“What if we retake a military base... and use their equipment?”
To be honest,
this was the method we’d relied on every time our unit ran into trouble.
‘To fight stronger enemies, we use a military unit’s weapons... their firepower.’
We’d retaken an ammunition battalion to make use of the gunners’ firepower.
We’d assaulted a tank battalion to go after vampires.
Our Legion might be pretty strong now that the Awakeners’ power had grown,
but even so, the impact of military equipment was enormous.
Gear designed to withstand bullets and bombs didn’t break easily, even against most monsters—it was basically a moving barricade.
And the firepower that equipment unleashed was on par with that of a powerful mage.
‘These people’s Awakener levels aren’t that high yet. If they could make use of that kind of military hardware, their combat power would go up several times over.’
And conveniently enough, this old man Jo Beomseok had been a soldier.
So he had to know a thing or two about how to use that equipment.
“Haha... You can’t be serious.”
So yeah.
I’d thought it was a pretty good idea when I suggested it...
“But that’s impossible.”
“Sir?”
His response to my suggestion
was surprisingly firm.
“Is it really so impossible that you have to say it like that?”
“Of course it is. You think we never thought of that? I’m Jo Beomseok. I may not look it, but I was a soldier. The idea of retaking military bases? I thought about that a long time ago.”
Mm.
When he told me my suggestion was impossible, I sighed inwardly.
‘Well, I suppose it’s natural he’d think it’s too hard.’
Monsters that occupied military bases tended to be that much stronger.
But.
I was a little different.
“If you’re saying it’s hard to assault them, I can probably help.”
For all I looked like this, I was someone with multiple successful military-base assaults under my belt.
The stacking effect of [Absolute Palate] was sealed away, sure,
but I could still use [Environmental Assimilation].
‘I’d already managed to retake military bases plenty of times even before [Absolute Palate] got boosted.’
As long as you gathered intel on the enemy in advance and went in with a proper plan,
even relatively insufficient forces could claim victory.
That was something I’d already learned in Gangwon Province.
But...
“I think you’re misunderstanding something. That’s not the reason at all.”
“...Sir?”
“Mm. Maybe it’s better to show you than explain it. Come with me for a bit.”
With that,
Jo Beomseok started walking off somewhere.
“Ah! General, you’re here!”
“Mm. Open the Wall.”
“Where are you going, sir? We should prepare some troops...”
“We’re not going far. Just heading ‘next door.’”
“Ah, so that’s it.”
Before I knew it, we’d passed through Southern Branch’s Wall
and were heading out into the cold beyond.
“...Where exactly are you taking me?”
“It’s not somewhere strange, so don’t worry.”
I’ll admit, I was a bit startled when he said we were going outside the Wall.
But thankfully,
we didn’t go very far.
We stepped out through the Wall,
and walked through the blizzard for maybe fifteen minutes.
“That’s it.”
“What is?”
What appeared before us
was another massive Wall.
****
“...Seriously, just how many Walls did that Kim Jongdu guy build?”
“Haha, that fellow’s pretty diligent. He’s just using his Job Skills, and he gets paid quite handsomely for it. Every time a request came in, he built one. His group was able to become the Eastern Branch largely thanks to all the things they acquired doing that kind of work.”
The Wall stood not far from Southern Branch.
But unlike Southern’s Wall, this one was only slightly open at the gate.
There didn’t seem to be anyone maintaining it, much less living inside.
“...Whew.”
Even so, once we went inside,
just being out of the blizzard made it feel relatively comfortable.
“I mentioned it during the meeting, didn’t I? That we built them all over the place like mushrooms after rain, and some Walls ended up not getting used at all.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This place is one of those.”
I tilted my head and asked,
“This isn’t even near the southwest side, so why was it abandoned like this?”
“Oh, it’s nothing dramatic. As you saw for yourself, this place is really close to Southern Branch. At this distance, you start thinking, ‘Do we really need to be living separately?’ right?”
“Ah.”
Yeah, that made sense.
Not by Awakener standards—
even by ordinary people’s standards, it was only about a fifteen-minute walk away.
You couldn’t help but think, Do you really need two Walls this close together?
Just how many Walls had that architect guy built, anyway?
“In any case, the group that had been living here eventually got fully absorbed into our side. So all that was left was an empty Wall. Since it’s close enough to walk back and forth, we’ve basically been using it as a warehouse.”
“Huh...”
That was all well and good, but—
“So why did you bring me here?”
What I was really curious about
was why he’d gone out of his way to drag me to this place.
“I told you, didn’t I? It’s being used as a warehouse.”
“...?”
“Let me show you our warehouse.”
Inside the Wall
was a massive warehouse-type building.
“I imagine it’ll be something of a surprise.”
With a mischievous grin,
Jo Beomseok opened the door.
And when the scene inside revealed itself—
“...Holy shit.”
I couldn’t help it.
The words just slipped out.
“With all this power on hand...”
This place they used as a “warehouse.”
