A Week of Party Time (1)
At the veterans' answers, a glimmer of hope seemed to light up in the newbies' eyes.
Of course, if they only handed out hope, the newbies were liable to do something stupid — so the veterans started adding one last round of warnings.
At any rate, the newbies who'd been listening to the veterans' war stories were starting to show signs of a full mental collapse around this point.
And then, right on cue, people stepped in to stitch those shattered psyches back together.
It wasn't exactly a good-cop-bad-cop routine — more like one veteran spouting absolute insanity and another swooping in to put the shattered mental state back together. I felt a hollow laugh well up in spite of myself.
Watching our newbies bounce back with such vigor, I steeled my own resolve as well.
Alright. Time to develop like my life depends on it.
A Week of Party Time (1)
About two days after reading the veterans' chat logs.
"Commander, we've got a report from the unmanned surveillance drones deployed on the perimeter."
"Mm."
"A pirate band consisting of one destroyer, two frigates, and two patrol ships is currently approaching this base."
At Jessica's words, I immediately opened the quest window and checked how much time was left.
> Time remaining until Frenzy begins
> (00 : 00 : 03)
Ah. Perfect timing.
The moment I checked the clock, the timer hit zero and a new message bloomed before my eyes.
Starting today, for one week, pirate raids will continuously assault your base.
Scores based on pirate eliminations will be reflected in the rankings — please check them.
"Are the pirates finally coming, Commander…♡"
"Mm. Looks that way."
I nodded in reply to the transmission from Pashtura — who'd become such a ship-detonating marine that blowing vessels apart was basically her entire personality — and then turned to Jessica beside me for a quick briefing on our current situation.
"Jessica, status report."
"On the front, we have the fleet that includes the frigate Pashtura is aboard. And behind the ice moon ahead, Belial's fleet is standing by."
At Jessica's briefing, I looked over the sleek lines of the brand-new frigate we'd pulled just two hours earlier and spoke.
"Good. Proceed according to the plan."
"Yes, Commander."
It went without saying, but the pirates were inferior to us in every single respect save one.
"Aside from the fact that they have a destroyer, they're weaker than us in numbers, in brains, and even in the quality of their troops."
"Mm."
"They haven't even conducted any reconnaissance of the local terrain, so they've already lost the information war before the first shot."
Belial's assessment was, frankly, entirely fair. The moment combat began, the pirates pushed their destroyer to the front and charged toward Pashtura's fleet — which was holding the line with a single frigate as its flagship — pouring fire as they came.
Pashtura's fleet, sticking to the plan, calmly executed evasive maneuvers and began drawing them inward, putting on a convincing show of being overwhelmed and forced to retreat.
Given that our base sat in an early-game resource zone, the surrounding space was littered with abandoned and fully mined moons — a cosmic labyrinth in every sense of the word. And yet our pirate friends, apparently high on the sheer visual power gap (Destroyer 1, Frigate 2, Patrol 2 versus Frigate 1, Patrol 3), just kept coming.
"My, the pirates keep chasing after us, don't they?"
Without so much as a proper scouting run, they barreled straight after Pashtura, pushing deeper and deeper.
— Kuuuuu… kugugung! Kakak!
Even as their ships slammed into moons along the way, they kept grinding forward with pure brute force. Watching it, I found myself wondering why they were throwing such a tantrum in the first place.
"Commander, did you see that?"
"See what?"
"Pashtura provoked the pirates."
I floated a question mark over my head for a second, completely lost. Jessica clapped her hands together, realizing she hadn't filled me in, and explained.
"With this update, the real-time status of individual ships is no longer automatically relayed to commanders during combat."
"…What?"
"More precisely, if you cut the comms or they get destroyed, there's no way to know what's happening on that ship."
"Mm."
"Even if a ship falls into enemy hands, you have no way of knowing unless it takes damage or something similar."
What kind of garbage update was that supposed to be? It wasn't the priority right now, though, so I filed it away to dig into properly once the battle was over.
While I was thinking that, the pirates Pashtura had "provoked" finally reached the spot we'd planned for.
"Now."
Belial, who'd been cloaked behind the ice moon, dove on the pirate fleet exactly like a dive bomber on a steep attack run.
"What the hell is that?!"
"Ambush! Directly above!"
And the instant every pirate eye snapped upward in panic at the sudden assault—
"Just as the Commander planned♡"
—Pashtura's fleet, which had been slowly falling back while reeling them in, spun a full one-eighty and unleashed the main guns and missiles of its patrol ships and frigate without restraint.
"Fire♡"
At the same time, our power-leveled Pashtura added her own devastating beam attacks to the barrage. Of the pirate ships that had been trying to concentrate their shields upward, the frigate riding alongside the destroyer was swept up in the assault and sunk outright. The other frigate took a full unprotected hit and was forced to fall back.
The destroyer alone managed to tank Pashtura's side's concentrated fire through sheer weight class… but in the process, its shields shattered completely, leaving the vast expanse of its deck fully exposed.
Under normal circumstances, the shields would have recovered before the next fleet volley and the destroyer would have walked away more or less intact. But right in that window, assault pods — helldi… no, assault pods — launched from the ambush force above slammed straight through the destroyer's deck.
And so the destroyer's interior, which had been crawling with pirates, suddenly found itself hosting an SSS-grade and a near-SSS-grade running a full-blown holocaust.
While our Superhumans cooked the destroyer, the remaining pirate ships tried to make a desperate break for survival. But in a situation where even having a destroyer was barely enough, a force that was outnumbered, outgunned, and leaderless didn't last long. Before long, they had taken up new careers as producers of heat and space dust.
Truly, from the moment they were born to the moment they died, these space pirates had never contributed a single useful thing to anyone's life — a public nuisance to the very end. Still, watching them burst like fireworks in the distance, I nodded and offered my thanks.
"Thank you, Midori… live strong out there in space."
"…What exactly are you doing to the space pirates, Commander?"
Jessica, standing beside me, scrunched up her face in pure incomprehension at my attitude.
"Think about it, Jessica."
"Yes?"