Affinity Starts at Minus One Hundred
Looking purely at performance, she's surprisingly unsuited for frontal power struggles for a latest-release character — she loses fights against most same-grade supers in a straight brawl.
So the first people who pulled her started calling her a useless idiot and even stuck the weird nickname Smegee on her.
But the thing is, Smeragi was never a character designed for frontal power struggles.
She's not there to charge in screaming and wipe the board clean. She's meant to be used like an assassin.
Check the stats and you'll see it — compared to same-grade units, her defense is significantly lower, but her attack power is absurdly high.
You're supposed to exploit that: infiltrate an enemy ship, then rapidly ambush the command staff and any defending heroes, put them in a groggy state, and finish them off.
Charge in yelling like the other melee supers and her fragile body melts on contact.
Sure, if you pair her with a proper support super's aura buff and a melee-buff character, she can do bruiser work to some extent.
But to turn an assassin into a bruiser, you have to commit two extra supers. How easy is that supposed to be?
So if you're a newbie who pulled Smeragi, don't do anything stupid. Just quietly put her on assassination duty.
Outside of combat, as with most melee supers, she has no fleet buffs of any kind.
Ah — but if you station Smeragi at a base or on a ship, she grants a 10% increased chance of blocking other supers' infiltration or assassination attempts. Yeah.
Hmm… an assassin, huh.
Judging purely by the wiki tab's description, she looked like she had pretty solid performance. And that unique ability — or buff, I supposed — was something else. Calling it assassination was one thing, but a character who reduced the success rate of base infiltration? Those weren't exactly common. Her frail body was a drawback, sure…
Not that it particularly matters for our fleet.
We already had tanks sturdy enough to take hits for her. Ignis alone looked squishy on the surface, but her offense-defense balance was solid enough to play bruiser. Pair Smeragi with Partia — the living tank in her muscle form — and the damage output would be absurd. With one SSS-grade and two additional S-grades, we could finally start clearing the higher-difficulty quests the monster side handed out.
Hell yeah. Absolute free real estate.
The thought of nothing but smooth sailing ahead sent my mental happiness circuit spinning into overdrive. Unfortunately, the reality that had actually landed in my lap was considerably less rosy. There were plenty of issues to address, but if I had to pick the single most important one—
"You think we'd submit to the likes of you?"
"Even if our Commander abandoned us, we would never abandon our Commander."
"Hmph-nya. The second I see an opening, I'm escaping and going back-nya."
—it was those three captives. Being prisoners of war, their affinity was low. Catastrophically low.
The problem was serious. After waking up and immediately showing defiance, the three supers had been put back under with anesthetics and a Partia scripture attack. While they were out cold, I'd decided I didn't need a closer look at their faces, left instructions to handle them appropriately, and returned to the command center.
"Whenever I look at stuff like this, I feel like my super-pull luck is actually pretty good."
"I was thinking the same thing, Commander."
Jessica, however, caught the subtle shift in my expression despite the praise.
"Commander, is something bothering you?"
I shrugged, then said what had been on my mind.
"Well… having all three of them isn't a bad thing, exactly."
"Right."
"Still, I was hoping we'd catch people who could actually command a fleet."
"Ah."
As I'd already noted, the quality of my supers was already ranker-tier — I was just short on numbers. So the mere existence of additional supers was something to be grateful for…
"Commander, looking at your face and the way you're talking, it seems like there's another reason."
"Good catch. The real problem is that their affinity is lower than I expected. Way lower."
"Affinity… you mean?"
"Yeah."
When I explained that the three of them were currently too hostile to put to any use — affinity so low it was almost comical — Jessica tilted her head, looking puzzled.
"If their affinity is low, can't you just raise it again?"
"…That's the idea in theory, sure."
"Then what's the actual problem?"
"It's so low that the debuffs alone are bad enough — and the probability of negative events firing is so high that I can't do anything with them as things stand."
The question mark floating over Jessica's head only grew larger, so after a moment of thought I decided on a simple explanation.
"What do you think happens if we deploy them like this?"
"Well, you said negative events, so… they'd probably cause some kind of incident."
"Basically: say we send them out for leveling and affinity grinding, or put them on a ship."
"Yes."
"High chance they either desert on the spot, or hijack the ship and make a run for it."
"…Ah."
And that wasn't even the full list of problems. Since the topic had come up, I decided to walk Jessica through the details.
"There's a high probability of all kinds of negative events beyond that."
"Negative events like what?"
"Breaking out of the brig and sabotaging base facilities. Overloading a ship's reactor and scuttling it. That sort of thing."
"Oh…"
"Or shutting down the base defense systems from the inside. Just off the top of my head, there's a lot."
Jessica's eyes filled with a look that clearly said, why on earth would anyone design it like that. Which, from my perspective, was deeply unfair.
"Jessica, look — originally, when you captured supers like this, affinity didn't start at minus one hundred or minus two hundred."
"Pardon?"
"As far as I know, capturing them just reset affinity. It didn't open at negative one hundred from the jump."
"Ah… is that so."
Clearly, in the time since I'd quit, those damn developers had pushed some bizarre special update. Leaving Jessica's reaction behind, I opened the gallery window to dig through the wiki tab for details — and the moment it loaded, a flood of posts from people in the exact same situation poured in.
I put them on a ship without thinking, just to clear a quest
and they just fucking stole the ship and tried to go back to their own commander
Is this real??