The Gallery Mascot
"GYAAAAAAAAAAAH!!"
Really, setting aside how absurdly well she fought — every time she crushed another Xenobia Empire special-ops unit, she launched into a hymn of praise directed straight at me, and from where I was standing, it was genuinely, thoroughly exhausting.
But whether I found it exhausting or not made no difference. Our dear Lady Partia proceeded to turn every last Xenobia Empire special-ops unit into a former special-ops unit.
And so, a mere two hours after Partia's arrival—
It was supposedly an Advanced quest, so the difficulty should have been considerable — watching it get demolished in an instant left me with a distinctly complicated feeling.
And once Pashtura returned from clearing her own Advanced quest, I decided to vent my bewilderment about this whole situation onto those bastards in the gallery.
No seriously what the hell is this
I never saw people like this when I was playing
Since when did characters like this exist
True to form for a pack of clowns, they greeted me with nothing but roaring laughter. For a moment I seriously considered tracking down every single commenter one by one and handing Marianne a hit list — but even I had to admit that would be petty, so I just shook my head and kept watching the replies.
Of course, if these jokers kept refusing to give me a real answer… well, I'd have no choice but to break out the "In this situation, we deploy Marianne THE Pirate Empress" card. Fortunately for them, not long after I posted, a veteran who'd always been oddly friendly toward me put up an explanation of the whole Gallery Mascot bit.
One of the all-time Gallery Mascots. She was a character released during a past April Fools' event.
Being an April Fools' character, she originally wasn't supposed to enter the main canon — but she got so popular that she ended up getting folded in anyway.
She was a free giveaway character, so at the time she was called the hope of all F2P players. But since she was only handed out during a limited event, the "Partia-less virgin" meme exploded afterward.
And as I'll get into below — she's one of the rare pure melee characters in this game, which spawned every kind of comedy concept imaginable, and that landed her as the 5th or 6th Gallery Mascot.
Her raw performance blows past most SSS-grade melee characters. The problem is her ranged capability is completely obliterated. How bad? She doesn't even have the kind of ranged slash attacks that Ignis — the poster child of melee characters — can use.
In PvE, if a player commits fully to a tank build, she can shrug off AI and NPC attacks and just walk in and fight. But the moment it becomes PvP, the firepower from player-raised ranged characters doesn't just outclass NPC and mob damage — it melts straight through even a fully tank-specced Partia's defenses, rendering her pointless.
Oh, so that's how it is.
Apparently even after I quit the game, they'd kept running all sorts of events.
Well, yeah — that would be the normal thing to do.
Thinking about it, given the sheer scale of the game, a decent player base would still have been around when I left, so running events like that wouldn't have been much of a stretch.
At any rate, now that I had a handle on Partia's capabilities, I figured I could put her to some very productive use going forward. And with Partia conveniently still at the base—
"Commander~♡ Your Pashtura has returned~♡"
"Oh."
—Pashtura came back from clearing her quest at the perfect moment. Since the two of them seemed to belong to the same order, I figured I'd naturally introduce them to each other…
But the instant I brought them face to face—
"Pashtura. Why do you address the Savior in such a careless manner?"
"Eehh— P-Partia unni?"
"Oh…"
"And what is this vulgar attire? No matter how important the Order considers the spreading of the Savior's seed… I do not believe that was an instruction to appear in public dressed like this."
"Uwehheehh—"
I could only stare in genuine astonishment at the rare spectacle of Pashtura — that ever-composed, thoroughly lewd-tempered nun — on the verge of having her collar seized by a Partia who looked half a second from transforming into an ogre.
Anyway. After wrapping up Partia's combat debut like that, we cleared various quests and properly started running a five-person roster…
"Commander, so from now on, should our people only take Advanced quests?"
"Yeah, let's do it that way."
Just as Jessica said — to run the event more efficiently, I decided to subcontract all the ordinary quests that automatically came in from the monster side out to the pirates. We would exclusively handle Advanced quests, which scored higher but came with a matching jump in difficulty.
That, however, meant we needed to strengthen our own forces accordingly. So I also drew up plans to enhance the Superhumans through Griyanaar's body modifications.
One of those plans was to attach tentacle tails to Ignis and turn her into a three-sword-style fighter. However—
"…Commandeeeeeer!!!"
"Hm?"
"Th-there's something weird down below!"
"…Oh."
"Tehe~, I accidentally attached it wrong~"
"Euuueehh—!"
Whether she was trying to turn Project SDL (Three-Sword Style?) into Project K-whatever, Griyanaar had "accidentally" installed a front tail instead of a rear one during surgery. Ignis complained of a multi-layered deterioration in her condition, nearly took to her bed, and had to go under the knife all over again.
"Jessica, I've been feeling like my luck's been pretty good lately."
"Pardon?"
"So I was thinking maybe I should throw a multi on the gacha…"
"Commander. Last time wasn't just luck — it was because you'd already burned through a hundred-fifty-pull pity and another seventy-pull causality lock before that."