Yogur-tosoth was strong. The problem was that it was too strong.
At its current size, Yogur-tosoth couldn’t cross a dimensional gate, or even a dimensional passage. Only a dimensional rift, where the movement restrictions between the two worlds disappeared, could let it advance into the enemy world. That moment was the only timing when I could send Yogur-tosoth forward.
Looked at that way, there had been hope no matter who I ended up facing. Because the dimensional rift didn’t open until at least halfway through the collision.
So until Yogur-tosoth appeared, the plan was simple: raise as much military strength as possible, somehow kill Yogur-tosoth when it finally showed up, then push into my ecosystem, exterminate everything, beat Abhojuth to death, seize the 《Nectar Spring》, and claim victory.
From the fourth game onward, if you had a decent military and put in a few years of effort, that insane extermination campaign to clear every Jelly out of a Nectar Spring was at least possible. The enemy’s score hadn’t looked low, either. They’d built an impressive civilization.
The problem was that I had never intended to let things reach that stage.
The dimensional gate phase. I had planned to reduce the enemy civilization to scorched earth right there.
Every time I got a chance to open a dimensional gate, I kept pouring in Camel-Eating Candy and subspecies that had evolved differently depending on the size of their prey. The Candies deployed into the enemy world sent me information on the composition of the enemy ecosystem.
This opponent’s ecosystem was still a desert. But it had several rivers and oases. They seemed to have developed it with Divinity, and the desert, maybe eighty square kilometers across, looked surprisingly fertile.
No purely magical life-forms, but their magic level was fairly high. They seemed good at farming. Their world even had mountains. The rivers flowed down from them.
Could I connect those rivers to the Teimong River? No idea. What mattered was the mountains, plains, rivers, floodplains, oases, and everything else. They called it a desert, but it was really a wetland civilization that didn’t have to worry about water at all.
And, very unfortunately, the enemy world had extremely high <Politics>.
Why was that a problem? Because worlds with high <Politics> usually had distinct classes, and once classes were divided, “soldiers” and “civilians” were rigidly separated.
In other words, there was a soldier class with very high combat power, and a civilian class with high productive ability instead of combat ability.
Normally, that wasn’t a problem at all. But there was one case where it became a serious one.
Not when a war was fought across a sealed border, with castles or walls separating inside from outside. But when intruders had already gotten inside and it was effectively urban warfare, the civilians who lacked combat power got butchered.
Like now.
“Aaaagh!”
“Help me! Please, help me!”
The enemy world had eight tribes. Since there were eight players spamming me with <Conversation> requests right this second, they must have climbed this far without ever really fighting, just by stacking alliances.
And since none of them were magical beings—just flesh, or insect keratin, that sort of thing—they were being slaughtered.
The few dozen Candies I’d dropped the moment I opened the dimensional gate had already pulped the enemy scouts. After that, they tore into the corpses, reproduced, slipped into forests, oases, and wetlands, hunted every kind of living thing they could find, and body-slammed the farmers working the fields to death one by one.
If a player spent <Divinity>, they could stop dimensional gates from opening in specific regions, which let something like a front line form. But if you poured in enough divine power, you could open a huge number of gates, or force your way into regions the opponent had tried to block off.
I just dumped Candies like a maniac into areas the enemy hadn’t defended. Simply by mapping the enemy ecosystem and dropping the Candy variants best suited to the enemy species, I shattered their civilization.
Maybe I should listen in on what the civilians in the enemy world were saying.
“Oh, my lords! Those things are roaming around outside—how are we supposed to farm?!”
“Calm yourself! The shamans and warriors are trying to drive them back right now—”
“They’re moving around in packs of hundreds and eating every bit of meat and grass in sight! What kind of warriors are supposed to handle hundreds of those things?!”
Their absurdly high <Politics> hadn’t stopped infighting from breaking out. They were in full panic now.
No, maybe that made it even more impressive. There were eight tribes, and I still didn’t see any obvious ethnic conflict. Just how high was their <Politics>?
But no matter how perfectly a civilization could deploy its administrative capacity and military power, there was no answer to predators whose numbers exceeded the entire civilization’s military strength.
The enemy soldiers, to their credit, weren’t stupid. When the Candies charged, they blocked with shields, brought down maces, and developed an efficient strategy for killing them on the spot. They reorganized their elite formations, conscripted civilians, and had everyone hunting Candies.
And they were putting in magic as well, working hard to exterminate them. Too bad. The Candies I’d already sent in had started reproducing.
