The Final Week (1)
> Independent of the 'Kaiju Breeding Grounds,' the base has successfully developed the capacity to produce Chimera forces on its own.
> Effective immediately, production of Chimera Soldiers is now available within the base.
Whoa! Chimeras!
She'd been locked in the biology lab nonstop without even touching her quests, so I'd been wondering what on earth she was up to.
Soldiers each rivaling a D-grade superhuman in combat power.
The individuals who became chimeras never particularly wanted this fate for themselves.
But since nobody bothered to ask their opinion, they abruptly began a new life as biological weapons that obeyed orders alone.
The report that she had made it possible to produce forces far superior to the ordinary soldiers and androids we'd been using for boarding actions left me thoroughly satisfied. I decided to head straight to the biology lab to offer my congratulations.
But the moment I opened the lab's grotesquely warped door and stepped inside…
"Ah, Commander? It's been quite some time."
"…"
"What do you think? Of the new Chimera Production Facility I built?"
Between the state of the pirate captives—who had been transformed into something that used to be captives—and the indescribably, utterly nightmarish scene unfolding before me…
"Mm, right. You've done excellent work."
"Heheheh, of course! Once something falls into this professor's hands, everything is A-OK!"
I offered nothing but praise to the overflowing confidence of Griyanaar, then immediately backstepped out of the lab with Jessica in tow.
The Final Week. (1)
Anyway—roughly a week had passed since I'd witnessed Griyanaar's chimera production process, which had realized a truly PC brand of egalitarianism by applying the principle of You will birth as many as you killed and plundered—met with a chorus of Nooooo!!!—to pirates of every age and gender without discrimination.
In that span of time, we managed to go through a truly staggering variety of miscellaneous nonsense.
Take, for instance, the backlash from Marianne's little "prank" that had sent the Pirate Union into a frenzy. The Earth Federation, brandishing what it called its main force, sent regular fleets that included actual battleships rampaging through every corner of the region. One of them smashed a Space Kaiju nest that had been minding its own business, which so thoroughly enraged the kaiju that they threw a three-hundred-thousand-strong kaiju fleet at a force of a mere thirty thousand ships.
And so, rather than doing the event they were supposed to be doing, nearby players—myself included—temporarily reinvented ourselves as scrap collectors, scavenging the "byproducts" of that sudden inter-faction brawl.
All in all, it had been a thoroughly chaotic week. But as for whether it had actually been hard? That was another matter entirely.
Quests almost never handed players something completely impossible to solve. And even if one did, you could just ignore it, cancel it, and draw a new one—so there was nothing to stress over.
That left collisions with surrounding factions and other players as the only real sources of potential misery, and even those weren't much of a problem. Inter-faction clashes, as mentioned above, were actually a welcome windfall from a player's perspective.
Faction-versus-player conflicts? Unless a quest forced the issue through a mandatory event, the Earth Federation would deploy fleets of at least ten thousand ships just to clear a single sector, and Marianne's Pirate Union would casually drop a hundred thousand ships the moment I asked for a little help. Why would factions that threw ships around by the tens of thousands take a player with a few hundred—maybe a thousand on a good day—seriously enough to respond in force?
The main fleets simply ignored you. At best, a squadron from some detachment fleet would show up.
Which left only player-versus-player—PVP.
The problem was that PVP, as I and the gallery had noted ages and ages ago, tended to produce thoroughly unpleasant results for the players involved—regardless of how hard this damn game seemed to be pushing a PVP-friendly meta. Outside of a handful of hot-blooded newbie commanders, the vast majority of players held a fundamentally negative stance on PVP.
The result…
> War Zone Fleet Deployment Results
> Fleet cargo holds: 87% capacity
> Resources acquired: Minerals 8,800 / Rare Resources 720
> Captured: 3 standard destroyers
> External-mount cargo module discovered
"Mm. Yummy."
I'd either send fleets into the zones where the Earth Federation and Space Kaiju were clashing, as described above, and live the scavenger life—or some overeager newbie who couldn't control himself would blunder into an invasion. And as always, the gap in skill and luck, combined with the fact that these types almost never checked the gallery and just did their own thing without understanding why people avoided PVP, meant my long-range chip-damage fleet would unilaterally melt their forces. Unlike a typical PVP engagement, my fleet took almost no losses.
All told, it was no exaggeration to say I was living a thoroughly peaceful, uneventful daily life.
But that healing lifestyle of mine wasn't destined to last much longer—and there was a reason I was recounting all of the above in the past tense.
That reason being…
A message for all Commanders.
The currently ongoing Favor of the Reward event is scheduled to conclude in one week.
Upon the event's conclusion, the event shop will likewise cease operations.
Please note that when the event period ends, all quests currently in progress will be forcibly terminated.
Wait, the event's ending already?
Barely two months had passed, and yet the event was wrapping up far sooner than I'd expected.
Favor Points: 534,764
Ah, damn. This isn't going to be nearly enough.
The moment I saw the event-end message and checked my points, I calculated that even grinding as hard as possible from here on out would top out around seven hundred thousand. So for the final push, I decided to accept every advanced quest I could—and any quest that didn't require deploying superhumans, regardless of grade—then throw fleets and troops without superhumans at them, squeezing out every last point I could manage.
And separate from all that effort…
"Hmm, Jessica?"
"Yes, Commander?"
"Roughly how long has it been since I last checked the gallery?"
"Uh… hmm… about two weeks?"
Hasn't been that long, then.
Struck by how merciless the passage of time could be, and with my fleets and superhumans already deployed, I decided to drop into the gallery for the first time in a while and see how people were reacting to the event ending.
But when I opened the community window I hadn't touched in over two weeks and clicked into the gallery, the "reactions and evaluations of the event ending" I'd expected were nowhere to be found.
[Gallery Firepower is INSANE] (5,311)
[I'm sorry. I was wrong.] (3,754)
[TheEventMattersRightNowTheEventMattersRightNowTheEventMatters…] (623)
[You Shall All Burn] (7,124)
[Points matter. Who cares about the event?] (5,115)
What the hell is this?
Maybe it was because I hadn't looked at the gallery once in two weeks, but I couldn't make heads or tails of how the discourse had spun out.
What went wrong that they're all flaming each other over points like this?