Running Dry (2)
As long as the Pirate Union's fleet — Marianne's elite personal armada plus every ragtag outfit she'd dragged along — remained temporarily under my command to help me out, the resource-starvation debuff was going to hit every last one of them.
And why was that a genuine problem?
Because it would kneecap the performance of Marianne's direct fleet and every pirate crew currently tearing through the surrounding space. Once that happened, the neighboring powers — especially the NPC factions, the Zenobia Empire and the Earth Federation — would have zero reason to leave an eyesore like the Pirate Union alone.
If the Pirate Empress and her main fleet got properly wrecked by the debuff and then wiped out in a full-blown catastrophe… the massive backer I'd only just acquired — the Pirate Union itself — could collapse under a full-scale invasion from every other faction the moment its main force ceased to exist.
So whether I liked it or not, I had to keep the resource fleets running, keep clearing quests for materials, and dump event reward points into bulk resource-crate purchases. I threw every scrap of effoooooort I had into making sure that particular disaster never happened.
Of course, the longer things dragged on, the more clashes broke out with pirates, players, and rival factions — which meant repair bills kept piling up on top of everything else.
So, as mentioned, I hammered the resource fleets, quest clears, and crate-cracking as hard as humanly possible. Somehow, I managed to get consumption and income running roughly parallel.
But that only lasted a moment.
It hit me all over again: at this rate, all I was doing was treading water. Everything in the event except resource crates had become impossible.
Ah, wait. We're screwed.
I was starting to think this event was well and truly cooked.
The pirates had only ever been meant to speed up my event progress and raise my standing with the beast factions so I could clear quests faster. The current situation? Calling it a case of the tail wagging the dog would be putting it mildly.
And I wasn't the only one who noticed.
"Commander, may I offer a word of counsel?"
"…I think I already know what you're going to say, but go ahead."
"If we keep going like this… aren't we just burning time on an event for nothing?"
"So you think so too."
Exactly as our bunny-bunny Jessica put it — if we continued on this path, the numbers simply refused to add up.
Since the topic had come up, Jessica and I put our heads together and spent a solid fifteen minutes trading ideas on how to fix the mess.
And when those fifteen minutes were up—
"…I suppose we really do have to send the pirates home now."
"Yeah. Time for the pirate uncles to head back to their own place."
Marianne hadn't given me a precise explanation, but the Pirate Union's repair invoices were ballooning at a geometric rate. The only logical conclusion was that response fleets from the other factions had reached the borders and were now happily trading blows with the nearly hundred-thousand-strong pirate armada she'd brought along.
With that conclusion locked in, I headed over to Marianne, who was sitting off to one side of the base command center, ready to tell her it was probably time to send the pirates home.
The moment the words left my mouth—
"Oppa, does that mean you don't need me anymore?"
"…!"
"Because I need Oppa an awful lot, you know?"
Marianne's eyes flooded with a thoroughly, extremely, extraordinarily vicious light.
I suddenly understood, with perfect clarity, what a foal must feel like after being tossed in front of a lion.
Marianne's reaction was far more intense than I'd expected. I spent a moment racking my brain over what exactly the problem was—
And then, just as quickly—
"Marianne, if this keeps up, we're actually going to wither and die."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
Jessica popped out from behind me and handed over a conspicuously thick stack of documents and a tablet. Marianne — who'd been growling like a puppy that had just realized it was about to be abandoned — took them with a puzzled look.
Suspicion written all over her face, she scanned through Jessica's paperwork. A moment later…
"…Oppa, was the base really in this bad a shape?"
I watched the demonic rage drain from Marianne's face, replaced in an instant by the pure, simple expression of a golden retriever, and felt a quiet surge of gratitude that she'd actually understood.
What followed involved no small amount of complicated wrangling, but the bottom line was this: at my request, the nearly hundred thousand pirate ships that had come to help all amicably decided it was time to head back home.
Though not without one last wrinkle separate from the repair bills…
"Hey, buddy — pirates or not, we can't just leave empty-handed after coming all this way, y'know?"
"Ah. Damn."
As a "hardship allowance" for the Pirate Union that had come all this way, I got shaken down for yet another mountain of minerals. And of course, there was zero chance those pirate uncles were going to accept something as civilized as interest-free thirty-six-month installments.
✦ Lavish Resource Crate x3 opened!
Obtained a total of 79,520 Minerals and 2,750 Rare Resources!
✦ Rare Resource Crate x9 opened!
Obtained a total of 62,339 Minerals and 1,311 Rare Resources!
✦ Common Resource Crate x11 opened!
Obtained a total of 25,894 Minerals!
Provided 183,257 Minerals and 4,533 Rare Resources to the Pirate Union!
Taaahhh…
I cleaned out most of the remaining resource crates and shook down every last scrap of material I currently held to pay their "bonus" in a single lump sum. After that—
> The Pirate Union fleet is returning.
> You will no longer provide repair costs to the Pirate Union fleet.
> All reconnaissance zones provided by the Pirate Union have been released.
· · · · · ·
A whole stack of minor status messages like that floated up, but none of them mattered right now.
— "Buddy! Next time Lady Marianne gives the word, we'll come running — just call us!"
— "Those repair fees were sweet!"
— "Since you're a sucker, we'll cut you a deal next time!"
"Ah, those sons of bitches."
I flipped off the departing pirate fleet as they cheerfully admitted to fleecing us under the guise of "repair costs," then stood beside Marianne — who was grinding her teeth behind a smiling face and muttering about stomping them flat the first chance she got — and turned to Jessica waiting nearby to ask roughly how many resources we had left.
At the question, Jessica took her tablet back from Marianne, tapped around for a bit… then froze. She slowly lifted her head toward me and spoke in a voice that was slightly — no, considerably — shaky.
"Commander… for some reason, the remaining minerals are even lower than expected…?"
"What are you talking about, Jessica?"
"We should have at least ten thousand right now, but what's left isn't even half of that…"
The sudden claim made me wonder if our Jessica was pulling a prank. I was about to tell her, as calmly as possible, to cut it out—
"The resources we have left… minerals are only about two thousand. Rare resources are sitting at exactly one hundred."
"J-Jessica, what on earth are you saying?"
I genuinely hadn't expected things to have fallen this far. There was no hiding the tremor in my voice.
Fortunately, the reason became clear almost immediately…