To be facing a fourth collision meant ranking in the top 12.5%.
The structure of the game pushed capable people onward. Anyone truly incompetent would have exited at the third stage, which meant the players still standing in the fourth collision all possessed at least a baseline level of competence.
And Soon’s world had not challenged the worlds of [exiting players]. There were two main reasons for that.
First, the number of players who had exited was far lower than expected. Out of the 67 million players left, he had thought about a third would take the exit. Instead, there had only been a hundred thousand.
And unless one of those hundred thousand exit worlds was especially attractive, there was no point. Most of them were nothing but feeble worlds, nearly depopulated after repeated wars. Broken worlds that made it obvious why their owners had chosen to leave. Their terrain was a poor fit too.
So instead of challenging an exit world, they had chosen to face another player. Someone who, sensibly, would cooperate with their world. Whether the other side was good or evil, weak or strong, the first principle was still cooperation. That had been their standing policy.
But there were always irrational players in a game—players who liked fighting.
And the possibility of running into one of those irrational players still fell within the bounds of a reasonable scenario.
Which was why they had also prepared a reasonable response. Control over their creations through high <Politics>. Then, using the moderately raised <Technology> and the <Industry> generated by their population, they had built structures like palisades and earthen ramparts, so that if danger arose, the weak would first be evacuated inside, while the warrior class emerged to face the enemy in an orderly manner.
In other words, their settlements were effectively fortified, and they even had a class trained specifically for combat. And if you had fortifications and elite fighting troops, then even a real combat gap of three or four times could be overcome.
This was their territory, after all.
Even from that explanation alone, one could understand how systematic and excellent Soon’s response—and the structure of his world—really was.
Soon, and in truth the seven allied gods who were little different from his subordinates, all judged this response and the completed system to be thoroughly rational. They even accepted the way Soon behaved as though he were their leader, letting him wield his political power freely.
And yet.
Even Soon, who had prepared that thoroughly—
Had never once imagined a response to an enemy this irrational.
“Enemy sighted!”
The one shouting was a trained scout, a bipedal rabbit-like species among the eight tribes, assigned to reconnaissance because of its keen eyesight and swift feet.
An elite scout.
It did not panic at the enemy’s appearance. The enemy’s <Charm> was effectively close to zero, which made it dangerously easy to underestimate them, but those insane spiked little spheres had already skewered several people to death.
And now one of those spiked little spheres—a carnivorous dessert its creator had named [Camel-Eating Candy]—came rushing toward the rabbit scout. It seemed to have several leg-like appendages, and it was a little faster than expected.
Still, at that speed, it’s not impossible to evade—
The moment that thought crossed its mind, the Candy suddenly accelerated to nearly two and a half times the speed it had been running at.
That speed was a full seventy kilometers per hour. Not impossibly fast, of course. With enough reflexes, it could be dodged.
But the thing was thirty centimeters across. Nearly the size of a human head. The spikes and horn-like protrusions that tore and split flesh even on a graze actually flared outward when it charged, despite the increased air resistance.
And even so, it was still moving at seventy kilometers an hour.
Crunch!!!
It slammed half-directly into the scout’s chest. The Candy weighed only four kilograms. But given its shape and speed, the impact was little different from throwing a four-kilogram greatsword, dumbbell, or counterweight at seventy kilometers an hour…!
And so one precious elite soldier died.
“More are coming!”
Then around ten more Candies charged straight in. The rabbits used their leaping ability to roll, evade, and respond with the competence expected of elites.
After dodging one round of attacks and regaining their stance, they discovered something horrifying.
“What the…?”
The ones that had charged were all dying. No—more precisely, they seemed to still be alive. But only their mouths twitched weakly, or else they hung limp, as if every muscle in their bodies had gone slack.
The elites were able to infer the answer almost immediately.
“So these things are finished after one charge?”
“Looks like it.”
“They’re creatures built around killing the enemy in a single hit? What a horrible species.”
Then the response was actually pretty simple. Lure out the attack and dodge it.
That method spread quickly, and they were able to contain the first fifty or so Candies that came through the dimensional gate with only minimal losses. A few elites were injured through mistakes, but that was all.
The next day, the dimensional gate opened again, and another fifty Candies were deployed. Livestock died. Still, they wiped them all out.
The next day, the dimensional gate opened again, and another fifty Candies were deployed. Those things bounced around all over the place and failed to kill anyone.
They couldn’t find the bodies, though, and no one knew why.
And then the following day—the fourth day since the dimensional gate had first opened—by the time the Candies from the first wave had fed, budded, reproduced, and reached adulthood—
They had to face not only the fifty Candies that came pouring out of the gate, but another two hundred Candies that had reproduced on their own by feeding on water, grass, and rock.
“…Huh?”
The next day, after desperately dodging their charges and beating them to death, they found three hundred and fifty Candies roaming the world.
The livestock were being annihilated in droves. They desperately beat the Candies to death, but the larval Candies, the moment they were born, sprang away at terrifying speed and vanished. They hid inside corpses, dung piles, even fortified houses, gnawing little bits of meat, and even chewing bit by bit at the palisades themselves, devouring every form of organic matter they could find as they grew rapidly.
By the fourth day, all of their elites were already being used for nothing but hunting Candies.
