Commander, Have You Done Your Job? (1)
> Current Remaining Gold: 100G
The whole point was that if players started from absolute zero, they wouldn't be able to farm Gold at all — cash shop or otherwise. All anyone had was the starter Gold the developers handed out.
Beyond that, my only options were to dump my gacha ships directly onto the auction house inside that shop-trade window, or list them and wait forever for some other player to buy them. The problem was that the only gacha ship I actually owned was the Overseer — and putting that up for sale would leave me completely unable to fight fleet battles. So that was a non-starter too.
In short, the gacha had completely tanked, and the auction house had gone right down with it. For someone whose fleet was already a five-alarm dumpster fire, the arrival of the Kraken had been nothing short of a last-ditch lifeline…
And then, out of every problem still piled up in front of me, the final one reared its head.
Namely: Okay, so I pulled a Kraken. Who's going to command it?
I simply didn't have a character who could give my precious little combat carrier the buffs it needed.
Jessica, who had been listening to my entire self-interrogation, gave me a puzzled look and pushed back.
"Commander, couldn't you just put Griyanaar on the Kraken?"
"Griyanaar?"
"Yes. I suspect she'd be thrilled — she'd probably come running to fuse with it on the spot."
Lately she'd been running around going Wow! Tentacles! with a pet tentacle in tow, and the more time passed, the deeper that purple-haired, scrawny little professor had sunk into the path of extreme modification and increasingly unhinged appetites. Thinking back on her gloomy little figure, I had to admit Jessica probably had a point.
If I actually floated the idea, she'd likely try to relocate her entire lab from the existing biology research facility straight into the Kraken's bridge — which was also its brain — or declare she was going to become a perfect organism and fuse her body with the thing entirely.
But that wasn't the issue. More importantly, I had no particular need to put Griyanaar on the Kraken in the first place. I shook my head firmly.
"I'll admit I'm deeply curious what kind of tentacle feature she'd film once she boarded the Kraken… but I have no intention of putting her on it right now."
"Uh… why not?"
At that, not only Jessica but also Belial — who had been talking with Marianne about something over by the command post — glanced our way with mild interest. I figured a brief explanation was in order.
"It's simple. Griyanaar's totem buffs are shared across the entire fleet."
"Is that so? But back when you had the Overseer, you stationed Griyanaar on that ship like a permanent fixture."
That was when I realized why Jessica was confused.
Right. From the outside, it would look like Griyanaar had some ship-specific buff that made me lock her onto the Overseer.
The reality had been nothing of the sort.
"Back then the Overseer had been modified so heavily that it became unstable. I didn't have a choice."
"Unstable? There was a system for that?"
There was.
To stop brain-dead veterans from stacking gear and mods until their rotten old corvettes could one-shot a newbie's light or medium battleship, the developers had built a system where the more excessive modifications you piled onto a ship, the more catastrophically the odds of something going wrong skyrocketed.
The Overseer was already a pure firepower specialist with everything else hanging by a thread. Once I'd modified it until a single ship hit fleet-level output, even Griyanaar's specialty biocomponents — thirty percent pirate content — and all the durability bypasses she'd slapped on everywhere still weren't enough. Our Overseer had reached the point where it was practically unusable on sortie unless Griyanaar herself was physically glued to it.
"That's why the moment I pulled the Kraken, I ordered the Overseer's modifications stripped and the ship restored to stock condition."
"Ah… I see."
"Anyway, that's not the real issue. The real issue is that I don't have anyone suitable to put on the Kraken."
"What about Belial? If what you want is a fleet command buff, couldn't she just board it?"
The instant those words left our mouths, Belial — still mid-conversation with Marianne — adjusted the collar of her uniform and straightened her posture. That was when I realized I'd never actually shown Jessica why Belial's command buff was meaningless on the Kraken.
"Jessica. Take a look at this."
"At what, exactly…? Oh."
I said it with the energy of someone announcing, Look, a glow-in-the-dark dinosaur! Jessica, still puzzled, checked the status window I'd just opened.
The moment she saw the accuracy and rate-of-fire numbers sitting there in plain text—
"So that's why you said it wouldn't work."
Even a village dog picks up a few verses after three years at a village school. Jessica, who normally had little interest in combat or fleet warfare and didn't know much about either, immediately understood why I hadn't brought Belial up and nodded.
"Exactly. If I were only going to use the Kraken as a pure bombardment ship, maybe. But then most of its armament would be completely wasted."
At our reaction, Belial's shoulders — still busy straightening her uniform — slumped ever so slightly, and something almost melancholy crossed her face. Even so, no was no. I shook my head inwardly and held firm.
"But Commander, it's not like you can just use someone else either, is it…?"
"…That's exactly the problem."
Ignis and Partia had been off the table from the start. Put bluntly, both of them were anti-personnel — or boarding-action — characters. You threw them at enemy ships or used them to repel enemy boarders. They were useless for commanding ships and fleets.
Compared to our reliable, trustworthy Belial, the gap was night and day. How bad was it? If I ordered a forward advance and there was a natural obstacle like an asteroid in the way, Belial would assess it on her own and route around it. Ignis and Partia would simply pour the entire fleet's firepower into the obstacle, pulverize it, and keep charging in a straight line. That was the level we were dealing with.
"What about Pashtura? She's a ranged specialist, so maybe she could help a little…?"
"…If I put a trigger-happy maniac in charge of a ship, don't you think she'd burn through ammunition and strike craft like water?"
"Ah."
"More importantly, Pashtura is a damage dealer too — not a command character."
Pashtura was the same story. She did have personal traits that slightly boosted the accuracy and attack power of whatever ship she boarded, but that "slightly" was genuinely single-digit percentages — barely worth mentioning. In the end, just like Belial, her kit simply didn't mesh with the Kraken.
The longer we sat with it, the deeper our dilemma grew.
Then, after a moment's thought, Jessica smacked her palm with her fist as if something had just come back to her.
"Ah — Commander! Come to think of it, there's Marianne too, isn't there?"
"Marianne?"
The instant Jessica said it, Belial and Marianne — who until a second ago had been facing each other in conversation — both turned their backs on us. Marianne's shoulders gave a little twitch.
They might as well have been made of glass. I felt something hard to put into words, but decided to pretend I hadn't seen either of them and answer Jessica first.
"Honestly, I'd love nothing more than to drop Marianne into our fleet as a commander right this second."
"Is that so."
The moment the words left my mouth, Belial threw an arm around Marianne's shoulders from behind and gave her a reassuring pat. And though it was hard to see clearly past the angle — the gesture Marianne's arm was making looked an awful lot like a silent Yes!
If I left them alone any longer, Marianne was going to start fantasizing about commanding our fleet and living out some cozy, domestic married life. I immediately supplied the reason she couldn't be used.
"But here's the thing. Marianne isn't my subordinate."
"Th… that's true, isn't it? Though Marianne herself seems to feel otherwise."
"The important point is that she isn't my subordinate — which means I can't freely assign her to one of our ships."
"…Ah. I see."
In the original game, Marianne would have been recruited as a subordinate and brought onto the base roster. Once that happened, I could have freely slotted her into the fleet, leveled her however I wanted, and grown her into one of our only two command-type characters — the backbone of the whole operation.