The soldiers lying collapsed.
In truth.
If I tried to wake those soldiers up by myself, it would’ve been incredibly difficult.
‘[Special Sauce] is a power that touches emotions.’
It was an extremely powerful power, sure.
But it also had clear limits.
‘All it does is touch emotions. It’s not a power that can force action.’
People sunk into deep sleep.
There wasn’t an emotion strong enough to wake them from a state like that.
If I had to put it into words, it would have to be the direction First Lieutenant Kim took—shaking off regret on their own.
But it’s hard to sort out your heart with nothing but emotions gained from food.
Normally,
the best I could’ve done was feed them something in that direction and then beg, please, open your eyes—
but.
“Prepare yourselves, First Lieutenant Kim.”
Right now, it was different.
“......Loyalty.”
Because what I had here
wasn’t just me alone.
‘Here we go.’
I placed my hand over the completed dishes,
and muttered softly inside my head.
[Loaves and Fishes]
And then.
I felt the mana inside my body drain rapidly.
A dish made with everything I had.
Copying it more than a hundred times.
Of course the mana cost was massive, but—
[Lv.40 Combat Chef]
[Supreme Cooking Mastery]
My level had gone up.
And my level as a chef had become something on a completely different tier than before.
FZZZAT!
Even as the completed meals were placed on top of the soldiers’ bodies,
I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself at all.
“.......”
And then.
First Lieutenant Kim’s expression turned awkward as he stared at the food.
“That’s... how do I put it.”
The food I made was...... actually pretty familiar.
A kind of cooking I didn’t need to do anymore once my skills improved.
But.
For me, it was also the very first dish I ever learned.
And in times like this, it was a menu that boasted effects stronger than anything else.
“It looks like chow.”
“That’s right.”
Chow.
In other words—a military meal.
‘Those guys are sunk in an illusion the Matron made.’
Then.
I had to make them able to break out of that illusion.
To do that—
‘He said they have to decide for themselves to leave the illusion.’
That wasn’t easy.
To pull that off, two prerequisites had to be met.
First: they had to realize they were trapped inside an illusion right now.
Second: they had to be able to make the decision to crawl out of that sweetness-drenched illusion.
Even First Lieutenant Kim had only managed it because the effect of [Meeting Expectations] turned him into an absurd iron man.
A normal person, on their own, would never be able to leave that sweet illusion.
Yeah. Only—
on their own.
‘A dream where every regret can be erased.’
Then.
The way to escape that dream is actually simple.
“I just have to make you realize what reality is.”
I looked at the meals sitting atop the soldiers’ bodies and activated a skill.
[Forced Feeding]
The meals laid on top of them
soaked into their bodies.
‘Times I’ve fallen into a sweet but empty dream.......’
And.
Watching that, I thought.
‘Honestly, there were plenty of times I got dragged back to reality even without an attack like this.’
For example.
That was how it was when I first enlisted.
Until I got enough time under my belt and managed to adapt to the unit...... every day was hell.
On the first night of boot camp, I fell asleep listening to the sniffles and sobs of the guys in the bunk beside me.
Yeah.
The one time I could forget those hardships was when I fell asleep.
In a dream, I could forget the brutal routine of the military and relive memories from civilian life again.
Literally.
A hollow, sweet dream.
And.
What brought people sunk in that sweet dream back to reality
was none other than—
“All personnel...!”
The thing you’d hear at morning—
“REVEILLE!!!”
That unbearably loud,
wake-up call.
[Hero-Grade Chef’s Hearty Military Set Meal ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) of Deep Loyalty]
The chow they’d just eaten
was a dish with a verified effect—one I’d experienced myself.
And on top of that—
“YOU STILL NOT UP!!!”
A man who, thanks to the effect of [Meeting Expectations], had become a commander stronger than anything—
First Lieutenant Kim’s order roared through the air.
Then.
“Ugh...... ngh.”
“This taste is.......”
“It’s good....... It’s good, but.......”
From the mouths of the guys who’d been drunk on a sweet dream,
pained groans began to leak out.
With skills like this, the higher your stats, the stronger your resistance—
but even I, with the highest stats in the unit, couldn’t withstand those two combined.
Just to carry out that order, I’d even partially grasped how to use divine power—something I couldn’t properly use on my own before.
‘Even as a Sergeant, I’m working like a dog in this condition. What, you think you get to sleep?’
