Ships Sometimes Make Excellent Stock Market Materials (1)
But that moment of peace didn't last long.
Before long, Griyanaar came marching in with an extremely detailed PowerPoint presentation and launched into a proud, exhaustive explanation of exactly how she had trained and modified Smeragi.
There was just one minor problem with all of that…
"So basically, I added a protein-binding compound here, and then layered on extra muscle fiber—"
"Ughheeeeh."
"Hey, hey, stay with me. Just a little more and the physical modification section is done."
"…Just the modification section?"
"Yep. Anyway, so I unraveled the nerve bundles, disassembled them, then stuffed in our monster cells and this and that and so on and so forth and blah blah blah…"
The real issue was that most of what our professor had to say involved highly technical jargon applied to the kind of ultra-fine details that would never appear in any setting book.
And it wasn't like I could just cut her off mid-stream, either.
> 'Griyanaar' is overjoyed at finally having a chance to show off after so long.
> Critical success rate for research and modifications performed by this Super will slightly increase next time.
Ah. Critical success? Now that I can't pass up.
She'd already told me that listening to her would raise the critical success rate on her research results, but looking at the event text, it was clear our dear Professor Gri-Gri had been a lot lonelier than I'd realized…
So, partly to boost that critical success rate and partly for mental health care, Jessica and I found ourselves involuntarily enrolled in Griyanus the Too-Much-Talker's delightful biology research presentation hour.
Of course, there was no way a guy who'd never even gone to college could follow that dense, sprawling lecture…
D-Don't shove weird stuff into my braaaain—!
Before long, I got a very vivid, firsthand understanding of what it felt like for your brain to short-circuit under pure information overload.
Anyway, after that, I picked up the newly "completed" Smeragi (Parasite Ver.) and brought her along.
With Smeragi's affinity already past +100, and Griyanaar freed as a result, my Super pool had grown to six. I put all of them to work in earnest, running quests and handling every kind of base business.
And the goal of all that work was, of course, upgrading the base to Stage 7.
And once I started running quests at full capacity for that goal, the results spoke for themselves.
Quest appearances and rewards were still random, so the high and low ends swung pretty wildly—but thanks to all of it, I could feel myself nodding along to the thought that my overall mineral intake was holding at no less than fifteen thousand a day.
Still, no matter how I looked at it, keeping up with other players at this resource rate felt like a serious uphill climb.
Right now we were fine only because our thoroughly pissed-off Marianne had dispatched a pirate fleet—a five-thousand-ship armada including at least ten battlecruisers—to sit on station and protect my base alone.
Without that, the moment someone posted a fleet analysis of mine on the gallery, at least one guy would have shown up going, "lololol rank 3 empty house free loot lololol"—guaranteed.
With all those reasons piled up, like it or not, I was feeling the hard truth that I needed a Stage 7 base upgrade by any means necessary.
And so, with that resolve in mind, a full week had passed since I'd thrown myself into the work in earnest.
I'd poured every construction slot into resource transport ships alone and slammed the brakes on everything else. The once-reassuring sight of three battlecruisers, two light carriers, and nearly ten heavy cruisers had vanished without a trace, leaving a pitiful landscape in front of me.
"Jessica, what's the fleet's current resource intake looking like?"
"The resource fleet's daily mineral intake has finally broken ten thousand, and rare resources are hitting two thousand a day."
"Oh…?"
For some reason, even though we had fewer mining ships than before, the numbers had still managed to creep up a little…
"And if you add the forward base you built a few days ago, this base's own resource intake, and the average yield from quest clearances…"
"And that totals…?"
Jessica shook her enormous rabbit ears—and the equally enormous chest beneath them—and pointed at the hologram with the soul-infused flourish of a duelist drawing a card.
"Tadaaa! Our daily mineral intake has finally broken twenty thousand!"
"Ah, finally!"
In one week I'd gone from a loser who couldn't even scrape together a hundred thousand to someone who could casually pull in a hundred forty thousand—the so-called "dignified hundred-thousand owner" tier.
To celebrate, I decided to throw a small party and, while I was at it, spin the gacha for the first time in a while.
Of course, Jessica took one look at what I was doing and immediately tried to stop me.
"Commander, why would you deliberately ruin a good day like this?"
"What…"
"Even the regular security guards and laborers on this base know that your causality-adjustment luck is terrible."
But that kind of discouragement just sounded like "scared?" to me.
Hearing Jessica try to talk me down only convinced me that this was exactly the moment to go all-in, so I scheduled a long-overdue meeting with the Multi-dimensional Fixed Causality Generator.
I did have my reasons for doing this, of course.
"We've reached the point where we need a new support Super, Jessica."
"Well, that's true, but… isn't Griyanaar enough on her own?"
"Griyanaar is a buff totem and a stabilizer for heavily modified units. She doesn't give the kind of powerful, combat-immediate buffs I actually want."
"Ah…"
No matter how long Griyanaar had held the absolute top spot among support units since her first release, there was a limit to how much buffing one person could do alone.
"And the kind of 'support' or 'buff' Super I want isn't just combat-related, either… There's something even more important."
"What would that be, Commander?"
"Resource buffs."
"Ahh."
When you got down to it, why was I always so far behind other players on resources?
Not joining a clan was part of it, sure—but more than anything, it was because in the year-plus, now almost two years, I'd been playing this game, I had never once pulled a single Super with a resource-gathering buff.
And it wasn't just the resource problem. The complete absence of any Super who could handle "support" or "command" in other areas was starting to become a serious issue too.
Just look at the last fight against the Unity Clan—what a pathetic showing my fighters put on against a few hundred craft from a single light carrier.
Even accounting for the enemy light carrier being higher level than mine, the fact that even the Kraken's and the captured light carrier's fighters got pushed back was clearly because they had Supers who buffed their craft and I didn't.
And even setting those Supers aside, I had a critical shortage of so-called "premium ships" from the gacha—so few it was almost absurd.
"Think about it, Jessica. What 'premium ships' do we even have right now?"
"Pardon?"
"Premium ships. The ones we pull through causality fixation."
"Well, there's the Kraken, and the Overseer…"
"Besides those two."
"…Huh."
"And those Unity Clan bastards? Every single one of them seemed to be running at least ten gacha premium ships."
"Aaaah—!"
At the time I'd been so busy I hadn't had the mental bandwidth to properly analyze the enemy reports, and I'd deliberately looked the other way so I wouldn't get demoralized staring at their ship pool…
"I kept wondering why even their heavy destroyers and battlecruisers that made it home were so ridiculously tough—turns out they were gacha ships."
"Is that so?"
The light carrier, as you could tell from the one I'd captured and was still using, had been a normal-grade ship. But still.
Watching even their gacha-pulled ships get ground down like that must have been what finally shattered their morale.