We're Dying, We're Really Dying (3)
I decided to figure out roughly how much of my fleet I'd lost while buying time.
Of course, someone might look at that choice and go, Wait, why aren't you just sitting behind the barrier and unilaterally pounding them? — but...
...and the wiki tab I'd just been reading had it all laid out that helpfully.
With nothing else I could do right now, I figured I might as well check the fleet situation and take stock of our losses.
Alright. Fleet status.
Looking at the results — thirty-five ships reduced to eleven, a massacre so thorough it was almost pitiful — I immediately started slamming out new hulls at the shipyard to claw back some combat power. Then I threw every resource mining ship still inside the base, which doubled as repair vessels, into emergency repairs on the ships that had been torn apart in the last engagement.
The one silver lining in this disaster was that while they'd been butchering us, the enemy fleet had lost a solid chunk of their heavy cruisers and small craft. The roughly two hundred fifty ships they'd brought had dropped below two hundred while reducing us from seventy-eight to eleven.
Of course, while I was building battlecruisers, laying down new hulls, and repairing everything that still floated, I'd also committed every last transport destroyer to the effort — which meant our resource intake rate had gone completely to hell.
"Commander, we're running out of resources!"
Jessica's half-screamed report was right — we were one step from a resource-zero fleet debuff — but then:
Total Resources Acquired:
Minerals 58,300 · Rare Resources 2,700
"Go finish things off with these."
"Ah — yes, sir."
Between the gacha disasters and the leftover stock from the old event shop, I still had resource boxes sitting around. The shortfall got patched by cracking open whatever remained.
And the critical detail about the barrier settings: it only blocked the base teleport. Ships with their own independent teleport capability were a different story.
"Kraken — show them what you can do!"
A vessel like the Kraken, with its own teleport ability, could freely send fighters and missiles outside the barrier. The moment the cooldown ended, I teleported a full salvo of missiles and torpedoes straight into the enemy fleet's face.
The enemy ships, still ringed around the base like they'd gone off for a nap, were slow to react — and lost about ten hulls for free. That, however, convinced them the barrier must already be down and that I'd just attacked them, so they immediately answered with a full volley.
Not that it mattered. The barrier was still up. The instant their barrage finished...
I had no idea who specifically, but one of the enemy fleet players had clearly sent that anonymous message.
At the same moment, over in the Unity Clan, they were losing their minds after another ten-odd ships vanished to that broken teleport missile-and-torpedo spam. But only for a moment. Once they thought it through and realized the base barrier would drop in just a few more hours — and that the Kraken's teleport attack had already spent itself and couldn't fire again — they tightened their encirclement from every direction without a single gap. They were determined to keep Icarus from abandoning the base and fleeing with whatever fleet he had left the second the barrier fell, and to erase the man who'd thoroughly screwed them over.
Of course, while they were locked into that, the rest of the player base already had results coming in — success or failure, something — and yet Unity, nearly a full week into this, still hadn't sent a single update. A Humanity Clan liaison had come by to figure out what the hell was going on, took one look at the situation, and slapped his own forehead.
"Are you people joking? We told you to take his surrender — who the hell said to just grind down that valuable force into scrap?!"
He tore into them for completely shredding a rank-three player's combat power while torching their own fleet in the process. But looking at eyes already full of nothing but spite — ships lost, and still getting unilaterally beaten even after they'd thrown the first punch — he just shook his head, told them to do whatever they wanted, and left.
And then, finally, the next morning — the moment my precious base barrier dropped...
"Fuck, NOW!!!!"
"NOW!!!"
"Uwaaah."
Against roughly one hundred eighty Unity Clan ships — still disgustingly numerous, but thoroughly chewed up by continuous air raids — I took my fifteen-ship fleet, including the newly built hulls, plus the base defense systems, and settled in for a thoroughly, utterly miserable fight.
We're Dying, We're Really Dying. (3)
It should go without saying, but I had absolutely no intention of abandoning this small, precious base. The Kaiju Princess was still here — ditch the place, and what would that do to our standing with the Kaiju faction?
So I stripped every last resource I had left and threw it into base defense turrets, free-floating unmanned attack drone hangars, and every other instantly constructible defensive installation I could slam down, locking into a pure holdout posture.
Since we were fighting a genuine siege from the base itself, there was no such thing as a mobile battle. My small, adorable little ships — the ones I'd just finished building — were destined to serve as meat shields for the big, beautiful capital ships.
And if there was one truly critical fact about base defense combat, it was this: contrary to the "we'll just smash the whole base" line users loved to throw around whenever they got bored, a player's base outer wall had durability so absurd that no mere fleet could knock it down. Per the lore, these were colossal space structures built on the principle of well, it doesn't move anyway, so might as well armor the hell out of it — to the point that even the oversized siege batteries on the assault battleships that could crack base barriers couldn't put a scratch on the walls. System-level protection, supposedly.
The net result was a gigantic obstacle called "my base" sitting right in the middle of open space, and our fight turned into something that genuinely looked like a medieval siege.
Long-winded setup aside, the short version:
— BOOM! KRA-ANG!
"Commander, Defense Turrets Three and Four have been destroyed!"
"Drone Hangar One destroyed! Drone Swarm Forty-One has been wiped out!"
— KRAAAAAANG!
"Enemy fleet fire has hit VLS System Nine! System going silent!"
"..."
Oh, for the love of—
While the immobile base chewed through its own defensive systems tanking the fleet's firepower, my remaining fifteen ships were locked in a cheerful little dance party with enemy vessels that had closed all the way into point-blank range.
And even in the middle of all that, my absurdly overpowered Kraken and the supers were tearing across the battlefield like absolute monsters.
— KRUDUDUDUK! KWA-JIJIJIK... KRAAAAAAAAAANG!!!!
"UOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!"