Whatever would become of far-future Japan, shouting, “I fail as a human, pass as a beast!” was beside the point.
What mattered now was immediate survival, and the joy that I alone had survived the hell roulette.
“You little... Yeah, you do look just barely more human than those human-failure bastards over there.”
“You lot are inferior too, but with bastards about a hundred times more inferior than you standing next to you, you suddenly look like angels!”
At a time like this, one needed to vent domestic discontent by mocking the bastards who had pressed the self-destruct button and blown themselves up.
The two East Asian countries that had added successful encounter cases for humanity smacked each other with a basketball-manga-style high five.
As two countries came together, they held their annual event: shouting, “You’re better than that moron,” while trashing the neighbor that exported coolies.
- Cooperation to be strengthened regarding the overflow of East Asian monsters... Korea-Japan reconciliation mood beginning...
- Analysis suggests concerns over the North Korean gate and fears of an invasion pouring into Hokkaido have overlapped...
Just as a rarely seen warm and friendly atmosphere began to bloom between the two countries.
“...Where’s next?”
“Damn it, please let it be our continent...”
Everyone’s attention began to focus on where the next one would be.
Of course, they had no choice but to be impatient, since the luck those two countries had obtained was no ordinary thing.
“Mm, so if we hand over materials engineering or related goods, you’ll give us food... Wait, food?! Did you say food?!”
“Woof!”
The world economy had effectively collapsed, and trade was no longer maintained at the level it once had been.
And for Japan, which had been battered by major earthquakes at every turn and had even had its position as a trade hub torn away,
a trade route had opened wide for one of the things it had secretly been most desperate for: staple food.
“...No, this is... the milling is rough, but... it’s a short-grain variety? Rice, it’s rice!! My God, Japan is saved!”
“Damn it, if we just take this and polish it, price stabilization is done for!!”
And on top of that, fitting their appearance, the Shiba beastmen ate rice as their staple food, though it was unpolished.
Even if they had given wheat or flour, Japan could have comforted itself by saying, “We can consume it as udon and soba.”
But now that such an absolutely perfect stage had been set, it would be close to political suicide for the current administration to miss this opportunity.
No matter how developed the neighboring country’s memes about digging into electronic rice online had become,
the original home of “Ooooh, rice, rice, rice,” represented by the rice exchange and the like, was still Japan.
The insanity of rice merchants, who had been active even during the Meiji Restoration, was still alive and well in modern society.
“Aw, damn it, so are you not going to eat rice?! We let you off with rice prices going up fourfold, so you’d better behave.”
‘...Those damn Japanese agricultural cooperative bastards, specializing in hoarding...’
In a future where the current dimensional gate incident had not happened, this was a demonic realm where things would not return to normal even if a minister-level figure stepped in.
Public sentiment had been savage thanks to those cursed bastards who profited by hoarding rice even in a national crisis.
But now, unlike the bastards from other countries, even if words did not get through, a trade route had opened where rice would pour in if they so much as gestured with their hands and feet.
Not a neighboring country that could grab and shake them by their food dependency if the administration changed,
but a neighboring country inside a dimensional gate, with whom they had begun exchanges for the first time in history “not through piracy, but through formal trade”!
“With steel of this quality, how much could you send us...? Huh? You’ll give us the same weight in rice¹?! Really?!”
No matter how much the price of iron ore had risen, if they could buy rice at this price, it was more than profitable enough.
The prime minister of the minority coalition party, who until then had been forced to bow his head and beg, “Please, release the supply...,” did not miss the opportunity.
“Ahh, it has been a long age of humiliation. Now you’ll get a taste of rice dumping from the dimensional gate.”
“W-wait?! Hold, hold on! Let me off just this once! Didn’t I even hand over the premiership to you after the coalition?”
“What a shame, considering how much you’d stockpiled! The rice you gathered up is surplus resources as of today! Get lost!”