That was how it had been for me.
So for the other unit members, the result was obvious.
“Ugh.”
They—
realized that the sweet dream they were experiencing wasn’t reality.
“Ah... morning.”
In the end.
They were soldiers who belonged to the Legion, and they had to work like dogs.
“......Tch. Yeah, figures.”
“I was wondering why everything was going so impossibly well. So it was a dream.”
Now that they’d woken up,
they would understand.
*****
“Hoo.......”
Soldiers clutching their heads like their minds were drifting.
They were the ones who’d been sunk in a sweet dream until just a moment ago.
They’d woken up from that illusion all at once,
so the loss and emptiness that followed would be beyond imagination.
“I know you’re confused, but you need to get it together.”
But.
I didn’t have the leeway to comfort them.
I shouted at them.
“The sound coming from over there—do you hear it?”
“This sound is.......”
Whatever else it was,
these soldiers were elites even within the Legion.
“It’s battle noise.”
“Is this... the military again?”
“Yeah.”
Separate from the fact they’d been asleep until a moment ago,
the way they looked after coming to their senses was worthy of being called Legion elites.
“The enemy is coming to attack us. And that enemy is...... the Republic of Korea’s frontline units.”
“......You don’t mean us, right. I get it, more or less.”
“For now, we’ve managed to hold them off somehow. But we can’t hold them for long.”
At my words,
the soldiers calmly began picking up their weapons scattered on the floor.
“Then we’ll join up over there. Frontline units will be brutal, but with you, Sergeant—”
“No, no. Don’t go over there.”
“Pardon?”
What was coming down from the north
would be the frontline army itself from before the world ended.
“Even if you go, you can’t stop it.”
Even if over a hundred awakened joined in,
they still couldn’t stop it.
‘We did call for reinforcements, though.’
Those reinforcements should be coming from Gangwon,
but when you looked, the army was already coming down from the Gangwon direction.
Inside this supernatural ability the Matron created, it was questionable whether reinforcements could arrive properly at all.
“So the job is simple. Everyone, grab your tools.”
So.
My job was simple.
Not simple, exactly—more like it was what we’d been doing nonstop.
“We destroy this city, just like we’ve been doing.”
*****
KWA-BOOM!
“Sergeant Shin!”
“What!”
“We’re following the order, but!”
The soldiers continued the destruction
in line with my command.
“What on earth is the point of this!?”
But.
A few of them couldn’t hide their doubts as they muttered.
‘The point.’
I thought to myself at that question.
Even while Jang Youngwoong rewound time again and again,
I kept destroying this Seoul.
And of course—
‘I wasn’t doing it without thinking.’
When I first seriously doubted and investigated this Seoul,
there had been one strange point.
‘They seem obsessed with maintaining Seoul’s original form.’
A report one of the soldiers had handed me.
I understood that Jang Youngwoong had fought to survive in this Seoul.
I understood that he’d tried to endure that collapse as much as possible.
But.
‘For some reason, they were maintaining Seoul’s appearance from the past.’
Even though that appearance was extremely inefficient for surviving the end of the world.
There had even been times when that appearance was heavily destroyed due to battles.
But in the next repetition, it was restored cleanly.
If my estimate was right,
restoring it that thoroughly would take a tremendous amount of power.
And yet.
They insisted.
‘There has to be a reason.’
Probably,
Jang Youngwoong himself wasn’t even conscious of it.
Just like how he failed to notice his child wasn’t aging.
By the Matron—
he’d likely been manipulated so he couldn’t notice that maintaining Seoul’s original form was inefficient, either.
If that was the case,
then the being forcing Seoul’s original form to persist was the Matron.
‘Right now, the Matron is exerting power on this world through Jang Youngwoong as a medium. Then.’
After thinking about the reason,
I arrived at a single conclusion.
‘Even this Seoul scenery the Matron created was made through Jang Youngwoong.’
More precisely—
‘This scenery is the embodiment of the [ideal ending] Jang Youngwoong envisioned.’
That was why.
No matter how severe the destruction became,
the next repetition always reproduced a perfect version again.
And.
If that was the case—
‘If that perfect version collapses.’
I muttered while looking up at the sky.
The sky of Seoul, which had been intact, was filled with the fight between monsters and the army, and with black smoke and flames from our unit’s destruction.
It was a scene far from anything you’d call an ideal ending.
Maybe because of that—
CRACKLE.......
