Even though her world had BETA gnawing away at it—and the war against them meant the world map had to be "updated" constantly—that wasn't mainly because artillery had reshaped the terrain. The destructive power simply wasn't that ridiculous.
The real reason was the BETA themselves. Those alien organisms consumed and excavated everything everywhere they went, turning every region they passed through into something unrecognizable.
So yes, her world's ecology had been getting worse and worse.
But compared to what she was seeing in this livestreamed world, it was better by an absurd margin.
Never mind the devastation from the current war. Just from what she could see of the landscape beyond the battlefront, it was obvious this world had already been in terrible shape even before the war started.
This world was basically a factory. A gigantic factory that developed everything at any cost, until the planet's ecology had been almost completely ruined by the pollution and damage from that exploitation.
Once the view moved far enough away from the space-fortress impact zone, the surface looked outright hostile. She saw peaks that were clearly mountains of accumulated garbage.
Garbage mountains, everywhere, stretching and linking together into entire garbage ranges.
At first, because the aircraft was still high up, Dr. Kouzuki had genuinely thought she was looking at real mountain chains.
Only after the altitude dropped did she realize the truth: those were mountains made of trash—trash ranges more magnificent than the largest mountain ranges back on her own Earth.
This world's development had obviously been carried out with zero regard for consequences.
Sure, if the planet had always been naturally harsh, you could argue they simply didn't care about the environment.
But Dr. Kouzuki could tell from lingering traces that there had once been forests, river systems, even oceans.
Yes—oceans. It was hard to believe. What kind of exploitation could drain even something like the sea?
A world like this would be blanketed in polluted exhaust and toxic haze. Outside the steel-forest megacities, the open world would be nothing but poison—somewhere life itself could barely exist.
Honestly, if someone from her world were suddenly teleported here, their first impression would be that this was a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
And now, on top of a planet that was already this ruined, extraterrestrial life had invaded and a war beyond imagination was raging.
Just the destruction from that first fortress falling—when she scaled it against her own world—was enough to make Dr. Kouzuki fall silent.
It could wipe out every living thing on her island nation. It might even sink it.
And then another fortress had started sliding down into the planet.
She couldn't even imagine what kind of horror that one would cause.
But before it could even reach the surface, an unthinkable bombardment blew that colossal mass apart.
One shot even seemed to miss and strike the ground instead, pulverizing an entire mountain range and carving out a ring crater larger than the Moon's Bailly crater.
Bailly was the largest impact crater on the Moon.
Which meant that if weapons like this were used in carpet-bombardment across a planetary surface… they really could break a world. They could punch through the crust.
And that, inevitably, made Dr. Kouzuki think of the weapon her own world was secretly developing to destroy the BETA's supposedly indestructible hives—the G-Bomb.
Rumor had it that, at maximum yield, just a few could sink the Asian plate.
But using something like that was no different than forcing humanity into a dead end.
If you could shatter a continental plate, the global fallout would be a disaster beyond comprehension. Could humans even survive it?
Was the plan mutual annihilation?
In truth, once the G-Bomb was completed, it was meant to be used in coordination with Alternative V.
That plan was to abandon Earth and emigrate to another planet.
While the migration was underway, they would use the G-Bomb to ruin the old world—taking the BETA down with it.
But based on what Dr. Kouzuki understood about her world's current technology level, once Alternative V began, interstellar migration would mean the overwhelming majority of humanity would be left behind.
Their tech was only at that level. They could only carry a tiny fraction of people off-world.
"Then what's your objective?"
Staring at the man on-screen—piloting that aircraft that looked like it could shake itself apart at any moment, still weaving through danger while fragments from the shattered fortress rained down—Dr. Kouzuki couldn't help wondering what he was trying to reach.
He didn't look like a soldier. And he didn't seem to have any deep attachment to this world, either.
Which suggested he hadn't grown up here.
Meaning humanity didn't exist on this planet alone—this was a colony world.
And she could be sure this wasn't Earth.
When he'd climbed to his highest altitude earlier, he'd almost broken through the atmosphere, and she'd caught a glimpse of the starfield—along with a nearby planet.
If this were Earth, the nearest planet wouldn't look that large, and it certainly wouldn't have such obvious rings.
So this wasn't the Solar System, either.
…Huh?
That is—!
As his aircraft continued forward—looking like it was about to arc around half the planet to the far side—she saw that this side, too, was burning with war.
And there, she saw something that made her blood run cold.
A hive.
It looked like an ugly flower of unimaginable shape, bursting up through the crust and blooming open.
From that enormous, hideous "flower-hive," dense swarms of monsters poured out like a tide, surging toward the planet's human ground forces.
Their shapes differed quite a bit from the BETA in her world.
But Dr. Kouzuki immediately noticed three points in common.
First, these bug-featured monsters—like the BETA—devoured everything they could consume.
Second, once they cleared open space on the battlefield, they immediately put what they'd eaten to use, building small-scale hives on the spot—just like that earlier "industrial elevator" incubation structure—hatching new comrades and throwing them straight into the war.
And third, when she looked closely at the grotesque flower-hive punching through the ground, something about the area around its core felt eerily familiar.
Just like the regions surrounding BETA hives back home, everything useful in the surrounding land had been eaten clean.
All that remained was bare, stone-like ground.
So this world's invasion was the same in nature as the BETA invasion.
A plague of locusts.
Devouring everything.
Leaving behind a dead, silent stone planet.
(End of Chapter)
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