These carnivorous Candies were truly extreme suicide troops. Their lifespans were short, and once they launched a single body-slam, most of their muscles tore apart. After that, they could barely move properly, let alone launch a second one.
But then they tore apart the prey they’d killed and reproduced by budding. The baby Candies that emerged from a Candy with all its muscles shredded fed on both the parent and the prey the parent had killed, then grew.
After that, they fed on plants and sand while growing, and three days later, once they reached adulthood, the instant they sensed a large life-form on land through vibration and smell, they launched the final body-slam of their lives. They killed, reproduced, and repeated.
Against camels, their hunting success rate was 5%. If a hundred Candies slammed into a camel, ninety-five died without tearing off so much as a scrap of flesh, and the five that succeeded turned into a hundred and five.
They only needed to increase by five.
Next time, a hundred and five charged. After that, a hundred and ten. Then a hundred and fifteen. As long as that kept going, there would come a moment when every bit of organic matter in the desert had been torn apart and eaten by Candies.
So any ecosystem facing these Candies had to drive their hunting success rate below 5%, no matter what. If it stayed above 5%, things spiraled out of control.
And in this ecosystem, my Candies had a hunting success rate approaching 45% against civilians. Even against the warrior class, they were still hitting 15%.
At that point, it was over. Even if the enemy used its overwhelming <Politics>, mobilized its entire population, and turned civilians into makeshift warriors and mages to throw the whole civilization into Candy extermination, it was already too late. The civilization’s fields, oases, forests, and mountains had all become Candy territory.
Every head of livestock and every crop in existence had been eaten. Even the floodplains were turning into trash sand.
They had lost before the most vicious, most relentless predator of all—and to the strategy that had bred such a predator.
「The opposing player ‘Soon’ has requested <Surrender>.」
「The opposing player ‘Soon’ has requested <Surrender>.」
「The opposing player ‘Soon’ has requested <Surrender>...」
Blocked.
Seven of them spammed <Surrender> requests one after another, but I had no intention of accepting. Let them all become Candy feed.
“That’s a really bizarre thing to say. ‘Become Candy feed.’”
Still, the fight dragged on longer than I’d expected. Since surrender wasn’t being accepted, in the end they had no choice but to fight to the death.
Maybe it was the power of high <Politics>, but they resisted for a surprisingly long time. Honestly, though, I don’t know how that was meaningfully different from just generously buying the Candies more time to reproduce and terraform the ecosystem.
The enemy used every strategy, spell, cohesive instinct, Unique individuals, and even hero units born from the power of <Culture> to resist my Candies.
But they never managed to push the hunting success rate below 5%.
Actually, even if they had found some strategy that lowered it, it wouldn’t have mattered. By then, there were already thousands of Candies and additionally deployed Jellies swarming through the enemy ecosystem.
In the end, the enemy’s last village collapsed under the surging body-slamming charges of the Candies, and they died gloriously.
「You have won the World Collision against player ‘Soon’ and 7 other players.」
「Your world expands.」
The enemy ecosystem is fairly stable... Maybe I should introduce large predators that eat Candies and make it livable for camels. Rather than tampering with it too much, I’d rather use it as a stable hunting ground for breeding carnivorous Candies and the freshwater Dessert Legion.
“To annihilate the enemy world the moment the dimensional passage had only just opened... Your victories were already fast, but this is unbelievably fast.”
“They were way too complacent. If their military had been twice as strong, they could’ve at least put up a fight.”
“Wouldn’t they still have been trampled by Yogur-tosoth?”
“Ah... That’s a different issue.”
Honestly, Yogur-tosoth hadn’t done anything.
That was a more serious problem than I’d expected... And by “hadn’t done anything,” I meant it hadn’t gained any experience. It wasn’t growing.
But Yogur-tosoth still ate just as much as ever. It devoured an obscene fucking amount of Nectar, which was the most important resource in my ecosystem.
On top of that, it even ate Mana itself. In other words, it was a dead weight that cost a fortune to maintain, had no real opportunity to be used, and couldn’t even be disposed of.
Normally, something like that would atrophy in nature. Stop wasting that energy and raise some other life-form instead.
“Wow. Cold.”
No, just an objective evaluation. Fortunately, Legendary Creations didn’t atrophy. Still, it was a shame.
“Why?”
“Because I thought this game was a one-on-one duel, so I rushed Yogur-tosoth into existence by spending 2,000 Points. If I’d known from the beginning that the environment worked like this, I might have skipped making a life-form like Yogur-tosoth—which I didn’t immediately need—and just made a whole lot more vicious Candies instead.”
“Hm.”
