The Battle Continues, Stretching On (3)
Two users who had been keeping quiet suddenly roared into the chat, cutting off the brainrot being flung my way.
Ahhh, thank you… overwhelming gratitude…!
Naturally, I was about to fire off a thank-you message to the two of them right away.
But the moment I expressed my gratitude…
For reasons I couldn't begin to fathom, the two people who'd just shielded me started acting like they already knew me.
Of course, from my end, all I could do was spam question marks — who the hell were these two?
Fortunately, before I could pile on any more question marks, the two users simply attached their fleets to mine and opened a direct comm channel.
"Commander, we're receiving an incoming transmission from their side."
"To us?"
"Yes — two fleets calling in at the same time… should I just connect both of them?"
"Hmm… yeah, go ahead and link them up."
"Got it."
Having both of them open a channel at once left me wondering why they'd abandoned the chat window for ship-to-ship communications in the first place — but a call was a call, and etiquette demanded you pick up. I nodded to Jessica and had her open the line.
The moment I accepted the connection, two separate comm screens popped up on Hresvelgr's bridge channel.
"…Huh?"
Just like in the chat, the moment the line connected, a male commander with horns on his head was acting like we were old acquaintances.
"Ah, yes."
And on the other screen, a silver-haired female commander was staring at me with a flushed face, making soft flustered little sounds…
No — that was the rank-4 player I'd only ever seen once before. The clan leader of Justice, one of the three largest clans on the server by sheer scale: Arcadia.
For someone who had no idea what was going on, the whole situation was deeply disorienting.
But that disorientation didn't last long. The moment they saw me looking openly flustered, the two commanders on the line immediately introduced themselves.
"My apologies for the late greeting. I'm Koenig — I was assigned to the same team as you during the first battle."
"Huh? Same team… in what sense, exactly…?"
"You know — the one where we flipped a troll and took him out the other way…"
The second those words hit, the image of the "Political Officer" from the first match snapped into place in my head.
"Ah — that morale enforcement squad! That was you?"
"Hahaha. Well, thanks to that, I ended up catching less flak from the other players, so I'd call it a win, wouldn't you?"
From the vibe alone he'd always come off as a bit of a weirdo, but meeting him face-to-face, the man was surprisingly well-mannered. These days, half the player base would casually drop informal speech or straight-up dual curses right in your face — so just this level of courtesy already put him well above the pass mark.
On top of that, I'd later learned something I hadn't known at the time: while he'd been hanging back under the pretense of repairing battleships, he'd ambushed an enemy carrier task force that had been trying to loop around, cutting off a rear assault before it could land.
All of which left me feeling genuinely well-disposed toward the player who'd just introduced himself as Koenig.
But unlike Koenig, with whom I at least had some small shared history…
Arcadia, watching me from the other screen… no matter how hard I looked, I could not figure out where on earth any connection between us was supposed to have come from.
I mean, ever since I got possessed into this place, the vast majority of "connections" I've made with other players haven't exactly been the good kind, have they?
And it wasn't just me — Jessica seemed to be thinking along the same lines. She quietly sidled up beside me so the people on the comm screens couldn't hear, then whispered carefully into my ear.
"Commander… do you perhaps have a secret lover stashed away somewhere?"
"…"
I needed to revise my earlier assessment. It wasn't that there was no connection — she had simply decided there must be a hidden connection of a very particular kind.
Of course there was no such thing, so I waved the idea off immediately and decided to start with a light greeting to Arcadia.
"Well, good to meet you. I didn't expect rank three and rank four to end up on the same team."
"Yes… I was quite surprised myself."
And honestly, setting the awkwardness aside, having two top-ten rankers on our side was an unambiguously good thing. So I took the opportunity to chat with both of them for a bit — and, while I was at it, check on the state of their fleets.
A short while later, after some back-and-forth and a look at both of their fleet situations, I learned that Arcadia and Koenig had both managed to keep a surprisingly large number of ships alive.
Of course, a big part of that came down to the fact that their playstyles were completely different from mine…
"Wow, how did you manage to save so many?"
"Nothing special. I mostly handled flanking and rear-guard duty, or beat the stuffing out of the idiots who tried to desert and save only themselves… so sometimes, if luck wasn't on my side, the match would end without me even running into the enemy."
"Oh."
Koenig himself admitted that luck had played a role — but fundamentally, he preferred flanking maneuvers over head-on fights. Unless he was specifically matching up against an enemy that was also trying to flank, it was entirely possible to go an entire match without a proper engagement.
That said, he clearly hadn't avoided every fight.
"Commander."
"What is it, Jessica?"
"I compared this against the data on his fleet from before. It's shrunk quite a bit since the first time we saw it."
Unlike the man himself, who was laughing cheerfully without a care in the world…
Hmmm.
On the data screen Jessica had quietly pulled up out of view of the cameras, Koenig's fleet was clearly a good deal smaller overall than when we'd first seen it.
At minimum, one battlecruiser gone — and more than half of everything cruiser-class and below.
Pointing that out to his face would have been rude, so I just nodded along and finished our pleasant conversation without letting anything show.
"Well then, I'll be on my way~ Hopefully we'll run into each other again next match."
"Ah, yes — take care."
As I saw Koenig off, I turned to the fleet data on Arcadia — rank four.
…Hmm.
I had no idea how Arcadia had originally brought her fleet in, but of the ships that could be called capital vessels — heavy cruiser and above — she had nothing but three battlecruisers.
Of course, looking closer at one of those battlecruisers… as expected of a ranker, it was an SSS-grade high-mobility high-speed battlecruiser, and…