Commander, Have You Done Your Job? (3)
As things stood, all I could do was shed tears at the mercenaries' sheer gall.
After grumbling about those absolute bastards and getting fleeced by their little business stunt of jacking the ransom straight up to one-and-a-half times the original price, I moved on to the Space Monsters' quest — Infrastructure Construction — and started working through the checklist.
And of course, the very first task staring me in the face was building a beast rearing facility to house the needs of our supreme and most exalted Princess Luka, the one who had so generously delivered a Kraken-class into my hands.
> Neural network building growth in progress...
> Standard Beast Rearing Facility
> Time until growth complete: 18 hours 31 minutes 22 seconds
Maybe it was just because this was an early-game structure, but seeing a message that construction would finish in under a day left me oddly moved.
And that was when I noticed — again — that the system had changed from the one I knew.
Originally, if a base was already constructing something, a hard system lock prevented you from starting any other building at the same time…
So why, then?
> Resource Warehouse construction in progress...
> Time remaining: 2 days 1 hour 5 minutes 13 seconds
Somehow, dual construction was now possible.
Lore-wise, putting up a single building was supposed to commit every available worker to that one project, leaving zero spare capacity for anything else — which was why you could only build one thing at a time. And that restriction had always applied even when a commander was raising faction structures, for reasons nobody ever quite explained. If your base was mid-construction, faction buildings were locked out too…
Okay, this is an absolute godsend… but is this another weird bug?
Unlike Marianne's situation — which looked like a bug on the surface but was actually just personal affection doing the work, and therefore not a bug at all — this one felt like it might be the real deal. A quiet dread settled in my gut.
Just in case, I opened the gallery's wiki tab to dig up some information.
And thankfully, it didn't take long to confirm that I wasn't exploiting some broken exploit. I was playing the game completely normally.
Writing this down because the dementia-addled low-spec grandpas, the washed-up veterans who quit and came back, and the newbies all seem to keep getting this wrong.
About three or four months before we got isekai'd in here?
They did a QoL update. Base settings stayed the same, but faction buildings got reworked under the concept that each faction dispatches its own labor force to construct them separately.
Oh, and for the record — Space Monsters are all living organisms, so they put in a setting where those structures just grow on their own.
…Somehow every sweet update in the book dropped while I was gone.
I'd taken every deliberate nerf the game could throw at me, abandoned the cash I'd already sunk into it, and quit — and now it felt like the game had clawed its way back to life on the backs of players just like me. Reading about the game's so-called "normalization" on the wiki left a faintly bitter taste I couldn't quite shake.
Anyway, not a bug — I'll take it!
At least I wouldn't have to suffer some operational hell from the admins for abusing an exploit. I nodded to myself and decided the next order of business was getting the fleet back into proper shape.
Jessica, our black rabbit, flicked those distinctive long ears of hers back and forth and gave me a look of pure confusion at the announcement.
"What exactly are you planning to do with the fleet, sir?"
"Going forward, aside from the remaining Azcran-class ships and about five or six patrol craft for small-scale pirate suppression and recon, every other small vessel gets scrapped. We won't be building any more of them."
"…Excuse me?"
Jessica blinked those red eyes at me, the expression of someone who was fairly certain she'd misheard, her face full of doubt.
That only lasted a moment.
"So go grab Belial and Marianne. Once they're here, we'll work out a more detailed plan."
When I said it firmly, Jessica realized I was completely serious. She nodded, promised to bring them both right away, and left.
Of course, the moment Jessica returned with the two of them and they heard what I had to say, they shoved their objections straight into my face.
"This is dangerous, Commander. No matter how much you favor capital ships and heavy guns… if the enemy is allowed to close the distance, our fleet could be helplessly overrun."
"I agree with Belial. That's the kind of thing only the Earth Federation would do — those people are obsessed with giant warships."
Okay, and why is the Earth Federation catching strays here?
After offering a quiet moment of condolence to the Earth Federation for getting dunked on out of nowhere by Marianne, I spent a brief second wondering where to even start explaining.
That second was all it took. I realized there was no need to turn this into a debate at all.
The reason I wanted to scrap my small ships was simple: we now had a clear, viable replacement for them.
"I'm not doing this without a plan, obviously."
"Well, of course."
"I can personally guarantee the Commander wouldn't act without one."
They said they trusted me, but their eyes told a very different story. I gestured to Jessica, who was standing beside me, and she brought up the holograms I'd prepared earlier with a soft chime.
"Hmm… and this is?"
"The new mercenary company we just acquired. Hired them at fifteen hundred minerals a day."
As an utterly ordinary mercenary fleet — one cruiser, two destroyers, five patrol ships — drifted lazily into view in front of me, the two of them proved they were smarter than me for a reason. One look at my confident expression and the mercenary formation, and they immediately understood what I was driving at.
"Commander… are you planning to fill the small-ship roles exclusively with mercenaries?"
"Yesssss."
"Hmm… won't Oppa's resources get drained dry in no time? Even at a bargain rate, given Oppa's current scale, you'd need at least three or four small pirate bands to cover it."
And for some reason, she was looking at me the way you'd look at Rome handing its border defense over to the Germanic tribes.
Why is she staring at me like that?
For a moment I felt a flicker of bewilderment, not quite understanding the reaction — and then the system chimed in.
…
The moment the event message laid out exactly what the two of them were thinking, I scrambled to explain the full plan in detail.
"Wait, wait — I'm not planning to handle everything with mercenaries!"
"…?"
"Then what?"
They looked at me like the hologram itself was evidence against me. I shook my head and had Jessica pull up a new projection — this one showing a small Space Monster fleet — and pressed on.
"Here's the plan! The lower squadrons, small ships included, get filled out with nothing but mercenaries and mid-to-small Space Monster units!"
"Hmm…"
"And just in case, I'll keep five Azcran-class destroyers and five patrol ships on permanent standby!"
"Ahh."
Once they understood the plan, both of them nodded, looking like it actually made sense.
"Then, Commander — do you intend to fill the remaining fleet capacity exclusively with cruisers and above?"