“Thankfully, Yogur-tosoth is also useful for regulating the ecosystem through artificially changing the climate and terrain with magic, so it’s not like it totally fails to earn its keep... But still, it’s supposed to be the ultimate weapon. If I can’t actually use that ultimate weapon, that’s disappointing.”
After saying that, I looked at the Angel.
Meaning: Hand over the victory reward.
But the Angel smiled.
“Lord of Mass Extinction.”
“How long are you going to keep calling me that? Call me Nonhuman.”
“No, I have to follow orders. Nonhuman. You’ve just won the fourth collision.”
“Wait a second. There’s another event?”
“Yes.”
“What is it with this game and constant events?”
“There really is an event every single time. If you’d like, they’re all fixed events, so I can explain all of them in advance.”
“Damn it. Tell me all of them later in one go. For now, explain the event tied to the fourth victory.”
The Angel beamed and started explaining.
“Every fourth collision is a shop interval. Instead of choosing one of three recommended Traits, you can spend Points and buy whatever Trait you want.”
Something ridiculous had just come out.
“You told me at the start that buying Traits wasn’t possible.”
“That explanation concerned the Community functions.”
Ah. Right. Fine.
“If you want, I can explain everything immediately.”
“Later. So what exactly is a shop interval?”
“In every shop interval, which occurs every fourth collision, you may pay Points to purchase any Trait from among the seven grades—common, superior, extraordinary, heroic, epic, legendary, and mythic. You may only buy one, and you must buy one. If you cannot make a purchase, you must instead buy a ‘penalty’ Trait.”
“Hold on... Then what does that mean? If I can pay the Points, can I buy a mythic-grade Trait right now?”
“Yes!”
How many Points did I have right now? 54,345. That was a lot. I’d taken almost no damage, I’d already had a large reserve, and I also had the Points I’d gotten from Sesaisa.
Then this was where I needed to buy a mythic-grade Trait—
“For reference, pricing treats common as –2 levels, superior as –1 level, extraordinary as +0 levels, and so on. After applying that adjustment to the current base level, the cost is the minimum world score for that level.”
“Base level?”
“The number of world collisions your world has gone through.”
“...Ah. So because this is after the fourth collision, if I wanted to buy a mythic-grade Trait, that would count as +4 levels. In other words, I’d have to pay the minimum world score for a level 8 world?”
“That is correct. To be specific, if you wish to purchase a mythic-grade Trait right now, the cost would be 144,093 Points.”
You little—
Was this a joke?
My world was a level 5 world that was barely approaching level 6, and even that only put me at fifty-four thousand. A hundred and forty-four thousand was basically the game telling me not to buy it.
“That’s right. But looked at the other way, that means you can purchase an epic-grade Trait right now, since that’s only +2 levels. It costs just 32,675 Points. Most players would empty their entire fortune just to buy an extraordinary-grade Trait, so even that alone is an enormous advantage.”
I knew how strong high-grade Traits were in this game.
Yogur-tosoth itself was a legendary-grade Creation, wasn’t it? Sure, summoning it had consumed absurd resources, but nobody in their right mind would call it weak or useless.
“You were just saying it ought to atrophy.”
That didn’t matter. The point was, epic-grade would already be strong, but if possible, I wanted a legendary- or mythic-grade Trait.
“In that case, you can sell off the life-forms, culture, or technology that exist in your world. That’s what the Community function is there for.”
“Ah. So I don’t need to buy it right away?”
“That’s correct. You only need to make the purchase before the next World Collision. For reference, if you buy nothing, you’ll receive a random ‘penalty’ Trait, so at the very least you should think of a backup option.”
Even so, what was I supposed to sell from my world? The second my world’s strategy got exposed to other players, they’d develop countermeasures and it would collapse.
“That sounds like a personal problem, Nonhuman.”
Damn it. Wasn’t there any way to rake in a huge amount of Points?
“You could sell Yogur-tosoth.”
“Shut up.”
[Sesaisa: Nonhuman! If you’re not busy right now, could you take a quick look at my world? I just won, but it seems the oaks you planted for me can’t drink saltwater, so what am I supposed to do about that? I’ll pay you Points again like last time, so could I ask for some advice?]
That idiot tried to plant oaks on a shoreline? That biologically illiterate little—
Wait.
Hold on a second.
Advice?
“You’ve come up with something atrocious again.”
From this point on, I would be launching an ecosystem consulting business.
“That’s... at least comparatively normal, I suppose...”
Author’s Note
Thank you for the support, hbin1126 and Mangsinchang-i!