No More Bad Luck

Which meant, of course, that the Kanhel-class light cruisers and Azkran-class destroyers I'd bought from the event shop last time had all been wiped out as well.

So, with the dual purpose of securing the new superhumans — supporters — I desperately needed and restocking my fleet with fresh ships, I made my way in person to the gacha chamber, the one with the dimensional causality whatever-it-was.

Along with the thirty multi-pull tickets I'd accumulated through daily, weekly, and monthly quests, faction quests, and exploration runs.

And if you really thought about it, this wasn't entirely the brain-dead move Jessica made it out to be, either.

Just recently I'd pulled the Kraken, and more than once I'd walked away from five-to-one fights looking like the luckiest man alive. Even the Beast faction — small fleet though it was — had sent me some genuinely solid ships.

No more bad luck. From here on out, it's Lucky Man Icarus's time.

With that thought in mind —

Who am I? The miracle man who cracked a one-in-a-million odds pull and got the Kraken.

— I headed straight for the gacha chamber the moment I arrived and spun the causality whatever-it-was without a second's hesitation.

Of course, as everyone would have predicted, and as it always went…

Or maybe, contrary to all expectations, I'd simply burned through every scrap of luck I had on the things mentioned above.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

"How pitiful…"

The gacha tickets I'd carefully stockpiled over more than a month of grinding went up in smoke in a mere thirty seconds — reduced to ten glittering Brilliant Resource Boxes, one Brilliant Equipment Box, eighteen Ordinary Resource Boxes, and a single Ordinary Equipment Box.

Needless to say, I could not accept this reality. I rolled across the floor, bawling, snot and tears and drool streaming down my face in a full-body meltdown.

Still, if there was anything to salvage from that gacha, it was this: the moment I got those resource boxes, I cracked them open on the spot.

For cracking open twenty-eight resource boxes, the rare resource haul was a little on the pathetic side. On the other hand, I got to gobble up a cool three hundred and fifty thousand minerals in one go — enough to immediately kick off a base upgrade to Level 7.

Of course, that also left my resources completely wiped out again…

But so what? This way or that way — what did it matter?

Ships, after all, sometimes make excellent stock market material. (2)

The base upgrade was proceeding according to plan, sure. That didn't mean I could just sit around twiddling my thumbs.

New combat power is an absolute necessity…!

As I'd already said — what I needed now was a proper high-grade ship, a specialty vessel, or a support character. So I had to sit down and seriously figure out how to get my hands on one of those two… no, three things.

"Jessica, come here and brainstorm with me."

"Commander, you're just bored right now, aren't you."

There was the minor inconvenience of Jessica taking a shot at my deeply serious deliberations mid-crisis — but sages throughout history have often gone unrecognized by those around them, so I magnanimously forgave her rudeness and dragged her into brainstorming mode anyway.

This time, though, something must have clicked upstairs. My IQ of 100 plus Jessica's IQ of 200 — a combined three hundred points of pure intellectual firepower — and a brand-new idea surfaced in my head almost immediately.

"Wait a second. We have the auction house, don't we?"

"Yep."

"Great. Then let's dig through the auction house this time."

"Yep."

And so, with all the confidence in the world, I flung open the auction house window… only for that confidence to deflate in about two seconds flat the moment we saw the prices.

Even the cruiser-class ships I could actually put to use right now had starting bids — minimum prices — that were three times the Gold we had on hand.

The battlecruisers, light carriers, and — ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠for reasons unknown — the aviation cruisers listed alongside them were all gold-guzzling hogs that started at ten thousand Gold minimum.

The second I confirmed that much, I closed the auction house window on the spot — even though the Battleship and Carrier tabs were still sitting there unopened — and spoke.

"Alright. Keep staring at this and I'm going to lose my mind."

"Ahaha…"

Of course, closing the window didn't make our needs disappear. I reopened the auction house, checked the market-rate listings, and—

"Jessica. We'll start from here."

"Right. Baby steps — solve the small problems first, one at a time."

With the 2,100 Gold currently in my pocket, I resolved to carefully watch the market, flip ships, grow my capital step by step, and eventually buy battlecruisers, battleships, even carriers. That was the plan. That was the will I set ablaze.

The problem was that the moment I actually started researching how to do it, I realized something. I'd been thinking of this as a kind of high-stakes, all-or-nothing gamble — but in practice, it wasn't gambling so much as… how do I put this.

Bluntly speaking, it just felt like staring at the stock market.