Surprise, Motherfuckers!
“Commander! Our Kraken did it!”
A ship that only drops at one-in-a-million odds wasn’t rare for nothing.
Even without proper repairs, the Kraken was still far tougher than any ordinary vessel. It charged straight into a ramming attack against a battlecruiser. One heavy cruiser that tried to intercept got shoved right into the battlecruiser, sandwiching it between the two. With nothing but the ramming strike, the Kraken split both the battlecruiser and the heavy cruiser clean in half.
Meanwhile Ignis was busy capturing five enemy destroyers in a row, growing our forces even while the fighting raged. Partia, on the other hand, skipped capture entirely. She pinpointed power cores, rendered ships useless, then decided even boarding pods were a waste of time and simply rode missiles into the fray—muscle-form Partia, of course.
Given the situation, Griyanaar stayed planted at the base, layering support and buff auras over the fleet and defense systems. Pashtura likewise remained at the base, but she used her overwhelming firepower like a guerrilla, hammering away until she finally sank one enemy battlecruiser. And while I was busy with overall command, Belial once again took the remaining fleet and somehow kept it holding together.
Every single one of them was of one heart and one mind, force-feeding every possible “fuck you” to that god-awful five-player alliance.
On top of all that, I received one more bit of help I had completely forgotten about.
“Commander! Enemy troops are landing on the base!”
“Ah.”
No matter how hard we rampaged or how hard the base defense systems fought, the gaps created by all the destruction were inevitable. Assault pods full of boarding parties poured in the same way they seized ships. I immediately dispatched the base’s own garrison to stop the infiltrators. Of course, since they had come in assault pods, ordinary troops would only buy time at best. I was just starting to wonder whether I should pull Griyanaar off buff duty when—
“Oxianor? What’s going on?”
“…!”
To my astonishment, our tentacle gentleman Oxianor was doing exactly what she had promised earlier. She and the kaiju troops her side had produced on their own were holding the line against the enemy invasion for the sake of base defense. Naturally, Oxianor was a command-type similar to Belial, and while she couldn’t match Pashtura she still possessed respectable long-range firepower. I felt a genuine weight lift from my shoulders and threw myself back into the battle.
The problem was that, for all the superiority of our Superhuman forces, the fleet battle was going terribly.
Even with the base and its defense systems drawing aggro, the enemy still outnumbered us more than ten to one. They simply accepted a certain amount of losses and kept shoving forward until the fight turned into pure chaos. And in that kind of free-for-all, our “light carriers”—large but paper-thin—had no chance of lasting.
After hours of continuous combat:
“The light carriers are holding up surprisingly—”
KRAAAAAAANG!!
> Light Carrier No. 1 is going down!
> We can no longer hold the defensive line!
> GYAAAAAAAH!!
> Where the hell are we supposed to retreat to?!
“Commander, Light Carrier No. 1 has been sunk.”
“….”
I hadn’t even finished saying they were somehow hanging on with their fragile hulls when the light carrier we had produced for this very defense was destroyed outright. The other one, captured earlier and therefore higher-leveled, took heavy damage but somehow survived…
> "Commander, fighter consumption is outpacing replenishment rates."
“I’m going insane.”
In the middle of the brawl we had burned through so many fighters that the remaining light carrier was reduced to surplus. Given the situation, it was now being used as nothing more than bait to keep drawing enemy aggro.
My precious trio of battlecruisers wasn’t faring any better. Two of them had been exposed to the full weight of the enemy fleet’s firepower, beaten so badly they sank. As for the last one…
Judging survival impossible, it launched a suicide ramming attack on an enemy battlecruiser and went out in a blaze of glory.
And our absolute unit of a fucking Kraken…
True to its reputation as the strongest ship in small-scale fleet battles, it was spraying missiles, assault pods, dozens of tentacles, and its heavily modified main guns in every direction, farming multi-kills against those clan bastards without mercy.
“Oh shit.”
“Commander! Two enemy battlecruisers are charging the Kraken!!”
Apparently they had nothing left to lose, because the enemy switched from gunnery to ramming. One of them took a perfect crossfire from the Kraken and Pashtura, failed to tank the accumulated damage, and sank on the spot. That left the second one free to complete its charge. The Kraken took a full broadside ram and was left coughing blood, critically wounded.
Fortunately the Overseer—now essentially an unsinkable fortress—and the remaining ships rallied around the Kraken and took over escort duty, so the enemy fleet could no longer land any clean hits on it…
But because of that, air superiority over the base fell completely into enemy hands.
At the entrance to my base, surviving enemy Superhumans and troops were pouring ashore. Ignis and Partia, who had returned for base defense, joined Oxianor and threw themselves into the fight. On top of that, the kaiju side’s self-produced troops and Griyanaar’s thirty-percent-pirate-purity Chimera Soldiers were being thrown into the meat grinder as well.
The problem was that five players had piled on. Even if each of them only brought a handful of SSS-grades, five people pushing together still meant we were critically short on absolute Superhuman numbers. Our defensive line kept getting shoved back. Then an enemy light carrier took catastrophic damage and, instead of retreating, simply docked at our base’s berthing facilities. It started funneling the troops still inside through the docks, opening a second front.
At that point I once again felt, deep in my bones, that five-versus-one was pure bullshit and that there were hard limits to going solo. Still, I refused to give up. I took direct command of the troops and prepared to resist the assault.
To be completely honest, the tide had already turned completely. Holding out any longer would only mean the command center itself getting overrun by sheer numbers, a forced system surrender, and total collapse…
Right then—
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!
An alert blared across the command center’s comms while I was preparing our last stand. I assumed those bastards were about to start teabagging instead of chatting and told Jessica to cut the line…
But the moment she checked the transmission—
“Commander! Commander!”
“Hm?”
“Look! Look over there!”
Jessica was literally hopping like a rabbit, her massive chest and the rabbit ears on her head bouncing wildly. She threw her arms around me and pointed out the command center window. Beyond the glass, a massive teleport signature flared—and a pirate fleet appeared.
“We’ve won!”
Surpriiiiiise, motherfuckeeeeers!!!!
I had never in my life found our space-pirate uncles so reliable.
They arrived right on time. Well done, Pirate Kim. Go forth and set the world on fire.
“What… did they just say?”
Something weird came over the channel in the middle of all that, but whatever.
The fleet that arrived numbered two thousand—no. I had heard that the original relief fleet had collided with another clan and gotten wrecked, so these newcomers were lower-leveled than Leonard’s elite squadron that usually garrisoned my base. In exchange, however, they had brought a grand fleet of over five thousand ships.
Naturally, while the enemy had been busy smashing every last one of my base defenses and reducing my fleet to nothing but the Kraken, the Overseer, and two heavy cruisers, their own forces had not come through unscathed either. The moment the pirates confirmed that their Empress’s “bio-dildo” was in danger, they opened fire with every gun they had and slammed assault pods home without so much as a word of negotiation.
The players who had rammed their Superhumans into my base desperately tried to extract at least those Superhumans in a frantic escape show…