Pirates' Rampage
Around the time the community started spinning Icarus's newly acquired SSS-grade into a slightly different kind of bait thread, another corner of the forums had already moved on. Rather than dwell on the man who'd just set a double-SSS record, they had something far more pressing to talk about.
I Made an SSSSSSSSS-Grade (5)
Okay But Now Is Probably Not the Time to Flex SSS Pulls (26) <
Comment Censorship Off (1)
A far more practical piece of bait.
At this stage of the game, the real concern was the appearance of enemies that no player's current fleet could hope to face head-on. And since the evidence wasn't some AI-generated concept art from the game's lore — it was actual, proper screenshots — every user who confirmed the situation reacted with the same stunned disbelief, even if the intensity varied from person to person.
Of course, mixed in among them were the genuine newbies — and the grandpas whose memories had long since checked out — all of them staring at the destroyer situation in pure confusion. Which promptly earned them this:
Taking pity on those poor newbies and dementia cases, a handful of community veterans immediately spun up info posts to feed them the feedback they needed.
With SpeedWagon's detailed breakdown hitting the board, the clueless newbies who'd been sitting there in a daze erupted into a chorus of panicked replies. The gallery's SSS-grade bait threads got buried overnight, and the entire community's focus pivoted hard toward the pirates' sudden power spike.
And separate from the newbies' meltdown entirely, the old veterans who'd been playing this game for years finally grasped exactly what kind of state the world they'd been dragged into was in.
The thought that the entire player base could get wiped here if they weren't careful made every veteran clamp down hard on their nerves and start taking this seriously.
And by the time the community's raging dumpster fire had finally begun to settle down, our Icarus — no, I — had at last reached the point where I could understand and operate the manual. "Approximately."
"Alright. I got this down perfecly."
"Commander, your speech pattern right now suggests you have understood absolutely nothing. Are you certain you're alright?"
"Obviosly."
...The truth was, I had not understood it properly at all. That was my current status. But the blazing gallery threads and chat logs made one thing crystal clear: I couldn't afford to sit here glued to a manual forever.
And more importantly than anything else...
Uegh. Shit.
As that damned quest made abundantly clear — the situation I was staring down right now was the exact same one that, back when I'd been deep in my prime playing this game, had shattered the mental fortitude of countless players.