Busy, Yet Not Busy (1)
And beyond those two, there was also the facility that poured resources and rare materials into high-speed ship restoration.
The Emergency Ship Repair Facility, which could finish the job in a mere few dozen seconds for a cruiser, for instance.
And the Gravity Detector Radar — which didn't particularly expand the base's detection range, but could at least weakly pick up the "stealth" ships that occasionally dropped from the gacha.
On top of that, additional docking facilities and resource warehouses became available for construction.
So whether you liked it or not, building a Level 6 base was an absolute necessity if you wanted to survive long-term in this game.
But right now, even if I wanted to push ahead with it, I simply couldn't. So I decided to knock out the daily quests at a leisurely pace, stockpile resources in earnest, and slam the construction button tomorrow or the day after.
About five minutes after I'd settled on that plan—
"Commander Icarus, do you have a moment?"
"Hm?"
Out of nowhere, Oxianor's telepathy — whose presence had faded into the background for a while — cut through, and at the same time:
"…That is the situation. Would it be possible?"
Ah. So it's about time for this one to pop up.
Watching an event still lodged in my memory finally trigger, I figured I'd have to push the base upgrade back a few more days.
And for good reason — this was a kind of "shared event" that fired for every player belonging to a faction. Refuse it, or donate less than the minimum, and you'd take a massive hit to your faction standing, or trigger negative follow-up events. And if that standing drop pushed your reputation into the negatives?
They'd just kick you out of the faction on the spot. An absolutely vicious little event.
Even if you weren't expelled, as I'd already mentioned, all the standing you'd carefully built up would get sliced away in one clean stroke. So I didn't bother deliberating — I skimmed off a reasonable chunk of my remaining resources and decided to hand them over to the Kaiju.
"Oh, of course. No problem at all."
"Her Majesty will be most pleased by your assistance!"
At any rate, after shipping the resources off to the Kaiju and knocking out daily quests at a comfortable pace, the next morning arrived.
"Jessica. Jessica. Magical Jessica."
"…"
"Won't you tell me today's resource status?"
"Accounting for both income and expenditure, minerals currently sit at 150,000. Rare resources just hit 3,000."
There had been a minor little blunder where half my resources vanished in a single day — but now that I wasn't going to be torching materials on some insane event spending spree, a solid week of focused stockpiling should do the trick. And as for mineral consumption, outside of what I'd burned through for ranking rewards, I hadn't actually blown through that much.
Judging that there was no real problem, I found myself thinking maybe I should go pick a fight with some passing NPC fleets and squeeze a few resources out of them.
But while I was mulling that over—
"Hm? Ah, yes? One moment, please."
Jessica, sitting beside me, suddenly started exchanging words with someone, then turned toward me with a puzzled expression and delivered a rather unusual message.
"Commander, Miss Oxianor is inquiring whether a one-on-one meeting with you might be possible?"
"Huh? Oxianor?"
I'd only ever heard about it, never actually experienced it myself — but the thought that this might be one of those random-chance "give us more resources" cling-on events sent a chill crawling down my spine. Still, nothing was more dangerous than sitting around inventing worst-case scenarios all by myself. So, figuring I might as well find out what this was about, I accepted the thrilling one-on-one date(?) with Oxianor.
Of course, as everyone had already guessed, calling it a "date" was pure bit on my part. At best, there was additional quest business to hand over. Or maybe, regarding the secret alliance with the Pirate Coalition, Oxianor didn't have the clout to speak with Marianne directly — and Leonard, the closest alternative, refused to get involved in anything that wasn't a direct order from Marianne. So I'd figured she wanted to bounce alliance opinions off me as a go-between…
But contrary to all my expectations—
"Icarus. I know not the reason, but of late the other Commanders have been most reluctant to accept our commissions."
"Mmm."
"Do you know why that might be?"
"…Beats me."
Our absurdly, outrageously well-endowed Oxianor had planted herself on the sofa beside me, using the soft give of her bio-suit as a shield, and kept pressing herself right up against my side. And as she spoke, she casually coiled one of my arms and reeled it in…
She was already well past "voluptuous" — those "kaiju pouches" looked ready to burst straight through the bio-suit that could barely contain them — and she slid my arm right into the middle of all that.
…Whoa.
For a split second, the sheer overwhelming springiness of that mass of flesh left my brain completely blank…
No, wait. Oxianor is a gentleman. A gentleman!
The moment I remembered that Oxianor had originally been male, a wave of profound sorrow and confusion washed over me — and with it came the conviction that there had to be a reason for this, which let me naturally snatch my sanity back.
So I casually tried to extract the arm Oxianor had coiled around me…
…and failed, thanks to muscle strength that put mine to shame. Stuck in an awkward half-pose, I resolved to keep talking to Oxianor in the calmest tone I could manage.
"I couldn't say for certain, but perhaps it's better to think of the past couple of months as the anomaly, no?"
"Mm… is that so."
And when I refused to fall for her honey trap(?) and answered with perfect composure, Oxianor — still leaning against my shoulder — blinked at me a few times. Then she naturally released her hold on my arm and straightened her posture back to how it had been at the start. I let out a quiet sigh of relief and decided to have a nice, wholesome conversation with her…
"Hmm. Is it that this form is not to your liking?"
"…?"
"The individuals in your vicinity share a certain appearance, so I compromised between Her Majesty's preferences and my own to craft this body. But if you desire something more… unusual."
With a strange crick-crack of shifting matter, she transformed her body in an instant into a girl who looked about seven or eight years old.
I grabbed Oxianor's shoulders and urgently opened my mouth.
"I am not a pedophile, Oxianor."
"Hm?"
"So change back to your original body immediately. If you stay like that, people are going to get the wrong idea about me."
Busy, Yet Not Busy (1)
After thwarting the Kaiju's plot(?) to socially assassinate me, the conversation I had with Oxianor — now restored to her proper form — was, fortunately, exactly what I'd expected.
Or rather, it went considerably further than what I'd expected.
"I trust you are already well aware, but we and the Pirate Empress have secretly forged an alliance behind the backs of both our factions, have we not?"
"Mm, that's right."
"However, setting aside the existence of that secret alliance, strictly speaking, at present it is an alliance in name only."
Huh?
What I'd been expecting was nothing more than a "Ah, we can't really talk to the Empress directly, so could you pass a message along?" kind of request. But listening to Oxianor — no, to the Kaiju side — it felt like they were pushing things far, far beyond that.
While I sat there blinking in mild confusion—
"Moreover, on the Pirate Coalition's side, the Empress herself is present in person. Whereas on our side, no matter how enhanced I may be… in the end, our representative envoy is merely an intellect terminal that doubles as a diplomatic function — namely, myself. That is the problem, is it not?"
"…Ah."
Through Oxianor's words, I finally understood why the Kaiju side had brought this up.
"So what you're saying is, in the current state of things, discussing matters with our so-called allies in the Pirate Coalition is…?"
"Icarus. Just as you are thinking… we shall dispatch a VIP of equal standing to the Pirate Empress to this place."
"…Hmm."
I thought this every time, but for a faction calling itself the "Space Kaiju," they sure placed a lot of weight on diplomatic formalities.