And by their estimate, there were now around 2,300 Candies in the world.
“What the hell is this?!”
Physically dodging a charge was only possible when the Candies moved in groups of five or six.
When they gathered in packs of thirty and threw themselves in body-slams from every possible angle like an explosion, there was no luring them out and dodging anymore.
All they could do was run for their lives and somehow avoid the charges of those insane Candies.
“Everyone, shields up!”
“That’s right! Instead of dodging, the bigger tribes need to put on armor and take the hit! It won’t kill them even if they get struck!”
But once the number reached around 2,300, even that was no longer manageable.
You dodged a hundred and fled one direction, only for another hundred to come rushing in from the other side.
These deranged life-forms could eat rock, plants, animals, corpses, even feces—there was nothing they couldn’t consume—and they could survive in water too. Once they charged, they chewed apart anything nearby and immediately budded offspring. The offspring hid first, and then once they matured, reappeared and attempted suicidal charges at everything in sight.
Against those mad Candies, they were helpless.
“Call the shamans!”
The shamans tried to exterminate the enemy using the Mysticism spells they possessed. It worked rather well. The creatures seemed extremely vulnerable to magical damage. A blast of lightning would instantly roast them.
But there weren’t that many shamans. Every shaman with offensive spells joined the extermination effort, but at this world’s level, there was no way to stop the charge of hundreds of Candies.
“Reorganize formations by species! This is a divine revelation!”
Even so, resistance continued. They drafted new warriors by size, by combat role, by species. At minimum they armed them with wooden shields, then devised tactics: if a Candy appeared, lure out the charge first, roll aside in any direction, and before it could bud offspring, beat it to death with clubs.
It was fairly efficient.
But the casualties kept coming.
“E-even the civilians! Any able-bodied ones, come out and fight!”
Thankfully, thanks to their high <Politics>, they were able to conscript many people even under that order. The death toll kept rising, but the number of Candies was at least falling rapidly.
But every single day, every single day, that bastard kept dropping fifty more Candies into the world.
The Candies did not even need to eat people specifically, so they simply kept body-slamming every living thing in existence.
The only creatures that could survive at all were the beings here called membranebirds—creatures like some fusion of bat and bird. They alone could fly, and being light, they could evade the Candies’ charges.
And among the eight species of this world, not one possessed flight. Even the livestock were butchered without mercy, their corpses chewed apart.
This dessert apocalypse continued for ten days.
By then, survival was no longer the only concern.
“M-my lords? What are we supposed to do about this year’s farming? Those insane little spheres are roaming around everywhere.”
“…”
“O gods? Please answer us! What are we supposed to do?”
The eight gods tried every countermeasure they could think of. They spent divine power to grant Mysticism abilities to the untalented, healed the wounded, and strengthened the already strong even further.
But unlike the Protection Period, time flowed extremely slowly during the World Collision phase.
That meant divine power recovered very slowly as well.
Meanwhile, during the dimensional gate phase, the dimensional gate opened again and again with perfect regularity, every single day. They were struggling just to defend, unable even to think of attacking. The enemy, meanwhile, seemed to be spending all of its divine power on opening the gates.
And then, finally, the real tragedy began.
“The insane little spheres got into the village!”
Apparently one that had slipped through somehow had eaten food waste inside the settlement and reproduced. The ones that had multiplied so madly began massacring civilians inside the city.
Still, they couldn’t get over the palisades, so as long as they killed all of these, it would be fine—
The moment they thought that, the next wave of Candies was deployed. These smaller ones, only twenty centimeters in diameter, could leap nearly two meters, and though their impact was weaker, their faster charges could punch straight through a person’s abdomen.
“Meet them with the sturdier soldiers!”
Then the next deployment brought fifty-centimeter Candies. Heavier ones. Their charge topped out at only fifty kilometers per hour, but they weighed eight kilograms. Even the large species carrying shields had their bodies smashed apart under the sheer mass of the blows.
“O gods! What are we supposed to do with this?!”
“Show us a way!”
“We will obey everything you command!”
But there was no way.
At this point, trained soldiers, untrained civilians, even children were all trying to use quick movements to block the jellies’ charges as much as possible, burning every corpse, granting Mysticism recklessly, and wasting Authority in the process.
And in only thirty days, their world had become a land of Candies.
No matter where they went, insane Candies appeared and charged them. This year’s harvest was already doomed beyond question.
And it no longer looked like they would survive long enough to see the next year.
Even if we mobilize the military, we can’t kill them all. Mysticism can’t stop them either. The moment even one slips through, they multiply by dozens. We can’t farm, and the defensive walls are meaningless. They’re leaping over walls two and three meters high. Even if we mobilize every civilian, all that does is bring us up against the limit of what civilians can do in battle. At this rate, we’ll consume all the stored food and famine will break out. No—even if we killed every last one of them in a single day, the land is already so devastated we won’t survive this year.
And then Soon thought:
And even if by some lie we endure all this, we’re still only in the dimensional gate phase. Once the dimensional rift phase begins, that thing will come. That demon. That bubble-and-tentacle demon floating in the sky. If that thing comes, we can do nothing. So what do we do?
No matter how he thought about it, no answer came.
Darkness closed over Soon’s vision.