‘This scenery, too...... maybe it can’t be maintained anymore.’
Up in that sky,
distortions I’d seen before—
as if space itself had been torn open...... black holes were forming.
‘Those fractures.’
The first time I saw those fractures
was when we visited Yeouido.
And.
‘When that hole appeared over Yeouido, Jang Youngwoong had already broken out of the illusion and run several repetitions on this land.’
Jang Youngwoong was the medium through which the Matron exerted power.
But at the end of the day, he was an awakened in the level 30 range.
He wasn’t a perfect medium for the Matron’s power.
Which meant—
‘After repeating and consuming that power...... an error appeared in the next repetition.’
The result of that error
was that hole.
And.
‘This place is an illusion the Matron created.’
A layer laid over reality.
The embodiment of the ideal ending Jang Youngwoong imagined.
In that case—
that hole created by an error,
outside of it was probably—
‘Reality.’
As the scenery of the ideal ending Jang Youngwoong dreamed of began to crumble,
the wall between reality and illusion
started to collapse.
“Keep destroying it!”
After we’d carried out destruction again and again, and after it had been forcibly restored again and again,
Jang Youngwoong’s power would have been heavily drained.
In fact.
When he spoke to us, Jang Youngwoong’s face had looked haggard.
Even then, his power was probably close to its limit.
“Just a little more!”
The Matron kept restoring this scenery.
But that, too, wouldn’t last much longer.
Soon—
if we smashed this entire illusion,
we’d be able to escape toward the reality outside it—
-......Master.
As I was thinking that,
countless presences flowed into my shadow.
Feeling them, I said with a bitter smile.
“Can’t you hold anymore?”
-......I’m sorry.
And.
I stared blankly up at the sky.
Far off, still faint—
-Has our time...... come to an end?
Red sunlight
was slowly rising.
‘The sun.’
There was a reason I’d shouted “reveille” when waking the soldiers.
Because the battle in this Seoul had dragged on,
it was already morning.
Night nobles are an extremely powerful kind.
But under sunlight, they have a powerful penalty that strips away most of that strength.
“The monsters are retreating!”
From far away,
a sound approached.
“Ghk......! I don’t know why they’re pulling back, but it’s good news for us!”
“Keep advancing!”
The people inside the illusion the Matron made.
In reality, they were probably Republic of Korea soldiers who had already died.
“Subjugate the rioters occupying Seoul!”
They—
to fulfill their duty of protecting the nation—
were coming toward us.
‘......Damn it.’
I looked at the fractures that had formed in the sky.
Compared to the beginning, there were countless more now.
“We’re so close.”
Proof that we were truly close
to dismantling this illusion completely.
But if those soldiers swarmed us—
against soldiers with that kind of numbers and equipment, even our unit members would have no choice but to focus on defense.
And even then, we wouldn’t last long before being annihilated.
Without accomplishing our goal.
Trampled to pieces by soldiers armored in duty—
and then forced to kneel under the Matron, who was exploiting that duty......
{Ah, I see.}
Right at the moment I was frowning at that thought—
{I was wondering why the holes suddenly increased...... hmm. What an interesting sight.}
Beyond the holes punched in the sky,
I saw an existence stick its head through and speak.
*****
The moment we destroyed the ideal scenery Jang Youngwoong had dreamed of,
fractures that began appearing little by little.
And.
{Hmm. What an interesting sight.}
Beyond those fractures.
A monster appeared.
‘That bastard is.......’
Staring at it, I muttered blankly.
“That bat monster bastard from back then.......”
{We meet again so soon, Legion Commander. Or—would it be more like it’s been quite a while for you, Legion Commander?}
The hole that had formed over Yeouido.
The countless monsters that had poured down from beyond that hole.
{It seems you’ve finally noticed the ominous nature of this place.}
The one that had commanded those monsters—
that grotesque eyeball monster.
{I’m glad my advice last time seems to have helped.}
The reason I’d been able to realize this space was an [Otherworld] created by the Matron
was because what that thing had said became a hint.
And then.
{Come to think of it, last time I ended up causing you trouble without meaning to.}
It scanned the space as a whole,
then gave a small nod.
{I wouldn’t call it an apology, but.......}
Those countless fractures that had formed in the sky.
From those fractures—
{I’ll offer you a bit of help.}
“What?”
-KRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK!!!!
Countless monsters
began to pour down.
