Fifty Pulls of Absolute Disaster
As if determined to prove their entire way of thinking operated on a different plane from normal human beings, the trolls swaggered around with such shameless confidence even after getting caught posting disgusting images that the comment sections under their posts had, ironically, turned into full-blown gladiatorial arenas.
And that wasn't all — the moment they received their amnesty pardons, they went right back to posting bait threads and launching terror campaigns…
Hell yeah.
This time around, even some particularly low-IQ specimens managed to get themselves handled directly by the admin team — and so, in one form or another, a parade of thoroughly bizarre behavior continued to unfold.
At any rate, I wrapped up the whole affair in a rough sort of way, established a contact network with the rankers who'd been solo-playing all this time, and figured that for the foreseeable future I had zero interest left in community drama. With the mod badge no longer requiring a full week of active duty, I naturally turned my attention to the newly posted announcement and decided to collect the rewards the admins had promised.
Personally, I wasn't expecting anything grand. At best, some resources — or, if they were feeling generous, some so-called "gacha currency"… or maybe a single 10-pull ticket. I'd have been more than grateful for that much.
Oh.
To my genuine surprise, the admin team had thrown me a full fifty pulls' worth of tickets, over a hundred thousand resources, and equipment crates on top of it all.
"Ahhh, fifty pulls — the sacred name we have always awaited!"
"…Excuse me?"
Thanks to that, whatever lingering resentment I'd been quietly nursing toward the admins melted clean away, and I was ready to drop to both knees and swear eternal loyalty with a full double-handed salute.
Of course, that warm feeling lasted all of about thirty seconds. There were no limited-time banners in this world anyway. The moment the rewards hit my inventory, I bolted straight for the Dimensional Causality Whatever-It-Was and dumped all fifty pulls in one glorious go —
> Common Resource Crate x25
> Rare Resource Crate x9
> Luxurious Resource Crate x3
> Common Equipment Crate x7
> Rare Equipment Crate x5
> Luxurious Equipment Crate x1
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
The long-awaited gacha session had returned as a complete and total wipeout — not a single superhuman, not a single ship — and the moment that reality sank in…
"AAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"
"C-Commander! Please calm down!"
I howled without restraint, staring at the spectacularly annihilated compensation for my week of living as a shitty-image eraser — and for the mod duties still waiting for me ahead.
Somehow, through sheer force of will, I managed to claw my sanity back together. Then I pulled up the construction window, figuring I might as well finally run the base upgrades I'd neglected throughout the entire event period.
The expensive stuff had all been built before the event started, though, and the cheap facilities I'd been plopping down whenever I had a spare moment in between. So what remained was…
With nothing left in the construction window but a single Forward Base, I realized it was finally time to raise the base level. That made sense — the Forward Base was literally an entirely separate outpost built off-site. Once that was the only remaining option and you hit the build button, the next base upgrade tier would unlock immediately.
So I selected Forward Base from the construction menu, dropped it on a decent resource zone, and turned to Jessica beside me to ask how our current stockpiles were looking.
"Jessica, how many resources do we have right now?"
"One moment… Yes. Currently about two hundred thousand minerals and roughly twenty thousand rare resources."
Probably thanks to the ranking rewards. Even after sinking thirty thousand minerals into the Forward Base, we still had a surprisingly healthy surplus left over. Satisfied, I decided to check the resource cost for the next base upgrade.
But — maybe because it had been nearly four years since I'd last looked this up, and I hadn't bothered opening the wiki tab — I'd completely forgotten how much a Level 6 base actually required.
The result:
Required Resources:
⛏ Minerals 250,000
💎 Rare Resources 7,500
"Holy moly."
Compared to Level 5, the resource cost had skyrocketed so violently I couldn't help but gape in horror.
I wanted to upgrade the base. The problem was that no matter how appalling those numbers looked, we absolutely had to push the upgrade through.
And the reason for that was none other than…
The mere existence of a dedicated Capital Ship Shipyard was enough to make anyone's mouth water — but the real prize was the Long-Range Warp System, which could instantly deploy a base's entire fleet to any battlefield of your choosing.
That single facility was the hard dividing line between commanders stuck at Level 5 and below, and those who had broken through to Level 6 and beyond.
Of course, given how the system was structured, you could only send fleets out — you couldn't bring them back the same way. The only return options were hitching a ride through an allied commander's identical facility… or just letting your fleet putter home on its own. There was simply no other method.