After the previous ruling party had already stepped down, unable to resolve public dissatisfaction and security issues,
the bomb they had prepared, the “you’re no different either” frame, in order to somehow win back sovereignty,
exploded in its owner’s hands in a brilliant burst of flames before it could even be planted, thanks to the dazzling appearance of gate-produced rice.
The butterfly effect that instantly led to the bankruptcy of merchants and the politicians connected to them was a bonus!
“Even after we set the rice tariffs that high, it still didn’t work...!! Gaaah, the last remaining chance of extending the coalition—!!”
“Vanish, along with all the ugly memories of the past!”
Not long after, the prime minister who had normalized “Japan’s greatest luxury and staple food,”
- H-honestly, I don’t think there are any votes to give to bastards who played games with rice prices...
- What are you saying, commoner... no, citizen-citizen...
proudly used an early general election to legally cut away the obstacles that had been interfering and ordering him around all this time.
- 317 seats² + 33 seats... the greatest landslide victory in history! The LDP shogunate sinks!
- “A government that does not play games with food”... The slogan of a decapitation operation that gave them no time even to slit their bellies was powerful!
He successfully crossed the line for a unilateral constitutional amendment, no longer needing help from anyone else’s party.
It was too great a butterfly effect to say it had happened over something as simple as food.
In the far future, the storm within those butterfly wings, commonly called the “Hakumai Kakumei白米革命,” the White Rice Revolution, revealed itself.
***
Meanwhile, Korea had not obtained anything all that remarkable in terms of food itself.
At most, a few items that had been openly toyed with due to distribution and climate issues became cheaper.
“...So, to put it briefly... you’re saying you’ll give us an opportunity to develop resources?”
“That’s right. We don’t use them anyway... In exchange, we also intend to import the convenient products of your civilization.”
But in contrast, they had obtained the chance to gorge themselves until they burst on the food of industry.
These were trade conditions mixed with consideration from the long-eared intelligent beings, who had grown by strengthening themselves with energy to beat down their enemies rather than relying on the conveniences of civilization,
and therefore had had no need to consume large amounts of natural resources to protect themselves.
“Well... we’re allowing it on the premise that you minimize environmental pollution to some extent.”
“My goodness, even if we have to attach reduction technology, if resources can be delivered through a door right in front of us, it’s more than profitable enough!”
They would dig hard on-site, pay a fixed percentage, and the remaining goods would be transported intact to Korean factories.
The economies of scale in exports, which had suffered in proportion to the shrunken raw materials market, thus gradually began to revive.
Meanwhile, what Korea obtained was not limited to the materials it had already been using.
“This is oil we use in our town. Couldn’t this also be used in that automobile thing or whatever?”
“...Complete combustion... and no residue left after it burns?! Oh, dear damned ancestors, my God!”
There were rare but significant cases where items used in other dimensions provided new power to existing industries.
“Why do you need to burn something to produce energy? Just connect to the planetary energy link and draw from it...”
The intelligent beings, almost all of whom used the energy that formed the foundation of Earth’s “supernatural abilities,” each with their own names for it,
generously provided opportunities to redesign processes from scratch into more efficient ones,
as well as stopgap technologies that bought time to develop processes suited to Earth’s environment.
When one country started receiving this level of benefit in things to eat, and another in things to use,
“Damn it, I’m jealous, so jealous...!!”
“The Japanese bastards have half-abandoned Hokkaido, sure, but just how lucky are those Korean bastards?”
of course they had no choice but to receive everyone’s envy.
Garbage was pouring out of their doors, while all sorts of treasures were pouring out over there.
- Canada determines it effectively cannot defend the area above Fort Nelson³... “A retreat for the sake of counterattack”
- Australia effectively gives up operation to recapture Port Augusta... Falls back once more to Broken Hill³!
“If only we could at least scratch off a lottery ticket. But we can’t even stop the monster overflow, so what...”
“We’re barely holding on even now... Damn it, Australia has it nice. At least China is nearby.”
Regions with low populations relative to their land area, which could not even clear dimensional gates outside their core development zones, felt that even more keenly.
