The Military Chef of a Ruined World

After receiving the urgent message for help from Captain Lee Sang-ah without wasting a moment, I rallied my troops and led them back to the Ammunition Depot.

We couldn’t afford to halt our efforts to expand our territory into Chuncheon.

I didn’t bring many of my troops back with me. I had prepared enough combat rations in advance, so they should manage well on their own.

Traveling between cities isn’t easy, but with the subway secured, we could return to the Ammunition Depot in a few days.

‘Things have changed a lot.’

As I looked around at the Depot, what had originally been a mere old military outpost was now encircled by massive walls that appeared quite sturdy.

“It’s been a few weeks since I left with my troops.”

While there weren’t many combat-oriented Awakened individuals left at the Depot, a fair number of construction types like engineers remained behind.

These engineers, with capabilities beyond humans, had worked tirelessly to produce this impressive result.

As I greeted the soldiers who came out to meet us, I noticed their solemn expressions.

“Um, well…”

“Let’s just go see for ourselves, shall we?”

Though I felt a twinge of curiosity, I followed them deeper into the base.

“Commander! I’m sorry, I heard you were coming, but—”

As we made our way inside, I spotted Captain Lee Sang-ah, who was responsible for managing this base. She held an enormous pair of shears, far larger than the usual ones, in the hands of a seamster.

In fact, they looked more suited for pruning tree branches than for sewing.

“…What are you doing?”

“Just as you see.”

Snip!

“I’m cutting down trees.”

With that, she indicated the massively oversized trees she was dealing with, which covered not just the inside of the Ammunition Depot but also stretched beyond into the surrounding mountain range.

“The jungle…?”

* * *

The Ammunition Depot, ASP (Ammunition Supply Point), was designed to house a variety of explosives, so the distances between buildings were significant to mitigate the risks of detonation.

The vast expanse of land here was many times larger than that of a standard military base.

‘The storage facilities at the back were reportedly several times the size of Seoul University.’

While the frontline Depot didn’t quite reach that size, it was still vast. Defending such an extensive area was no simple task; our forces only utilized a small section of the Depot.

“Two-thirds of the Depot has been overtaken?”

“Yes… It’s embarrassing to admit.”

Excluding the areas we used; the vast majority of the Ammunition Depot had been consumed by this jungle.

“How did it come to be like this?”

“Rather than saying ‘how,’ it might be more accurate to say that it just appeared suddenly one day.”

As I listened to her explanation, I noticed how the landscape had drastically shifted. Previously, there had been low hills at the edge of the Depot—hills that had not been dominated by trees.

‘So that’s why everything looked different.’

What once was a relatively barren area was now densely packed with towering trees, as if they were sprouting overnight.

“If it had been a gradual phenomenon, we would have noticed it sooner. But all of this happened overnight. We woke up one day to find it like this.”

“That was indeed the day we tried to reach out to you.”

Other soldiers chimed in, equally bewildered by the overnight emergence of this jungle.

“It’s hard to believe that something this massive could grow overnight.”

“Even if there was some sort of monster causing this, we wouldn’t have missed it approaching the base.”

The Ammunition Depot had undergone extensive fortification through the hard work of the construction crew, and had established its own reconnaissance systems. Yet somehow, this phenomenon had bypassed all of that.

“…It didn’t just sprout up out of nowhere. How could this have happened?”

At that moment, a thought crossed my mind.

[As time passes, the enemy will grow stronger. It’s best to prepare for that.]

A warning from the Pope before his death. Initially, I took it to mean that the monsters already on the ground would become stronger.

‘But in truth, these monsters just materialized out of thin air, didn’t they?’

From the Doomsday to the moment the dungeon in Chuncheon closed, monsters appeared as if they had always existed in that space.

‘Even now, monsters may continue to spawn unseen.’

I realized that this phenomenon, too, could be linked to creatures that had suddenly emerged in the mountains.

If that were the case, then the integrity of our surveillance systems made sense.

“I thought about burning it down, but I eventually deemed that too risky,” she continued.

“Well, considering this jungle has engulfed the entire base…”

“I was worried that we might not just affect our own troops but also cause collateral damage to the nearby villages.”