Even If the World Collapses, There's Still a Place to Live (4)
"An executive and a person in charge… well, looking at it that way, I suppose that's fair."
Since she wasn't wrong, I agreed — and Marianne clapped her hands together with a sharp smack, declaring that there was no real problem after all.
"Then there shouldn't be any major issues! At the very least, if we deploy people at the captain level, that should settle it, right, Oppa?"
"Hmm."
At the words "captain level," I ran a quick mental calculation.
Hmmm. By player gacha standards, that would be… about A-grade?
I had my own rough estimate, but I'd learned far too many times in this life that basing everything on pure daydreaming was a one-way ticket to disaster. Rather than take a pointless risk, I decided to put the question to Jessica, who was standing right beside me.
She answered without missing a beat.
"That's right. More precisely, a typical pirate fleet captain would fall somewhere between B-grade and S-grade."
"Jessica unnie is right, Oppa. And since I'm the one calling them in, they'll all be at least A-grade or higher."
"Oh…"
With Marianne adding her own confirmation on top of that, I decided to put my full faith in her and leave the whole thing in her hands.
"Alright then. With Marianne's help, maybe we can finally live a little easier for once."
"Of course, Oppa! Just leave it all to me!"
"Having Marianne's assistance is like gaining a million reinforcements, Commander."
"Mmm!"
Watching Marianne light up at my decision, I couldn't help thinking that if I'd known it would go this well, I should have just asked her for help from the start instead of fretting over appearances. Things might have been a lot simpler.
But honestly — who could have predicted that a girl that gorgeous would be this happy about helping me out?
Either way, I watched with a thoroughly contented expression as Marianne immediately seized the comms screen and started issuing orders left and right. At this rate, we should be able to haul in at least a few tens of thousands more points. With that thought, I began laying out our next steps one by one.
But those plans of mine were destined for the trash bin before long.
It wasn't that I'd drawn up some idiotically bad plan. To be precise… my plan had been based entirely on the scoring rate of a normal player.
Not on what was unfolding right in front of my eyes…
"Just finished handling that. What's next?"
"Ah, yes. Right now we need to hunt one large wild kaiju here and collect a specimen…"
"Easy."
"Um… it's a giant space centipede dozens of kilometers long. Isn't that dangerous?"
"Win."
Victory declared the instant the quest is done!!
…Because the pirate "executives" Marianne had brought in were just that absurdly overpowered.
> Quest Completion Confirmed
> Currently Resolved Quests: 164 + 3
Hooooh…
In a single day, not only had every quest we'd accepted and left sitting unfinished been wiped clean — the new ones we kept pulling in were getting cleared just as fast.
Not that I was complaining.
Oh-ho-ho, this is great.
If anything, I no longer needed to fry my brain drafting elaborate plans. We could just steamroll everything with raw numbers.
And the result of clearing quests at that insane pace:
Favor Points: 100,543 Points
Hell yeah… bartender!
A guy who'd scraped together maybe seventeen thousand points over two weeks had just raked in nearly ninety thousand more in a single day. As if I was going to cling to some plan I'd fretted over for a mere twenty-four hours. The only proper response was to stand there watching the spectacle unfold and let the dopamine flow.
"Just what on earth is going on? Until not long ago, you could barely keep up with the commissions Her Majesty issued…"
"…Turns out the world has its ways."
Naturally, a shift this abrupt left Oxianor — the envoy of the Space Kaiju — broadcasting telepathic messages thick with bewilderment. All I could do was shrug.
And for good reason. If I explained the situation to her in detail — Actually, we kind of made the Pirate Empress our subordinate(?), and right now she's working miracles by dragging in her own underlings and working them to the bone — how exactly was a member of the Space Kaiju faction supposed to take that?
Best case, she'd fly into a rage screaming this bastard's a double agent?! Worst case, our trust rating would tank. Either way, something annoying was guaranteed to happen. So whenever Oxianor pelted me with telepathic questions, I just shrugged and brushed them off.
Once I'd more or less settled her curiosity, I turned to the pirate captains' suggestion. Apparently they were already sick of shuttling back and forth, and wanted to know if they could just teleport the proof of completion straight into the base from their ships. I accepted, temporarily dropped the base's teleportation jamming field — and decided it was time to check how much trust we'd actually built up.
I mean, come on. One hundred sixty-four quests in a single day… no, one hundred sixty-seven. Humanly speaking, that had to be worth at least a five- or ten-point jump in trust, right? That expectation was sitting snugly in the back of my mind as I opened the status window.
> Current Trust Relationship with 'Space Kaiju': +18
Why is it still not twenty?
For some reason, the trust rating had barely budged. Even if they were only giving us 0.01 per quest instead of 0.1 — if they had any conscience at all, we should have hit +20 by now.
I was mid-grumble when something I'd completely forgotten suddenly drifted back into my head.
Oh, right. If I just click on that, a menu comes up.
Realizing the truth, I felt a hollow little pang — apparently I'd been so busy I'd forgotten things I already knew — but I clicked the trust status window anyway and expanded the collapsed list, determined to figure out exactly what the hell was going on.
What is this, a dating sim?
The moment I saw that laundry list of suspicion pointed straight at me, a quiet sadness settled in. Just as I'd expected, the Space Kaiju faction was deeply wary of the fact that I'd mobilized a bunch of pirates.
But the important thing was that those suspicions had surfaced at all. To keep from racking up any more excessive debuffs on the trust front, I decided to gather some opinions and deal with the situation immediately.
Our four musketeers — or rather, the four women who'd been getting cheerfully ground into dust this whole time — came running to the command post the instant I called, looking like they'd finally get a chance to catch their breath.
That didn't last long.
"The reason I called you all here is this: Oxianor and the rest of the Space Kaiju faction are starting to suspect us of being double agents."
"…Pardon?"
"What? What do you mean by that, sir?"
"Commander, you really do love living on the edge♡"
"Commander, why on earth are you trying to walk such a tightrope?"
In order: Ignis, Belial, Pashtura, Griyanaar.
The moment I laid out the topic, each of them produced a spectacularly different reaction. Whatever leisure they'd been hoping to enjoy while catching their breath vanished without a trace, replaced by a chorus of pure bewilderment directed straight at me—