Well, that did not mean Korea or Japan were anywhere near being able to relax on the security front yet.
“If you win once, it isn’t easy to win again next time... I know. I do know.”
Far north in Gyeonggi-do, while companies were learning new technologies, mining resources, and building the future,
and just as the unit was being overturned yet again by the absurd tyranny of, “Mm, this is a safe zone, so we’ll leave it to the corporations! You people, move out,”
a piece of sad news flew to Gim Chomok, whose final leave before discharge had truly been right around the corner.
“...Get ready, Chomok. So you can go down right away.”
No matter how many people Korea had compared to its small land,
that was only true of the big cities or satellite cities; it did not mean there were no regions where the population dropped sharply.
And in those regions, homeland divisions were barely holding back the monsters that came bursting out right in front of the doors.
They lacked both quality and quantity to cover every case where they occasionally failed at security, or when monsters slipped out in the middle of battle.
“...Grandfather.”
For an elderly man living in a farming village of a small-to-mid-sized city with fewer than two hundred thousand people, change was a frightening thing.
After the gate incident, Gim Chomok had called and tried to persuade him to come into the safe city.
‘Chomok, this is the precious home and land where your father... and you too, grew up. How could I abandon it?’
The house that had raised the treasure left behind by that damned man who had torn up his father’s heart and disappeared was the old man’s greatest treasure.
He did not even know what had happened, but once that final meeting, which had passed in an instant and was now blurry in memory, ended,
“...You tried to protect the house. But in the end, nothing is left.”
only sorrow remained on the site of the house from his memories, destroyed when monsters rushed in.
Right beside the place where his father was buried, the coffin his grandfather had apparently been preparing at some point lay side by side.
“...I have returned. Unity.”
All that remained in the world was a twenty-two-year-old young man who had returned to his unit without being able to erase his gloom.
“...I’m sure he went to a good place.”
Even when he tried to force a smile at the words of the only friend he had in the unit, who patted his shoulder and told him to stay strong,
the young man, feeling only as if something was pressing down on him, spent a hollow period of loss.
“...Right. I’ll go on my final leave and try planning out my life from here on.”
He made a plan to finally use up all the leave he had accumulated at once.
Well, before that, he tried to settle things with one gamble.
“Could you just discharge me early for as many days as I have leave left? Just being here makes me depressed and sad.”
He made a proposal asking to be released from this hellish place as soon as possible, where merely staying made his depression double.
“Mm, I understand the sorrow of losing a grandparent... But once you come in as active duty, even becoming a single-person household doesn’t make discharge easy...”
But the cold reply that came back was that the provision, which only applied when the livelihood of the family would be difficult without the person in question, did not apply in this case.
—Even when I went on compassionate leave, the answer wasn’t this cold?
Sensing something strange in the nuance, Gim Chomok immediately changed his stance on the spot.
“...Then I’ll just use up the rest of my leave and be discharged as soon as I return. Unity.”
He had always served diligently, so they could not take away something he already had.
And since it had already been decided that he would leave tomorrow, they would not be able to obstruct him either.
As the unit’s ace turned away as if to say he had nothing more to discuss,
“Hey, that guy’s dreaming an impossible dream, isn’t he? Does he really think that’s possible?”
the company commander’s words, spoken as if pathetic and yet in a way hollow, lodged deep in his eardrums.
—This is already a place I don’t want to stay in for even one more minute or one more second, and now what the hell did that bastard just say?
It was a tone that made it sound as if he could not take off this sickening uniform of his own free will.
After setting out on leave like that, he went back to the room he had been indebted to throughout his college days.
“Wow. When I get discharged, should I try living like a tree for a few months, not thinking at all and not moving my body?”
Even as he enjoyed, for the first time in ages, the serenity of comfort, with nothing at all to worry about—
—A call. A call from the damned military unit...
“Goddammit, they know perfectly well it’s two fourteen-night, fifteen-day leaves with a quick turnaround, so why are they calling every single day?!”
Those annoying little flies kept buzzing around his ears without end.