Inside it—
[Ingredient Identification (Enhanced)]
[Republic of Korea Army Main Battle Tank]
[Freshness: High]
“You were spouting nonsense about not having enough strength?”
was an enormous number of military hardware,
stored with meticulous care.
****
The huge warehouse safely housed within the Wall.
It was no ordinary logistics storage.
“As you can see, it’s a warehouse dedicated solely to military equipment.”
“...”
A gigantic armory,
packed with military gear.
‘...It’s on about the same level as what our unit invested to take down the vampires.’
There were military vehicles like two-and-a-half-ton trucks and Retona jeeps, of course.
But also armored vehicles and even tanks.
I couldn’t name them precisely as a mess hall soldier, but I could see what looked like artillery pieces too.
“Like I said, I was a soldier.”
“I heard.”
The first time I’d heard that, it honestly surprised me.
But he wasn’t active-duty; he was a former soldier.
And if you wanted to be strict about it, most men in the Republic of Korea were former soldiers.
So I’d just shrugged and moved on.
“At the same time, I’m someone who understands better than almost anyone how powerful a concentrated military unit can be.”
For Jo Beomseok himself,
this must have been something fairly meaningful.
“After I somehow managed to survive the early days of Doomsday, and succeeded in putting together a group of my own... I wondered how I should survive going forward.”
“Well, that’s something everyone wonders.”
“Haha, that’s true. But my answer to that question turned out a little different from most.”
Gently running his hand along the cold steel surfaces,
he began to speak, as if recalling the past.
“I came up with two directions.”
“Two?”
“One, lead my group and link up with a military unit. Even if it was just in name, I’d been a general. And I had my own connections in the military. I thought I could add our strength to theirs, and secure a position for myself there as well. But...”
He gave a bitter smile.
“I gave up on that after a certain point.”
I didn’t even have to ask the reason.
It must have taken some time,
but eventually, word that the military units had been wiped out would have spread to all the Awakeners.
“After that, the survival method I came up with was this.”
THUNK.
He tapped on the side of a massive two-and-a-half-ton truck.
“Rebuilding, somehow, the strength of the now-destroyed military.”
“...”
And that...
lined up quite a bit with the direction my own unit had been taking.
“That couldn’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t as hard as you’d think. Just like you, most men in this country have done their military service, or at least gone through the basic training process. Roughly speaking, if you just put equipment in their hands, they can serve as combat power.”
“That’s true.”
“If there are this many men with military knowledge, it’s not that hard to teach women and children who don’t have that knowledge either.”
From the manpower side of things,
the extinction of the soldiers wasn’t actually that big a problem.
It was tragic, sure.
But in terms of raw numbers, replacing the people who’d died wasn’t that hard.
“In that case, what becomes most important is...”
“The military equipment.”
“Exactly. Knowledge doesn’t mean much if you don’t have the equipment to use it on.”
Sitting down on a piece of gear nearby,
Jo Beomseok continued.
“From that point on, I started doing preliminary recon to retake military bases. I found that the stronger the military unit, the stronger the monsters that had appeared there. So I figured I’d have to start with weaker units and work my way up, one by one.”
“...”
“To be honest, it wasn’t easy. The monsters were so strong that no matter how I looked at it, I just didn’t see a way to crack them. I was about ready to give up when... luckily, I got an offer.”
“An offer?”
“Some old man shows up out of the blue and says this. That they were building a force capable of unifying the humans of Gyeonggi Province, and that I should join them.”
That would be
our dear Association Chair.
“There were a lot of voices saying we should refuse. Not to brag, but even back then our group was pretty strong. If we’d just added a few more Awakeners, we could have formed a stand-alone guild. To be blunt, we had no real need to go under someone else’s banner.”
“So what did you do? I heard that Chair fellow smashed in the heads of people who refused him.”
“Heh. Well, he didn’t go that far with me. I agreed with him that humanity needed to stand together... so as for unification? I figured, sure, we could do that. On one condition.”
The Chair was supposed to be absurdly strong.
And the people in his group had to be pretty powerful as well.
“When I attempted to retake a military base, that old man’s group would give me their full support.”
“...!”
“That’s when it started feeling doable.”
After that,
Jo Beomseok began in earnest to attack military bases.
“I knew it would be hard, but it was harder than I’d imagined. We took heavy losses. The stress from trying to find some way to make those assaults work was no joke.”
“...”
“But... it was worth it.”
He grinned.
“Long story short, we succeeded in retaking three military bases.”
“Three of them.”
These days, our guild had moved into full-scale occupation of Gangwon Province and had retaken more military units,
but before that, we’d only had the 423rd Battalion, the ammunition battalion, and the tank battalion.
They...
had succeeded in retaking the same number of bases we had back then.
“Don’t know if you’ve heard, but Southern Branch is rated the strongest of all the branches in terms of defense.”
“...Is that so?”
“Even with that architect fellow in Eastern Branch, we got that reputation thanks to this gear.”
I couldn’t quite hide my amazement.
“...You’re incredible.”
I’d thought he had some depth to him when he was drafting those plans earlier,
but I hadn’t expected this level.
“Come to think of it, I remember seeing Awakeners with guns at Northern Branch too,” I said.
