If There Are Five, One Is Trash
Ah.
The timing was absolute garbage.
The second I so much as thought about taking a break, the battle-start warning popped up — so perfectly timed it was almost enough to make me lose my mind. But then another thought hit me.
I've already been in here for two whole days?
Time really did fly. I shook my head, settled back into the command seat, and steeled myself for the fight ahead.
It went without saying, but just because the battle had started didn't mean the game was about to hand us the enemy's location on a silver platter.
"Launch fighters from the Kraken and the light carriers. One strike group on standby, one on fleet air defense. Push the remaining two forward for recon."
"Yes, Commander."
I and every other user who'd brought a carrier immediately poured fighters out of their hangars by the thousands, sending them fanning out across the vast combat zone on reconnaissance sweeps.
And separate from the fighters, swarms of fast small craft — corvettes and the like — poured out alongside them. At this game's scale, a fighter's onboard power alone couldn't maintain a direct link back to the fleet once the distance stretched far enough. The small ships trailing behind had to double as radar pickets, relaying the fighters' sensor data and communications.
You might ask how we'd managed the clan fight without all this — but that battle had been in my territory, where comm beacons were planted every which way and fighters never hit a signal ceiling. This place had none of that. No choice in the matter.
And this time it wasn't just me. Other users were here too, so the fighters flooding out numbered not one or two tens of thousands but well over a hundred thousand. The small ships surging after them ran to dozens of hulls as well — quite the spectacle, all told.
What the users did next, however, was a whole different kind of spectacle — the frustrating kind.
Like a flock of lost sheep, every last one of them wandered off in whatever direction felt right. It wasn't that they had no "strategy" at all — the chat had at least gestured at one — but scattering blind without the faintest idea of the enemy's composition, prioritizing contact above all else, produced exactly the result you'd expect.
A few hours into the battle, the chat was a chorus of wailing users screaming for help.
Of course you had the troll who charged a battleship head-on with nothing but a pile of cruisers — no cover, no stealth, pure frontal stupidity. And the genius who was told to flank, emptied his brain, drove straight forward, and fed his battleship to torpedo cruisers.
But setting those trolls aside, the rest of the users were at least pulling their own weight, fighting with something resembling competence.
And as I'd mentioned before — I had a real, honest-to-god one-shot-kill chad spear meta in my pocket.
The guy who'd mindlessly tanked with his battleships, gotten chased by torpedo cruisers, and finally managed to lose one of them — I sent a long-range missile strike his way as a little gift.
Thanks to our resident troll's nonsense, an enemy battleship had gotten cocky and started creeping forward into the open. The moment I spotted it—
"Hresvelgr — full salvo, strategic missiles and heavy torpedoes! Kraken, teleport every last one of them right in front of that goddamn battleship!"
"Yes, Commander!"
The cruiser-sized strategic missiles mounted along both flanks of our big, beautiful Hresvelgr — teleported via the Kraken. No intercept window, no warning. One second the enemy battleship was sailing along; the next, a cruiser-class warhead materialized in its face, and it went hoeee— and then BOOM.
The enemy battleship user turned out to be better than expected. The instant one hull ate a strategic missile, he snapped the other battleship into an evasive maneuver with impressive speed — a genuine highlight-reel play. But—
"Still six left."
He dodged one. Then the simultaneous barrage of big fucking missiles arrived. Strategic missiles that could critically damage a battleship in a single hit — he took three of them.
The kind of sight that would make anyone spit out, "Ah, shit-fuck," without thinking. The two battleships that had been chasing our troll vanished into cosmic dust without so much as a scrap of wreckage left behind.
Naturally, the remaining heavy torpedoes that had ridden along with those strategic missiles found the escort ships just as cheerfully, and set off a chain of secondary detonations among them.
And with that, today's Kraken teleport show came to an end.
And of course, right then, the position of our "main force" — including my Kraken, the allied carriers, and the battleships — got compromised.
Apparently the enemy decided that sacrificing a mere three battleships and some cruisers from a single user was a fair price to ensure their main body wouldn't eat a sudden heavy-torpedo spam. Because next—
Like true chads going for a short, decisive fleet engagement, they pointed a main force packing no fewer than forty capital ships straight at us and started driving in.
Naturally our side wasn't about to just sit there and take it, so countermeasures went out immediately. The problem was that unlike the enemy team — who at least had a shred of actual teamwork going —