Have You Come to Your Senses? (1)
Unfortunately, by the time our pink-and-perky Betelgeuse caught on to that particular fact, the distance was so vast she judged proper "command" would be impossible.
Not long after she set out with the commanders—the users who would lead her and her forces—toward a closer position…
"Uh, Lady Betelgeuse."
"Hmm?"
"The Pirate Empress says she's got something to say to the clan leaders who joined this war. She's inviting them to a nearby pirate fortress."
"…Th-the Pirate Empress?"
Marianne—the same woman who had thoroughly re-educated her with genuine, full-force punches to the gut—was summoning her and her subordinate clan leaders.
Once they actually went and sat through the group discussion, there was nothing particularly special about it. They simply listened to a rundown of Humanity's movements and the Earth Federation main force's activity, and for a brief moment Betelgeuse felt relieved.
She was just starting to think there wouldn't be any further problems—even as her lower abdomen kept throbbing and twitching at the slightest provocation, and she privately nursed dreams of revenge for the day she'd been "trained" like that—when…
"Ah, and could the clan leader of the Loki Clan stay behind for a moment? I have something to say as a fellow leader."
"…Ah."
"I hear you're the most powerful force among the commanders… so there are a few opinions I'd like to exchange."
Marianne had singled her out. And on top of that—
"Oooh, as expected of our clan leader!"
"Fighting!"
"Go cut a deal with the Empress and come back. We're counting on you!"
"…"
You absolute bastards.
Bolstered by the completely useless cheers of her clan members, she found herself locked into a private one-on-one meeting. Having no real choice, she went to see Marianne—and after enduring "this and that richly violent experience"…
She awakened to her identity as a dark-hearted masochist, then spent so much mental energy resisting that revelation that Antares's true objective—which had already been a lower priority—simply fell by the wayside and faded into nothing.
And so, while Betelgeuse, the one person who should have been stopping Antares, was momentarily walking the path of a dark-hearted masochistic deviant as the price of that encounter, the plans of Antares and the Humanity Clan proceeded without a single interruption.
Of course, calling it completely smooth would have been a stretch.
"Man, people just aren't following along at all."
"Honestly, looking at the current situation, isn't it normal to assume the real main battlefield is going to be a full-scale war with the Loki Clan?"
"Tsk."
They had been operating so secretly that most users genuinely believed the decoy theater was the real war. On top of that, the "trolling" Betelgeuse's Loki Clan had been pulling made it continuously difficult to deploy Humanity Clan users into the Central District.
"No choice, then. We'll have to mobilize the subordinate clans instead of our own people."
In place of the Humanity Clan's direct members—who could barely move under the weight of trolling and containment—they decided to call up the lower clans that had secretly sworn loyalty, and use them to attack the neutral users in the Central District and the surrounding border regions as planned.
The leadership also figured that solo players, by their nature, tended to lose in one-on-one fights against users who had specialized around a clan structure.
"Better to assign at least two or three users per target, right?"
"Of course. Those people all used to solo—they're experts at one-on-one."
To guarantee operational success, they were carefully arranging deployments so that the users invading solo players would always maintain at least a two-to-three-times numerical advantage.
And while they were working through the details—
"Hold on, Clan Leader. Doesn't Rank 3 live around here?"
"He does. Tsk…"
The moment Icarus—sitting square in the middle of the Central District like he owned the place—entered their field of view, the mood shifted.
"Looking at the posts that went up in the gallery, two or three people won't even scratch him."
"Between the stuff he posts himself and the old threads where other users whined after fighting him… yeah, that's pretty much a given."
"Agreed."
Remembering both the weight of a two-time Rank 3 title and the recent "warning notice" that had gone up in the gallery, they made a decision.
"Alright then. Let's throw an entire five-man mini-clan at him."
"That means we won't be able to hit one of the other user bases, though."
"We're already assigning two or three per person—it's not like we can invade everyone at once anyway. Better to do this one properly."
"Plus that guy's base has the Pirate Empress's fleet and a mercenary company on unlimited hire… at minimum, you have to count him as worth two people on his own."
"Agreed."
Refusing to get careless, they decided to commit an entire small clan solely to crushing Icarus.
And our Icarus, who had no way of knowing any of this even in his dreams…
"Hwaaaaaaah—!"
"C-Commander, please try to calm down first…"
"This is fucking rigged!!"
—was staring at the Eagle Five Brothers charging through his gates without so much as a word of warning, and screaming through tears.
And if Icarus had known the full picture, he would have had even more reason to understand what it meant for blood to rush the wrong way through your veins.
Because even though a fair number of solo rankers were stationed in the Central District where Humanity's offensive was about to begin… the only person who had five entire people assigned to him was Icarus.
Of course, Humanity had their own reasons for that particular measure.
The biggest one was simple: none of the other solo rankers in the Central District had ever displayed the kind of "overwhelming power against other users" that Icarus had. And even beyond that, the individual circumstances of Icarus and the other ranker users were quite different.
Take Menaldo, Rank 10.
Like Icarus, he was a pure solo player. True to his looks, he played like a cold city wolf—a lonely, self-contained style that left relatively little to worry about. But unlike Icarus, while he certainly beat up the users around him, he had never shown anything "overwhelming" enough to become a gallery sensation.
He simply didn't draw aggro. The judgment was that three rankers from inside Humanity's top 1,000 would be more than enough to handle him.
And as for Indefatigable, Rank 7… his situation was rather different.
"Why aren't we attacking Indefatigable?"
"Are you insane? That guy's one of our external mercenaries."
"Ah."
He had chosen the Earth Federation as his faction from the start. Officially neutral, but in practice a pro-Earth Federation asset who had handled a considerable number of commissions for the Humanity Clan—making him a friendly power.
"Well then, we'll be counting on you again this time~"
"I don't know what you're up to, but if you touch me or any of my acquaintances here, I won't let it slide."
"Oh, of course not."
They cleanly signed a mutual non-aggression pact. And to make sure he wouldn't answer any help requests from "acquaintances of acquaintances," they sweetened the deal with a modest package of resources…
> [It's a modest offering, but…]
> You have accepted the trade.
"Yeah, this level of courtesy is solid."
"Hahaha."
"Alright. I don't know what you're planning, but I'll just sit tight."
"That's more than enough."
A little Gold on the side, and the line was drawn—he would not intervene in this affair.
As for Laura, Rank 5, she oddly received the same treatment as Menaldo, Rank 10—about three people assigned to her.
And because of that, grumbling started circulating internally: even if they were putting three on Rank 10, dumping another three on Rank 5 felt a little off.
"Three on Rank 10, and then another three on Rank 5?"
"Even so, that's a bit…"
"What if the people we send end up getting wrecked and invaded in reverse?"
The clan tasked with deploying against Laura was especially horrified, so whether they liked it or not, Humanity needed to offer an explanation for the personnel decisions.
Of course, Humanity wasn't staffed by complete idiots. There were solid reasons for assigning the numbers the way they had…