“Mm. That part’s actually a bit of a regret... We don’t have any Awakeners who can produce food. So we ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ had to hand over guns and ammunition to other branches in exchange for food. Quite a lot of weapons ended up flowing out that way.”
“Yeah, that must have stung.”
“Still, what we sold off back then was only personal firearms. We kept all the real treasures here.”
Right.
So I understood that he’d gone to tremendous effort to retake those bases,
and that he’d acquired all this equipment in the process.
But that raised
one obvious question.
“Then why aren’t you using them? Why are they just sitting here gathering dust?”
With this much equipment on hand,
it would make a huge difference in how the operation played out.
For all we knew, with this gear backing him up, even that Association Chair’s operation
might have succeeded.
“It’s not that we haven’t used them at all.”
“Sir?”
At my question,
his expression turned a little darker.
“The artillery’s been working hard on top of Southern Branch’s Walls. Same with ammo and rifles. Our branch has a much higher proportion of firearm-based Jobs like [Shooter] than other branches. And as for the equipment here... Even though it’s just sitting now, during those assaults it did its fair share of work.”
“Then why... now...?”
“The problem was those assaults themselves.”
“...Sir?”
“It’s simple enough. Take a look.”
He walked over to the two-and-a-half-ton truck
and opened the fuel cap.
“...Ah.”
Only then
did I understand what he was getting at.
“You ran out of fuel.”
“...That’s how it turned out.”
Fuel.
“We did what we could, raiding gas stations and such to restock. But as you know, these military vehicles guzzle fuel like crazy. We brought them along when we went to retake other bases, and the fuel levels dropped fast.”
...Yeah, that was the same for us.
Our side had grown relatively rich in other resources,
but we were still short on fuel to run the equipment.
So we only brought out tanks and other armored forces for operations that really mattered.
“Obviously, we knew from the start that the fuel would run out quickly. To be honest... once we’d secured a certain level of firepower, the next target on our list was a supply unit.”
Of course.
They’d been fully aware of the fuel problem too.
“If things had gone according to plan, we would have retaken a supply unit around October, and used the fuel stored there to start deploying the equipment in earnest.”
It sounded like they’d even laid out a way to replenish that fuel.
“But you know how it is. Supply units tend to be located in relatively safe areas down south.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Gyeonggi’s supply units were no exception. All the ones we were aiming for were down in the south. Our plan was to hit them in October.”
“...Ah.”
October.
I’d heard about that month.
“While we were drafting the operation to retake a supply unit and mustering our forces... the weather suddenly turned brutally cold.”
“...”
That was when Gyeonggi’s climate had started turning into what it was now.
“The supply unit we were going after... was right near the [Source of the Cold].”
“...”
“All the other supply units were deep inside the [Demon Realm], so that one was the only one we had any realistic chance of taking.”
His voice stayed level as he spoke,
but when I glanced at his face—
“Man... the timing really was shit...”
this supposedly solid old man
looked like he might burst into tears at any moment.
‘He’s one hell of a guy.’
To have succeeded in retaking this many military bases.
Even with support from Central Branch,
it would’ve been impossible without near-perfect operations.
‘He must have poured in a ridiculous amount of effort and sweat to understand the enemy and figure out how to crack them.’
And that effort and sweat had borne real fruit.
They’d managed to reclaim this much gear.
But...
“When I look back on my life, it always seems to go like this. Just when I think things are finally going well... they get twisted at the very end.”
No one could have predicted it.
That sudden, freak shift in the weather.
And because of it,
all his plans had gone up in smoke.
“That’s why I said retaking military bases is pointless.”
“...I see.”
“We have more than enough equipment. Fuel is the only issue.”
Still,
for enough fuel to move this many military vehicles, you needed a place like a supply unit where it was all stored in one spot.
“And since that supply unit is near the [Source of the Cold], the idea of retaking it in order to assault the Source is just nonsense.”
“...”
“And if we tried retaking other bases just to steal whatever fuel they had stored, the losses would massively outweigh the gains.”
He shook his head.
“As much as it pains me, using military hardware as our main combat strength is impossible.”
“...”
“Sorry. You went out of your way to offer a suggestion.”
With that,
he turned his back and started toward the warehouse exit.
His shoulders, heading for the door, sagged,
and his footsteps felt oddly heavy.
‘...Hmm.’
Watching the bitter look on the old man’s back, I thought.
Yeah.
I roughly understood why he’d said retaking military bases was pointless.
He’d tried.
He’d pushed ahead, only to slam into a sudden wall.
From his point of view, it was only natural to say it was impossible.
“But, sir.”
“Mm?”
However.
“If you flip that around...”
I had a slightly different opinion
about that “seems impossible” part.
“Isn’t it basically saying that all we need is fuel?”
“What exactly are you trying to say?”
Maybe it was because he’d spent so long as a high-ranking officer,
but he seemed to have completely forgotten something.
“Well, then, let’s just go get some.”
“...”
When something won’t work,
you find a way to make it work.
Isn’t that what being a soldier is about?
