We're Dying, We're Really Dying

Among the heavy cruisers that had gone up in flames alongside the repair ships under Icarus's surprise attack, Goliath had owned a full three of them. On top of that, his ships had held the center of the battle line — which meant he'd taken the absolute worst of the beating in Icarus's fleet engagement. Three of his battlecruisers were on the verge of total wreckage, and he had maybe ten heavy cruisers left to his name. The words he'd spat out in a flash of pure rage were the last straw.

Marshmallow, who had spent the whole fight getting mocked as a carrier scrub by that very same Goliath, took one look at the state of him and snapped. The last thread of his patience gave way, and he transformed on the spot into a full-blown gallery warrior, ready to brawl it out in the chat window.

Faced with that mess, Bayraktar and Dolphin — who, naturally, had already had more than enough of Marshmallow's whining — kept their mouths shut. At the same time, they were quietly rooting for Goliath to win…

And then, right at that moment.

RamuRamu had been quietly holding the clan together this whole time, covering for users who'd shown up with nothing but capital ships slapped together on the cheap. And now, with both sides' screw-ups having literally shredded his fleet to pieces, his absolute fury erupted — and the chat brawl died instantly.

In its place…

RamuRamu's genuine, unfiltered rage — a full-blown chat spam rampage — turned the Unity Clan chat into something that felt less like a strategy channel and more like a people's tribunal.

And once RamuRamu's absolute fury mode finally wound down…

Somehow, the Unity Clan managed to get the situation under control. Their losses were staggering, no question — but from an objective standpoint, they still held an absolute advantage, and they knew it.

All kinds of discussion followed after that, but the summary was simple: Our AA is still more than enough, so we can turtle here and hold.

Once the battlecruisers and other capital ships recovered their mobility, the small ships would tank Icarus's air raids with their hulls while the capital ships pushed all the way to his base and crushed it under raw firepower. It was a clean, elegant plan — and for the first time, the Unity Clan, RamuRamu included, whose morale had been quietly fraying, reached a unanimous agreement.

They settled into a hedgehog-like space defense posture and prepared to deliver a seven-hit combo of battlecruisers straight into Icarus's face.

But a few hours after that brilliant idea…

Icarus, fresh from a nice long nap, came back and started raining chip-damage air raids with the Kraken plus light carriers.

"AAAAAARGH—! Air raid warning! Air raid warning!"

"Commander! Snap out of it!"

No matter how tightly they held their space defense, the fighter raids had grown far denser than before — and on top of that…

The Kraken's once-a-day teleport assault kicked off yet again. Five players found themselves getting toyed with in real time by a single user — a grotesque spectacle that was fraying every last nerve they had.

The one silver lining: their sole light carrier had gone through explosive level-ups over the course of the brutal fighting. That already well-grown light carrier was now holding its own in an even air battle against the farming Kraken squadrons, despite being outnumbered — which at least meant they could weather the first wave of those vicious Kraken fighter assaults.

But no matter how high that light carrier's level climbed, the enemy was a broken ship that only showed up in the final tiers. Everything else they had left could do nothing but dig in with pure grit and spite, using AA formations to buy time.

Of course, a mass fleet AA formation built from five players' fleets was no joke — there was a reason Icarus had thrown light-carrier fighters at them first, baiting them into dropping their guard and breaking formation. The formation was dumping insane AA buffs across the entire fleet, shredding Icarus's fighters with equal-opportunity brutality whether they belonged to the Kraken or the light carriers…

But the relentless air raids kept coming, and as the clan members had just discovered to their horror, those broken teleport torpedo drops kept landing. For every few hundred fighters they shot down, a destroyer would blow apart — and bit by bit, just a little at a time, their fleet's combat power was being ground away.

That fraying of nerves, however, didn't last long.

The vicious air raids that had stretched on for hours finally ended with Icarus's retreat, most of his fighters shredded. The Unity Clan members let out deep, heaving sighs of relief — they had survived.

Never mind that, in the process, they'd had to pull their support superhumans off repair duty and throw them into defense. Never mind that repairs which should have finished in a few hours from the moment the air raids started had been completely frozen until the very second the raids ended.

It was true that the battlecruiser repairs had been dragged out even further. But with no more air raids and no more of those damn teleport torpedo strikes, the Unity Clan users steeled their resolve: the moment repairs finished, they would rain down a merciless offensive on Icarus with no surrender accepted.

But contrary to that iron will of theirs, the thousands of stray shells and missiles from the air raids had dealt minor hits to the battlecruisers' engine sections…