The SSS-Class Arsenal Ship Hresvelgr
"…!!"
Jessica had beaten me to the punch, so the shout slipped out of me before I could stop it — but unfortunately, the honest truth was that Hresvelgr's exterior looked an awful lot like an oil tanker.
If you're going to hand out a cool name and a cool ship class, at least make the design cool too. What is this?
Shaped like a lumpy potato, the thing had a way of draining the hype right out of anyone looking at it. Which was why Jessica and I — and Belial, Pashtura, and Ignis, who'd all come running the moment they heard a new ship had arrived — all said the same thing in unison: the design was garbage.
"It's certainly… a unique design."
"Looks like an eggshell."
"Reminds me of the capsules we used for training with Marianne♡"
Unlike the rest of us, though, Smeragi had clearly picked up a few things standing next to her former commander. The earlier theatrics had apparently been pure hospitality. Now, with a far more serious expression, she inspected the ship from end to end, then nodded.
"Commander, you don't need to worry about the exterior, nya."
"Hm?"
"That's a protective cover applied so the ship doesn't get damaged by spatial erosion while it's being brought here through Dimension Causal Fixing, nya."
"…Ah."
Hearing that, I finally dredged up a bit of lore I hadn't thought about in over four years.
"Right, that setting existed."
"Pardon?"
Superins were only human-sized, so the odds of anything going wrong with them were basically zero. But capital ships — cruisers and above — were so massive that, according to the lore, the dimensional transit of Dimension Causal Fixing could subject them to a bizarre phenomenon called "spatial erosion," warping or outright shattering the hull. Hence the protective cocoon they arrived in.
Of course, as for what "spatial erosion" actually was… the developers had turned the whole thing into a MacGuffin, so nobody had any idea what really happened. From a meta perspective it was nothing more than an homage to the capsule gacha craze of the time, and even someone like me who'd read the setting books cover to cover had just gone, "oh, neat background detail," and moved on. The setting had so little presence that only remembering it now was, in a way, completely natural.
Jessica, naturally, had no window into my little epiphany.
"Commander, what is she talking about?"
"So you don't know, huh…"
I answered by pulling up the wiki tab with everything I'd just been monologuing to myself and turning the screen toward her.
"Here. Read this."
"…Ah."
Minor chaos aside, the confusion had fully settled. Once the gacha capsule — no, the protective housing — was stripped away and the real Hresvelgr stood revealed, I couldn't help but feel genuine awe.
It wasn't just the size. The overall silhouette was built on a boxy airship frame, with structures bolted on top and bottom without any particular regard for which end was which — and that shape, together with the armament, was pure Arsenal Ship identity made flesh. Peak "big dumb firepower" energy.
The weapons loadout alone screamed I am an Arsenal Ship. A full-fledged battleship, and it mounted all of three guns — low-output, high-rate particle beam cannons that would only really hurt destroyers and smaller. Everything else was wall-to-wall missiles and torpedoes. The sections we'd normally call "decks" were carpeted almost entirely in VLS cells.
Along both flanks sat the enormous launch tubes that had to be the "strategic missile platform" attached to the class name — and through the open mouths of those tubes, as if deliberately showing off for their new commander, the warheads of missiles the size of light cruisers stared back at me.
Whoa.
It might have been a stretch to call it "big-gun battleship" doctrine, but it was absolutely a firepower-first, no-compromise brawler of a ship, and that left me deeply satisfied.
That said, this game had proven more than once that looks and performance were not proportional — and Hresvelgr hadn't even existed back when I was playing. So I immediately opened the gallery wiki tab to start gathering intel.
↳ Especially in small-scale fleet fights, individual ships' interception limits mean they physically cannot stop the volume.
2. Aside from the fixed Strategic Missile Platform, every other hardpoint is fully customizable by the player.
↳ Load micro-missile cluster scatter warheads to make an already absurd missile count completely uninterceptable, or go full heavy-torpedo carpet and turn it into a pure death spear.
3. The Strategic Missile Platform is fucking broken.
↳ One hit will critically wreck a large armored carrier or battleship.
↳ One of the few actual death spears that lets dreadnought-and-below ships punch up against super-dreadnoughts and higher.
1. Tankiness is trash. Reactive defense can go fuck itself.
↳ Just look at the thing. One bad hit and it's a fireworks show.
2. Do not run come-to-me tactics against a proper main-battery battleship.
↳ You'll eat battleship main guns that outrange, out-hurt, and out-speed any missile or torpedo you've got, and drop straight into a groggy state.
3. Let anything close and even small ships will kill you.
↳ Close-range armament is nothing but missiles, torpedoes, and three particle beam rapid-fires bolted on for show.
↳ Get caught and you're dead. Say it with me. Yeah.
After reading that long, exhaustive review, I lifted my head and looked back out the window. Watching the Hresvelgr-class glide serenely into the docking berth, I felt my head shake of its own accord.
Why do we never get a tank ship, though.
Of course, just because I'd acquired this big, beautiful monument to missile fetishism didn't mean I could immediately go around thrashing everything in sight. As with games — and with everything else in this world — and as anyone who'd been there for the early Kraken days would remember…
An ordinary max-level unit will always beat an SSS-grade Level 1.
"Leveling work finishes in a few minutes."
"And once the work is done, what happens?"
"You don't know? Leveling begins."
"Ah… yes, sir."
Same as when we'd run the Kraken Raising Tycoon arc, Hresvelgr dove straight into endless leveling operations.
The reason we were scrambling into leveling this hard was the event waiting after the one players were currently grinding — the Ancient Base Ruins Expedition. The follow-up, the Ancient Capital event, was a group event where players banded together.
"The next event is guaranteed to be fleet battles first and foremost."
"Is that so."
"Yeah. It was when I played."
Fleet combat was mandatory in that group event — so whether we wanted to enjoy it properly or simply survive it…