Don't Fight Head-On Like a Coward—Just Snipe Fair and Square (2)
"We've got seven battlecruisers and ten heavy cruisers sitting there like cripples. What the hell's the point of peeling off with just the ships that can still move…?"
"They've only got two battlecruisers, and if you check the wiki tab, the Kraken and the Overseer both pack battleship-grade firepower on their own."
"The merc companies took a beating, sure, but Icarus's main force barely lost anything except fighters. We charge in, we get massacred."
The consensus that the idea was pure fantasy won out fast, and the suggestion was shut down on the spot.
Once the decision was locked in, the Unity Clan's main fleet—battlecruisers that couldn't move anyway—resolved never to get played by Icarus again. They threw mobility out the airlock entirely and settled into a full fleet-formation fortress… or rather, a pure anti-air defensive screen, digging in for a thorough holdout.
But while they were busy manicuring that formation and accidentally running a base-building tycoon sim, a frantic chat dump from the light-carrier player Marshmallow slammed into their screens.
Icarus's fleet had pulled back the moment it started losing the gunnery duel, so of course the light-carrier player should have been on his way back too—alive, having survived the scrap with Icarus's detachment.
Instead he was spamming the channel with pure filth, and the other four members of the Unity Clan could only stare at Marshmallow's meltdown in confusion.
Then, right after that—
The moment the images arrived from Marshmallow—still hammering out typos in pure panic—they understood.
Icarus had realized he couldn't smash them head-on, so he'd staged a clean retreat toward base, looking for all the world like he was going to repair his damaged ships. In reality, he wasn't repairing anything. He'd taken his entire fleet, accepted the damage, and slammed it straight into Marshmallow's light-carrier group—the force that had been operating separately on a flanking route.
And at that same moment, while the Unity Clan was still processing that they'd been completely baited—
"Aigoo, seven battlecruisers dumping a full volley really is disgusting."
"Still, once the enemy main force is pinned down, the whole battle opens right up."
I was riding pure euphoria as I drove my entire fleet into the enemy formation that four merc companies and one squadron had locked in place—unable to advance, unable to fall back.
"For the Saviorrrrr!!!!"
"You insane bitch!"
Sure, farming free kills with well-grown fighters was fun in its own way. But at the end of the day, if you were a real man, no-guard mindless brawling was the golden rule among golden rules. And when almost none of the damage was landing on your side while the other side was just getting beaten to pulp—how refreshing was that supposed to feel?
On top of that, the earlier fighting had been at such absurd range that nobody except Pashtura—who could actually throw dreadnought-grade beam cannons—had anything useful to do. Now we weren't just closing to knife-fight distance. We were past that.
"Commander! An enemy destroyer is ramming our cruiser's bridge!"
"Call the nearby cruisers and sink it."
"Commander, then we'll commence our assault!"
"Yeah, yeah. Looks like Partia's already gone full charge anyway."
Boarding pods were dumping superhumans into enemy hulls, and ships on both sides were ramming each other—on purpose or by accident—until the whole engagement had turned into absolute chaos.
"We will not give this ground!"
"Hmph! Give it up!"
Ignis, whipping her new energy blades—slash-and-whip hybrids—through the corridors in an even more spectacular display than usual.
"All units, charge. Seize this ship's command deck and engines."
Belial, finally free to board again now that I was handling fleet command, slammed not into some random hull but straight into the enemy light carrier the instant she dropped, carving through compartments at a ruthless pace.
"Eek—get away!"
"Gah!!!"
…And somehow, even though she was on our side, the enemy started looking more pitiable by the second.
Partia, true to form, had already charged in on her own and turned one enemy cruiser into a slaughterhouse.
"Kyahahahaha! It's a carnival~!"
BWOOOOOOOM!!!
Pashtura, Trigger Happy fully active, indiscriminately dumping battleship-grade beam fire into everything that wasn't friendly and turning the field into a massacre.
