Chapter 385

Invasion (6)

A long time ago. So long ago I could barely remember it anymore.

A senior at college, or maybe a classmate, or a professor. Someone had said something like this once.

An assignment shows exactly how much time you put into it. The more care and sincerity you pour in, the higher the finished quality. No matter how smart you are, no matter how sharp your head, if you slap something together carelessly, the quality will inevitably suffer.

At the time, I think I found that kind of a cool thing to say. Whatever afterglow of that feeling still lingered in me carried a positive tint. Even now, in a world where AI could finish an assignment in an instant, in a world where monsters crawling out of nowhere had rendered the whole concept of "assignments" meaningless.

-Global casualties approaching one hundred thousand... humanity's "Day of Nightmares"

-What was the government doing while fifty thousand died... the blank "five hours"

-Ten thousand casualties worldwide... to those who say "the Association held the line well," can't you see the victims' tears?

-Five thousand sacrificed... we must remember them

-One thousand casualties, nine nations... while every other nation held the line beautifully, what went wrong here?

-One hundred deaths, one hundred stories... the Russian government remains "silent"

Regress, revise the plan. Find the variable, regress, revise the plan again. Inside that sickening loop, the death toll kept dropping, little by little, and that was exactly why I couldn't stop. When I could see with my own eyes that people's lives were being saved, there was no way I could quit here.

"I'll go here myself, and... send the remaining players to Paris. That'll make the bird-brain originally in Paris die faster, so who else had stamina to spare... could they reinforce Germany?"

If I had to compare it to a game, it felt something like shuffling my party members around over and over, save-scumming until it finally worked. The number of players I could trust worldwide was fixed, and I could see with my own eyes how casualties dropped the better I positioned them.

"Let's leave Russia for as late as possible. No casualties there for six hours... the real problem is India."

Right, didn't someone once say that the reason games are fun comes down to instant gratification? Maybe that was true after all. Repeated regression wore me down physically and mentally, exhausting in every sense, but at the same time, it carried a strange kind of joy. There was an exhilaration, a satisfaction, in reshaping a world that could have suffered massive damage into something better. A conviction that the road I was walking, even if it was paved over people's blood, was still the right one.

And so, as the casualty count dropped to a hundred, then fifty, then ten.

"...India really is the problem."

Even after several more regressions, I hit a plateau where the death toll refused to drop any further. It wasn't Russia, whose vast territory made positioning players difficult. It wasn't Hong Kong or Singapore, packed with people. It wasn't even the United States, where loose gun laws created endless civilian variables.

The two real problems were the Middle East and India.

India's issue started with how outdated the infrastructure was, and of all places, the monster had shown up dead center in a slum. Even mobilizing police to evacuate people didn't help much, because these people had nowhere to go, and nowhere would take them in. Even if some place could have, nobody wanted to. The country's deep-rooted caste discrimination showed its ugly face even in the middle of a national disaster.

Still, after half-threatening the Indian Prime Minister and leaning on Zetter to apply pressure, I managed to get the slum residents temporarily moved to a nearby empty plaza. That much succeeded. But...

"BWOOOOOOO!!!"

The monster that showed up there took the form of a giant elephant, and that became its own problem. Some idiots screamed about it being an incarnation of "the god Ganesha" and tried to stop anyone from killing it. Others suddenly dropped into prayer and got trampled to death. Even the police, faced with this majestic elephant deity for the first time, couldn't hold the line. Even India's strongest S-grade player refused to kill the "sacred elephant," too worried about his political standing and public opinion.

In the original history, Zetter and the other strong players had eventually been sent to India after things settled elsewhere, but by the time they arrived, an enormous number of people had already died in the process. Not a direction I wanted things to go.

On top of that, the elephant thing was absurdly tough, so even when I tried to handle it myself, it dragged on. And dragging on meant more time for India's uncontrollable crowds to do something reckless. To end it in an instant, I'd probably need to properly invoke the Hero trait, but that came with political and social fallout I really didn't want to deal with.

"What do I do..."

After repeating the regression cycle several times trying to take down India's elephant, I reached the conclusion that minimizing damage was possible, but eliminating all human casualties completely wasn't.

"Ah?"

Then it hit me. I'd been trapped in one fixed assumption this whole time. I didn't have to solve everything myself. By that same logic, Indians didn't have to be the ones to deal with India's monster. Zetter and Choi Ji-won themselves were already flying all over the world handling nasty monsters wherever they showed up.

By that same reasoning, couldn't I just send the right person for the job?

"I need a favor."

"...Fine. Leave Korea in my hands."