“...Communications security. Sergeant Kim Chomok of 1st Company speaking.”
—Yeah, it’s the usual check-in, so just bear with it. Don’t cause any accidents! Do everything safely! Don’t drink...
“...Yes, understood. Unity.”
Those officer bastards kept contacting him, as if they had to know where he was at every moment.
“...They look like the same bastards I saw earlier. Do these guys think their faces look ordinary?”
Flinch!
Watchers who, to anyone’s eyes, still had the water of society not quite drained from them, cleverly straddling the line between soldier and civilian.
At this point, he couldn’t help wondering if they thought of him as something like a “bomb guaranteed to cause trouble.”
“Ah, this is pissing me off. Should I really cause one accident for them?”
Of course, a sergeant out on his final leave was supposed to make a grand effort to live a docile, plant-like life.
“Yeah, if I make a big scene in society, they’ll really tighten the screws, won’t they? Let’s just think of it as a brief verification process before I leave the army.”
He was irritated, but in the end, once this was over, weren’t they all going to be the sort of people who’d spit at each other while flipping one another off?
Kim Chomok endured and endured, fully intending to drop a bomb of civil complaints on them the moment he became a civilian.
And so, two days before his discharge, after finishing his honey-sweet final leave and returning to the base—
“...What did you just say?”
“Oh, come now. I was going to discharge you, but... an order happened to come down from above.”
—They said, in this state of national crisis, is it really right to send such a precious talent back into society...?
The sound of the star up above whispering drove into his eardrums like a thunderbolt.
They had decided to maintain the current ability-user troops somehow, by any means necessary?
“Haha, hahaha...”
“No, think about it. In this era of youth unemployment, there’s no greater merit than a secure job, you know?”
The company commander’s words, as he earnestly unfolded a line of logic that wouldn’t work on a five-year-old and tried somehow to persuade him—
Beeeeeeep...
Were drowned out by the ringing in the ears of an enraged civilian (genuine), turning into white noise.
Rotten as it was, he had nearly two years of military experience, so he could more or less guess what the higher-ups had been smoking to come up with this idea.
Every time the conscription period ended, elite agents who had survived this special operation simply disappeared.
So they were probably using this special situation as an opportunity to set a precedent for tying ability users down as career soldiers.
The first time was the hard part. If they could succeed in scouting someone this way just once—
They could create the framework of, “Hey, your seniors all did it like this! Don’t you have any patriotism, you bastard?!”
And they must have thought it might be possible for the state to run them directly on low pay and poor treatment.
As a bonus, all the military merits that came from it would be amicably divided up among the important people.
Then the answer a soldier in this situation had to give was also already decided.
“Well then, our Sergeant Kim Chomok. Are you ready to become a staff sergeant? Don’t worry, your promotions will be fast...”
“Haha, I’d rather cut off my own hand and get discharged on compassionate grounds.”
“...What?”
These damned bastards were looking at him like a fish they could just eat for free.
“I have absolutely no intention of remaining in the military, no matter what happens. That’s just common sense, isn’t it?”
If he left behind such idiotic genes for future generations, it was obvious he’d be doing humanity a great disservice.
Whether or not the company commander’s face twisted, having thought he could easily cook a mere beginner in society—
“Then I’ll return to the barracks. Unity.”
Kim Chomok’s eyes, which had gone through all sorts of things until now, shone dangerously.
‘I have no idea what they can even do in the remaining two days...’
But if they tried to put even the slightest hint of coercion on him, something incredibly entertaining was going to happen.
“I don’t have family, I don’t owe any debts, and on the other hand, I’ve done everything I needed to do for the state, haven’t I? But they won’t give me freedom?”
If the period they had set for using him for free had passed, then there was no more free lunch.
At the predators trying somehow to swallow this appetizing fish in the little time remaining—
The pufferfish, packed full of tetrodotoxin⁴, smiled brightly.
Not being eaten would be best, of course, but it was a self-deprecating smile saying that even if he was eaten, he absolutely wouldn’t die alone.