do about it?”
“...Right? That’s the question.”
Yeah.
We’d identified the cause.
All that remained was to resolve that cause... but.
The problem was—
no obvious method came to mind.
“Normally, this is where your cooking solves it, Sergeant.”
Gwangil tilted his head and asked:
“You said what’s down there is flesh, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then—”
Right.
“You can’t feed your cooking to it, can you.”
That’s the biggest issue.
‘What’s down there wasn’t even a complete corpse.’
A tiny fraction of flesh.
Not the head, but the thigh.
Meaning—
‘It has no mouth to eat with!’
I’ve solved most problems with cooking,
but when I couldn’t, it was precisely this case:
when the target couldn’t eat the food.
“Do we have to hunt it?”
“From the sound of it, it was an unimaginably strong being. It’s quiet now, but if we provoke it, who knows...”
With the cooking solution looking hard,
the squad leaders naturally angled toward a hunt.
But, how to say—
“Let’s leave a hunt as Plan B.”
“Sir?”
Nnng...
I pushed myself up in the bed,
and while pulling on my uniform, I said:
“There’s one method... I want to try.”
Whether it’ll work or not—
I honestly can’t say for sure.
But—
‘If what I saw described it right... there’s a chance.’
A method that just might resolve this
popped into my head.
****
“Engineers—anyone in?”
“Ah... Sergeant Shin!”
Where the engineers stayed.
I headed for the production district.
“We’re sorry... Sergeant Shin.”
“Hm? Why the sudden apology?”
The production-line soldiers who came out to meet me
apologized the moment they saw my face.
“We heard you overextended because our equipment came up short.”
“Ah.”
“The squad leaders said it wasn’t a severe injury, but... still, for someone of your level to get hurt—it’s got us worried.”
If the protective suit they’d made had been perfect, then in the end we could have gone all the way to the objective with everyone.
So—
they seemed to think I’d been hurt because they were lacking.
‘What are you sorry for over that.’
From the start,
the performance of the protective suit they made was incredible.
It’s just...
the cause of that miasma was far more extraordinary.
‘Even if it was just a handful of flesh... it was the corpse of a god.’
Even in hindsight, it gives me chills.
A god.
Other than what I’d seen in [Dasmur]’s memories,
this was my first time actually seeing one.
Until recently, it wasn’t even a concept I believed existed.
Sure, it’s probably a bit different from the absolute beings religion on Earth talks about,
but it was unquestionably transcendent.
‘Just in sheer weight felt—compared to that demon’s gaze not long ago, it made it look laughable...’
To demand they make a protective suit that can withstand miasma exhaled by something like that—
that’s an unreasonable ask from the outset.
“Your protective suit helped plenty. Nothing to be sorry about.”
“Even so...”
“Hey. If your senior says so, that’s that. Okay?”
“...Haha. Yes. We’ll take it that way.”
Once I’d smoothed over the apologetic mood,
“Come to think of it—why did you seek us out?”
“Ah.”
I brought up
the real reason I’d come.
“There’s something I want you to make.”
“Something you want us to make... If you mean upgrading the protective suit—sorry, but right now we—”
“No, no. Not that.”
“???”
If it were the protective suit I wanted, I wouldn’t have come to the engineers like this.
‘I could’ve just told Lee Sanga when she stopped by the ward.’
Gas masks are heavily within the engineers’ domain, sure,
but development of the protective suit itself falls overwhelmingly under the [Tailor], Lee Sanga.
The reason this wasn’t that was simple.
“Actually, I want to ask for something closer to your real specialty.”
“Our real specialty?”
Their class is Engineer.
And what Engineers specialize in is...
“Manufacturing and modification of war machines.”
Therefore,
what I was going to ask them for was already decided.
“I want you to make cannons and shells.”
“...Sir?”
“For the cannon, it needs a range of over twenty kilometers, and the important part is the shell...”
“J-just a moment.”
At my first-ever request to manufacture weapons,
Engineer Corporal Lee Gongu broke into a cold sweat and replied:
“Cannons with a range beyond twenty kilometers... it’s not that we can’t. Honestly speaking.”
When it came to making weapons, he was always all-in.
Engineer Corporal Lee Gongu’s eyes lit up.
“The tech you brought back from underground helped us more on the war-machine side than on anything to do with miasma.”
“Oh...”
“A cannon with that kind of range was doable even before the Apocalypse. If we modify the ones we have, we can easily—no, we can push beyond that range.”
As expected of our unit’s engineers.
My chest swelled with pride—when:
“What we want to ask is this.”
“Hm?”
“By asking us to make a cannon...”
A cannon request usually means one thing.
“You saw the cause of the miasma down there, right, Sergeant Shin.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re... planning to hunt it?”
“Eh?”
A cannon is a war machine.
If you’re using it, obviously that means combat—so [N O V E L I G H T] went the logic.
“Was the cause down there a monster, by any chance?”
“If so, hmm. We’ll have to pour on maximum firepower in case something that took a bombardment tries to climb up. But can we really hunt something that generated that much miasma...”
They seemed to think
the cause below was a monstrously powerful monster,
and that I intended to hunt it.
“Hell. Why wouldn’t we. If it won’t work, we make it work—that’s our job!”
“Right. With the tech we just gained, our firepower will be multiplied... No matter how strong the monster, if we slam maximum firepower into it, we can—!”
They started stoking each other up—
“No, what are you even talking about.”
“Sir?”
“We’re not hunting it.”
“...???”
“Maximum firepower—what a bloodthirsty thing to say.”
Why would we hunt that thing.
It was pathetic.
The engineers looked puzzled.
Be that as it may—
“When your senior’s talking, you listen to the end.”
“Ah.”
“The key isn’t the cannon. It’s the shell.”
I laid out for them
the shells essential to the operation I had in mind.
“Uh-huh... Those, we could make. It’s not impossible.”
“But we have no idea what they’re for. Where exactly are you going to use shells like that?”
“Hm? Isn’t it obvious.”
The flesh of what had once been a god, far below.
If the bad, emotional thought-stream it exhaled was making that miasma—
‘We’ll have to lift its mood.’
And if we’re talking about a way to do that...
What else is there.
‘I’m a chef.’
Naturally,
the solution is—
“I’m going to cook.”
What else would it be, if not cooking.