"How about it, Commander? The new shipboard combat beast I built for this?"
"Oh…"
And last of all, Griyanaar—who had insisted she was overdue for some action—buried inside the torso of a massive Ulquiorra-like monster, punching into a destroyer and simply demolishing it from the inside with overwhelming force.
All five superhumans were committed to boarding actions. On top of that, the Kraken had swapped its fighters for dozens of thick, thrashing tentacles and was supporting the close-range brawl directly. Against a fleet that was basically nothing but light escorts around a single light carrier, our battlecruiser-led force was simply too much to hold.
To be fair, the other player had come here specifically to fight me, so he was a ranker in his own right. He snapped his ship placements around on the fly, threw surviving fighters from the air battle with the Kraken into counterattacks, and even rammed his precious light carrier into our charging ships—eating the damage just to shove them back.
"Who said you could seize our Commander's ship?!"
"Tch. So the other side has superhumans of their own."
"How dare you. The price for attacking our Commander's vessel is death."
"Those pathetic little claws of yours—I'll carve every last one off."
His capital ships carried S-grade and higher superhumans as a baseline. The light carrier Ignis had stormed even had an SSS-grade holding the defense. He was throwing every card he had left, clawing for any resistance he could manage.
But no matter how hard the enemy player thrashed—
Our precious little Kraken, exactly as the wiki tab promised, was absurdly efficient in a "small-scale fleet engagement" like this.
While the battlecruisers and the rest of the fleet covered its weak flanks and rear, the Kraken closed in with a mass five times the Overseer's—no, pressed this tight it looked closer to ten—and dozens of tentacles that hit like heavy-cruiser main guns at point-blank range. It scattered thousands of beast-type boarding pods and short-range shotgun missiles and simply charged.
The enemy, fleets tangled too badly to run, was still trying to fight when that same Kraken lunged straight at the light carrier. They hammered it with the 250mm CIWS and anti-ship missiles that came standard on anything cruiser-class or heavier—
And then, in pure panic, they swung the light carrier's bow aside and rammed a nearby destroyer into the Kraken just to buy it a second of life.
A regular destroyer clearly wasn't going to cut it, so they sent a "heavy destroyer" layered in what looked like gacha armor plating. To the Kraken, that was just a crispy tonkatsu cutlet that had grown one-point-five times larger.
Our Kraken opened its enormous maw, swallowed the heavy destroyer whole, and chewed it to pieces without breaking stride.
And of course, once that heavy destroyer had been reduced to a single meal without buying even a single second—
The light carrier, still desperately trying to turn, only succeeded in presenting its broad flight deck and flank to the Kraken in full.
It dumped every remaining CIWS mount, every anti-ship missile, even the last of its surviving strike craft into the Kraken's face. Our Kraken, with frontal armor that rivaled a battleship's, ignored that pathetic resistance and drove straight in.
Under the full-force headbutt, the enemy player's light carrier had its flight deck cave in with a sickening crunch. It couldn't withstand a mass so much greater than its own. Its spine—no, its entire hull—snapped clean in two, and the ship went down.
Don't fight head-on like a coward—just snipe fair and square. (2)
Our Super Kraken, after colliding with a light carrier at full speed, walked away with nothing worse than a few scratches on its frontal carapace. The light carrier, on the other hand—spine broken, internal organs exposed—never got a chance at auto-repair or anything else. Its long, eventful ship-life simply ended on the spot.
"AAAAAAAGH!!!"
Watching his precious little light carrier get turned into a light / carrier, Marshmallow—the commander who owned it—suffered a complete mental collapse. He tried to salvage whatever ships he still had left, abandoning the front entirely and punching an emergency warp back to base.
But for all of Marshmallow's desperate intent, the fleet's reverse charge simply would not happen.
"Why won't it retreat when I hit retreat?!"
Unlike Marshmallow, who was sobbing with his psyche in pieces, there was a very good reason his ships couldn't run even if they wanted to.
And that reason was none other than—