And so Kang Chan, guild master of Steel Guild, urgently flew out to India. Just as I'd asked, he loitered near the slums and, with his signature punch, literally exploded the elephant's head. No god, no divinity, none of that. Just one punch.

-The Korean who saved India... who is he?

-India's "One Punch Man," identity revealed as Korean?!?!

-America stunned, China trembling... [Read more]

In exchange, I handled Korea's tiger while Kang Chan racked up fame. He looked a little sour about the arrangement, but everything worked out in the end, so I figured that counted as good enough.

Next up was the Middle East. This one had its own headache, since the octopus-shaped monster happened to appear near a border region tangled up in territorial disputes between multiple countries.

This thing wasn't much for raw destructive power, but it produced powerful hallucinations and could even mentally hijack soldiers, turning them against each other. With this happening right along a border, past cycles had actually seen it escalate into real wars more than once.

Its body itself was soft enough that killing it the moment it appeared wasn't hard, but the real problem was the psychic wave it let out when it died.

In its final moment, gripped by terror, the thing let loose a hallucination that drove every nearby soldier insane, and that naturally turned into casualties. I tried as hard as I could to pull people away from the border area, but with tensions already running hot, there was no way anyone would listen. Pressure through Michael Zetter didn't help. Even going straight to the leaders themselves and pleading my case only got me "there's nothing we can do" as an answer.

Couldn't pull people out, couldn't just kill the thing outright. A genuine headache, in every sense. But just like with Kang Chan, I realized there was a new option available.

"I need you to shine here."

Japan's little troll with the concealment ability, the Grim Reaper. Instead of wasting his time on nonsense in the real world, he'd been diligently climbing the Tower and leveling up hard, which meant he could now approach the octopus monster without ever being noticed.

-Shk!

"Rest easy."

He kept it from ever sensing its own death, right up until the moment it died, and destroyed its core without a single casualty. A total victory of tactics.

Either way, after countless regressions and endless trial and error, I finally managed to make sure nobody died anywhere in the world. Nobody forced me to do this. Nobody but Choi Ji-won even knew how brutal the process had been. The rest of the world would probably chalk it up to something as dry as "well, the players earned their keep this time."

Still, I'd earned the right to pat myself on the back and call it a truly great success. That much, I could allow myself.

"I won..."

In my empty penthouse, I quietly declared victory. Yeah, I won. Me, the man who never loses forever, had finally claimed a win. I'd pulled through. I'd completely blocked the monsters' assault.

Of course, this didn't mean monsters would stop showing up from now on. They'd keep appearing on Earth, steadily, and I'd have to take proper action every time. But what mattered was that I'd blocked it, right now, at least for the moment. What mattered was that I'd taken a perfect first step.

And if there was one bone-deep lesson I took away from this whole process, it was this.

"...Politics is hard."

Satisfying everyone was, quite literally, close to impossible.

"My son... my son is dead..."

"Mom, mom, no... I never even got to spoil you yet... Mom..."

"Please, please do something... please... my little brother is dying right now..."

People died. The ones left behind wept and howled. Watching them, I always steadied my resolve. I told myself I wouldn't make the same mistake twice, that next time I'd save everyone, that they should trust me. I repeated it to myself, then detonated the mana in my body and regressed again.

But shockingly, even when nobody died at all, there were still plenty of problems.

"My house, my house is gone... and the debt on it..."

"You're saying insurance won't even cover this? That it doesn't qualify as an existing natural disaster... what am I supposed to do now?"

"Aaah... aaaaugh..."

The world was still groaning. The wailing had only gotten a little quieter. The monster invasion had left deep scars across Earth. Telling someone thrashing in misery, "you could have been far worse off, and I'm the one who stopped that," wasn't going to land with anyone.

So what was I supposed to do here. Was it even possible to block every single monster with zero property damage across the board?

Possible... probably. It was probably possible. If I poured in enough time and effort, maybe someday I really could pull it off.

But flip that around, and it just meant I'd have to pour in an enormous amount of time and effort.

"...Screw it."

My resolve to do this perfectly, since I was doing it anyway, shattered somewhere in the middle of this whole process. Satisfying everyone was impossible. So I'd choose the path that satisfied me instead. Let's be honest, the reason I was doing all of this in the first place was self-satisfaction. Not to guarantee everyone else's property and rights.

I'd talk to Michael Zetter separately and set up some minimal relief measures, but I couldn't protect everyone's homes and property too. That was society's job. I couldn't solve everything.

My goal had always been one and the same, then and now.

Stop people from dying unjustly.

And climb the Tower all the way to the top.

I'd just blocked the first real trial to hit Earth, so what was left now was.

"A month and a half, huh."

Waiting for the real catastrophe my own existence was going to cause.