Stronger Than Expected
"Ah, so he was just messing around."
Once that realization sank in, Indefatigable found himself thinking that Icarus had a far more humorous side than he'd previously given him credit for.
And the other rankers present weren't much different.
"…?"
Ranked fifth — a solo ranker in name only. In practice, she served as the professional fixer for Arcadia, the de facto fourth-ranked player, handling everything outside the clan. Because of that arrangement, Laura received resource sponsorships through the Justice Clan that Arcadia led. So when Icarus started flinging out those hook-line questions, she was every bit as baffled as the rest.
If you're a ranker… isn't the normal move to get sponsored by other clans without actually joining one…?
How many workarounds existed in this world, really?
Rather than formally joining a clan and painting a target on your back for rival factions, the optimal play was to operate as elite external talent for a major clan — quietly collecting resources and tribute without the risk. That was the smart way to live.
Which was why Laura, watching Icarus's attitude, started to suspect he might already be in a clan and was simply pretending otherwise — spinning some convenient lie about being unaffiliated.
Anyone capable of becoming a ranker would have spent at least some time browsing the community for information. And if they'd done even a halfway decent job of it, this was the kind of knowledge you simply couldn't miss.
Menaldo, ranked tenth, was thinking along the same lines… except:
"Eh, he might just not know."
Menaldo, who had a tendency toward simple-minded denseness in the strangest places, thought nothing of it and cheerfully passed along the link Indefatigable had mentioned — that bizarre place called the Super Solo Room for Solo Players.
And so, the next morning—
> Commander Icarus is requesting a trade with you!
> Icarus ⇒ Menaldo
> Minerals: 10,000 | Rare Resources: 1,000
"Whoa!"
Menaldo accepted the gift of gratitude from Icarus, adding a little extra prosperity to his resource warehouse.
Having received the Solo Player Room link from Menaldo, I diligently absorbed every thrifty tip and trick they had to offer. Things like taking subcontract work from major clans to earn resources. Or beating up the weaker players nearby, leaving them just barely alive, and periodically raiding them. Or, conversely, protecting those same weak players in exchange for a kind of protection fee. On top of that, tips for picking up extra "resource" quests from factions, and methods for squeezing additional resources out of certain quests.
Thanks to those reclusive sages who pinpointed every useful trick with surgical precision, I figured I could get by just fine for a while without joining any clan.
Of course, the real foundation of that confidence was…
"Never gets old. She's gorgeous."
"I… suppose so?"
As Princess Luca had so elegantly put it, my little treasure of a Kraken-class had taken damage on the level of "getting beaned in the chest-fat mass with a rock," earning it a week of hospitalization. While it was in for repairs, Griyanaar had cheerfully performed one of her delightful biological-component overhauls (unaffiliated pirate content: 55%). The result: the muzzle of its main bio-plasma cannon had come out looking even more massive and imposing than before.
Until now, no matter how well I fought, the bulk of my fleet had been low-grade standard ships — just as Betelgeuse had half-praised, half-mocked me for last time. Against a proper player fleet, we would have melted away without a doubt.
But now, in one-on-one engagements against those player fleets — the so-called "small-scale fleet battles" — our Kraken could finally start pulling its weight. The idea that the "beat up the neighbors" strategy mentioned in the Solo Play Room might actually be viable now, when it wouldn't have been before, was starting to feel freshly real.
Even so, as I'd noted before, players had recently started treating light carriers and battlecruisers as personal vehicles, one apiece — a trend popping up all over the gallery. Complacency was the enemy. So, using the intel on nearby "commanders" that Marianne's pirate friends had scattered and then regrouped with, I searched those nicknames on the gallery to get a sense of their actual combat strength.
While I was at it, I also wanted a precise picture of the overall player power situation…
But the moment I opened the community and started digging into the power landscape, about an hour into browsing the gallery, a thought hit me.
Huh. They're stronger than I expected.
Contrary to the hope circuit I'd been burning so brightly, the players' combat power was significantly higher than anticipated.
[Image of a cheerfully grinning toad]
Hate fluff? Straight to the point.
As of now, roughly 40% of the total player base — hell, closer to half — have hit base level 6 or higher.
And about 10% of all players have gone past 6 and built level 7 bases.
They're not just building them, either. They're starting to construct and field capital ships like carriers and battleships for real.
Unless you're one of those uncles who stole an NPC ship and rides that around, the rest of us are looking at roughly the same picture.
What? Over 40% are at the same level as me?
Seeing a post claiming that a full 10% — not even 1% — were ahead of me, I genuinely struggled to hide my dismay. But after thinking it through for a moment, I realized that was actually the obvious outcome.
Most players had simply been luckier than me. They'd been rolling around with SSS-grade superhumans and ships dangling off them like ornaments, snowballing far earlier and harder than I ever could. Compared to me — who'd been twisting myself into knots playing this game with a single Overseer and three or four superhumans — the gap was so extreme that comparison itself was almost insulting. The other side should be the one feeling embarrassed.
And that wasn't even the real problem.
Heh heh heh. That guy's the weakest among our rankers. (4)
Of course, everyone already knew about this particular issue. The heavens knew, the earth knew, and Jessica knew. Namely: my godforsaken, sabotage-packed, absolute garbage luck.
To be precise, the problem was that my gacha luck wasn't just bad — it was nonexistent.
If I'd had even average luck, after snagging the Overseer from that newbie whose name I'd already forgotten, I wouldn't have been forced onto the defensive later. With a proper hero roster providing fleet command buffs and support, I could have literally played the overlord without even fighting. No joke.
Reality, however, had other plans. Luck never showed up, the gacha tanked, and by the time I should have been doing overlord things with the Overseer, my hero lineup was in no condition for swagger. I finally managed a base upgrade and pulled Griyanaar — the all-purpose support — but barely any time after the professor arrived, a new event kicked off. Overlord antics? I was too busy for any of that. And once the event finally ended, other players had grown so much that mindlessly stomping around with the Overseer plus Belial-Griyanaar combo was no longer an option.
Everything I'd pulled from the gacha since then, if I was being brutally honest, amounted to Partia — who, comedy value aside, was basically just Ignis Mk-II. Everything else had been total duds. The ships that should have formed the backbone of my fleet alongside the Overseer never came. So even though I'd recently pulled a Kraken — a massive assault combat carrier with a one-in-a-million, 0.0001% drop rate — the only things I had to escort it and hold the fleet's midsection together were a single Overseer-class heavy cruiser I'd been wringing dry like leftover bone broth, plus various light cruisers and destroyers bought from the Favor of the Reward shop.
And those event-shop ships? Everyone else already had them. They were baseline gear — not even worth mentioning as an advantage. Which meant I'd have to buy ships through the trade window instead. But ships there were expensive to begin with, and more importantly, I didn't have the Gold on hand to make those deals.
Well — it wasn't that I had none…