The Resource Drain
A full month had already passed since the event began, and only now was I realizing that I hadn't upgraded the base even once.
On the surface, sure, it looked like we'd built a ton of stuff. The list practically screamed productivity.
But those were all facilities we'd already finished. When I checked what we still needed to construct…
From what I'd casually seen on the gallery boards, people were already talking about bases hitting Level 6 and even Level 7. Meanwhile, the only thing staring back at me was proof that I still hadn't finished my Level 5 construction.
So I decided to start with the Additional Docking Facility, which would expand our Fleet Point capacity. Once the Resource Warehouse was up, I'd go straight for that expensive Forward Base and push the base to Level 6 as fast as possible.
There was just one very serious problem.
"Jessica, go ahead and start construction on the Additional Docking Facility."
"Commander, we don't have any minerals left."
"…Huh?"
"More precisely, today's remaining surplus is only about 2,400. If we build that, our actual intake rate goes into the negatives."
"Huuuh?"
Jessica's sudden claim that we were out of resources left me completely unable to hide my bewilderment. We had more than ten mining sites running three shifts around the clock. Our daily mineral intake was already past ten thousand. What was she talking about?
Our fleet barely took any damage, so repair costs weren't a concern. And since I'd been too busy to upgrade the base, we should have been swimming in surplus resources by now.
I put that exact question to Jessica. She looked back at me with half-dead eyes and answered in a voice drained of all energy.
"…We're subsidizing the pirates' repair costs."
"Ah."
And there it was. (1)
According to Jessica's explanation, the problem was simple. Roughly a hundred thousand pirate ships had answered Marianne's call and come running to our aid — and we were covering a portion of their repair bills. Every last resource we'd stockpiled had vanished in a single month, gone as cleanly as if a magician had blinked them out of existence.
The truly maddening part? From Marianne's and the Pirate Union's perspective, this was already them doing us a massive favor.
"Repair costs? People have been talking about that a lot lately, you know."
"…Ahem."
"I told them only the ones who were actually coming to help Oppa should show up, but every random freeloader tagged along anyway. The fleet losses have been insane."
"Hmmmmm."
"Don't worry, though. I know perfectly well that Oppa's base can't handle the full bill."
"Sniff…"
Hearing Marianne herself put it that way made the situation clear enough. We weren't covering a hundred percent of the repair costs for the pirates currently "deployed" to our base. Given the sheer scale involved, our share was only about one or two percent. The rest was being handled by the Pirate Union's main base and the individual pirate crews themselves.
But even one or two percent, when the fleet filing those claims numbered nearly a hundred thousand ships, ballooned into a completely deranged figure.
On our end, we were running more than ten resource zones — including newly discovered ones — with fleets of transport-destroyers stripped of everything but a single turret and plastered wall-to-wall with cargo holds, cycling them through three full shifts. On top of that, whenever we cleared a quest, the kaiju forces would send us resources as a reward. None of it mattered. Our fleet simply could not keep up with the pirates' absurd scale, and every last resource was drying up — slowly, but with absolute certainty.
So in this grotesque situation, we were thrashing about desperately, doing everything we could to avoid a full resource wipeout.
First up: the resource crates that had piled up thanks to my catastrophic gacha luck. Whenever we needed them, I cracked them open one by one like emergency canned rations and dumped the contents into our warehouse. For a moment I thought that might be enough of an emergency transfusion.
That thought lasted about five seconds. The resources vanished just as fast as before, and I watched the crate stockpile I'd been keeping as evidence of my gacha disasters get cleaned out in the blink of an eye. Clearly that wasn't going to cut it. So I moved on to a new method.
> Event Resource Crate x10 — Purchase Complete!
> 15,000 points deducted.
> Remaining Points: 395,222
In other words, unless I bought resource crates from the shop at a painful 1,500 points apiece and poured them straight into the gap, there was simply no way to cover the consumption. Like it or not, we had zero room left for something as luxurious as a base upgrade.
And so, praying that we wouldn't hit a resource wipeout, I spent another day burning through points in bulk just to keep the resource patches holding.
Part of me wanted to just let the resources hit zero and pay everything back in one lump sum later. But if I actually did that and a real resource wipeout hit? With no resources at all, my fleet and superhumans would take a massive performance debuff.
If the Commander's base completely runs out of resources:
The Commander's entire fleet will receive the following debuffs:
Attack Power -50% | Evasion -30% | Speed -20%
⚠ WARNING! This debuff applies to ALL fleets under the Commander's command — including mercenaries!
Just like the tooltip I was staring at right now. If that deranged debuff landed, fleet combat power would be cut roughly in half before the fight even started. Against any user of equal rank, it would be an automatic loss no matter who showed up.
And the real problem in our current situation wasn't even PvP with other users. As that cursed tooltip made clear, the debuff applied unconditionally to every fleet under my command, regardless of affiliation.