Commander, Have You Done Your Work? (2)
Unfortunately, it wasn't that Marianne had been subdued by me and then surrendered. She had risen as the Pirate Empress from the very start on the premise that she would submit to me—and that, it seemed, was the whole problem.
Because Marianne remained a faction leader in her own right, the disaster of her never actually joining our base had come to pass.
To cut straight to the conclusion: the Marianne currently at our base, judged purely on her raw performance as a unit, came with none of the free, point-cost-free, player-controllable fleet that the old veterans used to tout when explaining the Pirate Empress. And though she was labeled SS-grade, the real Marianne—who was actually far superior to most SSS-grades—couldn't be fielded as a character either. A thoroughly awkward situation.
Of course, someone unfamiliar with all this might ask, Then what about the permanent stationing and deployment of Leonard and the pirate fleets?
Those guys did fit the "doesn't cost points" part mentioned above—but they were absolutely not units I could control myself. If I had to put a label on them, friendly neutral units?
The important point, at any rate, was this: Anyway, I can't use Marianne either.
"That's how it is. Got it?"
"Ah—yes."
I was drilling into Jessica the fact that, at this stage where we had no proper solution to our problems, there was nothing we could do about it—while making her feel that we somehow had to roll that snowball we'd completely wrecked in the early game once more, and catch up to the other top-ranked players even now.
But just as I was about to put some serious effort into crafting that grand strategy—
Slump.
Pat, pat.
Even as Belial casually patted Marianne's shoulder, I had to feel a pang in my chest at the sight of those shoulders visibly sagging.
Sniff…
The next day.
A person couldn't stay gloomy forever, so I was currently putting my energy into the battlecruisers under construction. I'd run through the daily quests first and was now taking some time to figure out what to do next.
But that particular bout of fretting didn't last long.
I was mid-ponder, striking a commanderly pose in the command seat, when—
"Commander, do you have a moment?"
"Hm? What's this about all of a sudden?"
"Well… Princess Luka and Marianne say they have something they'd like to ask you."
Jessica's sudden question had me wondering what was going on—until the news that the representatives of two factions wanted to see me hit. For a second I thought a new quest might be about to drop. But if that were the case, a message or something would already have been floating in front of my face by now. Still wearing a thoroughly skeptical expression, I agreed to meet them anyway.
And yet, the moment those two actually stood before me, I found myself handed a pair of neat little objectives from our two allied factions—from a direction I had never once expected.
"Icarus. There is something I have been most curious about since arriving here… but first, I shall yield the floor to Her Majesty!"
"Thank you, Princess. Ahem—Oppa?"
"Hm?"
"Why did you go and build a Mercenary Office, and then never use it even once?"
Uh.
"And we are of the same mind! You went so far as to grant us permission—so why have you built neither a breeding pen for our forces, nor even a production facility for biological ships?!"
Ah.
The instant I heard those two out, two quest windows popped up in front of my eyes as if they'd been waiting for their cue.
Oh, for the love of—
Those quests made it abundantly clear that I had more than one or two things I needed to do right now, and they shoved the point home with the brazen insistence that fretting over anything else was a waste of time.
Well, at least I had work to do now.
"I'm soooorryyy!"
Being busy had been part of it, sure—but the fact remained that I simply hadn't done it. I owned up to my mistake and decided to knock out the quests as fast as possible.
Right. Just take them one at a time.
And the first item on the list was, naturally, the easiest and most convenient one: hiring a mercenary company. Except—
"Jessica, how many resources does it take to hire one mercenary company?"
"An average company with about one cruiser, two destroyers, and five small craft runs roughly a thousand minerals a day."
"That's expensive."
Listening to Jessica—rabbit ears twitching, jacket half-draped over her shoulders—I said as much, while quietly wondering whether there might be room to negotiate.
But no matter how realistic this world had become, its foundation was still a game. If I let that kind of intent show too plainly…
"Aaanh?"
"You never hired anyone this whole time, and now you want a discount? You've got some nerve, punk!"
"I'll kill you!"
"Oh, shit."
—yakuza slang would come flying at me on the spot, and at the same time—
The current state of the Mercenary Office is quite poor—negotiation is impossible!
The only reason they are still putting up with you is because the Pirate Empress Marianne herself is present. It would be wise not to provoke any unnecessary trouble!
—a warning message telling me not to pull any stupid stunts would pop up in front of my eyes with a cheerful little chime. That much was certain.
Having briefly indulged that little flight of fancy, I shook my head and told Jessica—who was still waiting—to hire one of our pirate mercenary uncles and have them run reconnaissance of the surrounding sectors.
There was just one thing I hadn't anticipated.
"Commander, the price is higher than what I knew."
"…What?"
"They say they won't do it for less than fifteen hundred a day."
"…"
They'd quoted one rate, and the moment I was forced into hiring them for the quest, they jacked up their fee—a pure merchant move. My head went blank on the spot.
Wow. So that's the level you need to operate at if you're going to run a mercenary business…!
Thanks to that, when I later hired myself out as a mercenary to some player clan, I was able to draw on this experience and double my own asking price. Unfortunately, that was still a far-off future.