10 The Situation Outside

Since I knew very little English, I could only make out simple phrases the hosts said. Still, thankfully they had put Spanish subtitles underneath, so I somewhat understood what they were saying after decoding the computer-translated Spanish, and as expected, almost half of what they said was a complete lie.

Apparently, according to what they were saying, although the US did take the Peruvian part of the Amazon river under control by force, they still established the same deal with the Peruvian government as they did with the Brazilian one and that they had pretty much been hands-off from there.

As for the explanation they gave regarding why there were so many Peruvians being sent over to India, it was that the Peruvian government, as corrupt as it was, did not directly give the water to its citizens and instead made it so that they had to enlist in the US army in exchange for the water that was supposed to be theirs.

The reason why? To get back on the US' good side, from what they started, the Peruvian government was fearful that the US would retaliate against them because of their out-of-line actions.

Hence, they did this to make it up to the US and show their loyalty as an ally to them; as for why the US allowed people who didn't have a green card to enlist in the army, it's because it was simply convenient for them.

From there, they began talking about other things that were going on, and I had begun to lose interest as it didn't have anything to do with me.

However, my interest was once again spiked when I read the number of casualties that the war had brought.

They were too large to be realistic considering the number of unmanned weapons the US possessed in their arsenal. After repeating what I had just read, however, I noticed that they were tricking everyone.

Because while the numbers they were presenting weren't technically fake, who those people were was, because while they were stating the 'facts,' they made it sound like the lives lost were all American lives.

Still, by looking closer, one would notice that they were listing out the casualties of the US Army, US Navy, and US Air Force, of which the US Army was highlighted the most due to their higher number than the other two.

Why that mattered, simple, as they had reported just a couple of minutes prior, the US had let a ton of Peruvian citizens without green cards 'join' the army meaning that a big portion of the casualties shown on the screen wasn't from people who at the very least had a green card, but of non-American citizen Peruvians.

It was then that it hit me; it all made sense now; as shown by the news channel, The US army just added up the Peruvian forces they had sent over to fight in the war to what the public perceived as US casualties from the war. And the more casualties the US suffered, the more reparations China and Russia would have to pay once they lost the war.

As for why I now believed that China and Russia were guaranteed to lose the war, it was because from what I had seen outside the complex, the US didn't need to even rely on human lives to gain the upper hand against both of them who had already begun sacrificing lives in large quantities a while ago.

As for the exact situation outside the complex, from what the reporters had stated, the bloodiest battlefield had been the one between India and China, followed by the Russian European front and at the very end, the Siberian front, which had basically been completely dominated by US machinery.

As for the European front, it was slightly complicated.

Russia knew that it had no chance to push back the US from Siberia, so they had focused almost all of their efforts on moving into Europe. At first, it seemed that the entirety of the European Union plus some British naval support were all going to come together to push back Russia.

Russia had always looked at its European front as it was in the times of the second great war, but the stories of then failed to conform to the realities of now.

A strong line of bunkers and other defensive measures had sprung all the way from the north of Finland to the south of Romania.

Worse yet, the Russians had started their campaign in Finland first, aiming to avenge their old failures. The Fins proved to be more trouble than their worth, though. As even the capital, Helsinki had been turned into a bunker complex through which the reinforcements from the other EU members started to flood and overwhelm the Russians.

At the same time, American air support and artillery strikes kept them trapped.

Once the situation stabilized, however, and it was clear to see that the buffer states in between Russian and the heart of Europe were actually holding out quite well mainly thanks to US support sending land troops and securing Air superiority, a lot of the European countries that were not directly behind the buffer states decided to pull their military support away to minimize the number of casualties their armies would face.

Needless to say, this decision was certainly not looked upon as a noble one. Still, there wasn't exactly too much backlash, mainly because the people in those countries didn't really want to have their people killed if they didn't have to be, plus the countries that pulled out increased the economic aid they sent, so it wasn't as bad as it seemed.

And finally, regarding the Indian front, the US had been making slow progress into Chinese territory 'in exchange' for massive casualties.

Still, it made progress nonetheless, plus the Chinese resistance was showing a slight decrease in the number they were sending, so it appeared as though they had begun to run out of steam.

Once the hosts finished talking about India, though, the TV was turned off, and there was complete silence in the room, which I thought was because everyone was shocked at what they had just read; as for myself, I began to think about what would happen moving forward, that is until I read Josue's voice.

"Hey, hey, you there, hello? Stevan? you do realize that we are the last people in the cafeteria, right?"

"... hm, wait what, sorry, I got lost in my thoughts again."

" Yea, I kind of noticed that when you stopped moving for almost half an hour."

"...yea..."

"It's fine; I'm used to it by now; you do really have to work on that though, it's going to be harder for you to make friends with others at college once we get out of this hellhole."

"...Your right, thanks, I really needed that"

"No problem, anyways; we've got to get back to our room before they lock us out."