Diversified Victory
One look at the state of the gallery told the whole story.
Players whose resource mining ships never made it home alive were everywhere. Plenty of others had found a single resource zone, poured everything into developing it, and gotten thoroughly wrecked for their trouble. Compared to those idiots, my situation wasn't all that dangerous.
As always, the existence of people who'd screwed up worse than you had a way of becoming the driving force that got everyone else through another day. And as I'd already mentioned, I was different from those fools — I'd adopted the gospel of Diversified Victory Investment.
All I had to do was laugh at the all-in gamblers while simultaneously crushing the pirates who'd invaded my resource zones. Per the great Lanchester's Law, if I committed more than double the enemy's combat power, I could steamroll them mindlessly without taking meaningful losses. So that was the plan: hit every pirate force with at least twice their strength.
As for our Supers, ground down through battle after battle after battle…
"Hooaaaah…"
"I feel truly alive again."
"Haaangh♡ C-Commander, you're filling me up so completely♡"
"That's just the smoothie the Commander made for you. Keep talking like that and this game's age rating is going to skyrocket."
"Uuungh? I have no idea what you mean? Censoring a game for content? As if any country would do something that ridiculous♡"
"…Fair point, actually."
Trading oddly meta remarks like that, they were enjoying a pleasant stretch of downtime in the base's recreation lounge. And as for me, today's workload amounted to little more than running auto-repair checks on the existing fleet, inspecting newly produced ships, confirming that the mining vessels that had returned half-destroyed were repairing properly, and verifying that the fleets I'd dispatched to the resource zones had fought as intended.
With far less on my plate than usual, I'd been spending the free time on a brief stretch of volunteer service for the Super characters who'd worked so hard. Of course, this was really just my way of saying thanks for a job well done.
"Eungh♡ Commander, come rest with us♡"
"No."
Cases like Pashtura — currently receiving a full-body massage in the nude on the grounds of accumulated fatigue, and somehow still trying to seduce me in a way that put certain teenage something-or-others in serious danger — got shut down without mercy. Strict social distancing protocols were in full effect.
"Hiiing, you're so mean."
Naturally, my attitude drew an immediate complaint from Pashtura.
"Commander, didn't you used to lust after my body whenever you got bored?"
"…"
"Back then, you'd invent the most unbearably embarrassing titles for yourself and whisper your affection for us."
"…Ahem."
"What was it you said again? Ah, yes — you asked us to call you the Saint-ChuuChuu-TouchyTouchy-BabyMama-SmoochyWoochy Commander…"
"…"
The way she casually dropped that ancient history made my soul leave my body for a second. But as anyone could see, there simply wasn't that much work involved in looking after three people plus two more — myself and Jessica — on break. So after only a short while of this "volunteer service," I found myself thinking things felt rather peaceful, and decided to open the community boards again to get a rough sense of how the situation was developing.
The moment I logged in, the first post I saw was this:
[Ship Destruction Image]
These losers don't even have the money to build mining ships, so they're just limping around. I poke them with a couple of patrol ships and they get so twitchy they start having full-blown meltdowns. The flavor is incredible.
Absolute losers lmaoooo
Then when their destroyer blows up they go completely feral
Comments locked
I felt my brow furrow on its own looking at a post that had locked its own comments just so the author could pure-flex their malicious attitude. Naturally, other users felt much the same way.
Of course, a Grade-A loser like that was the kind of person from whom you couldn't extract a single drop of amusement — so my own reaction was pure, unfiltered secondhand embarrassment.
But while most users were content to trash-talk in the comments, a post eventually dropped revealing that the shitposter in question had been pulling every dirty trick in the book since the moment he'd been isekai'd into this game. The rage that had been building against the troll finally boiled over, and some of the veterans drew their blades.
[Fleet Battle] [Fleet Battle 2] [Pirate Destroyer Split in Two] [Large-Scale Fleet Review]
We've been watching these clueless losers try to slaughter newbies just to keep themselves alive.
We're not interested in that.
No long speech needed. If you're a newbie whose resource zones got hit by pirates and you can't mine anymore — contact us.
Ten veteran fleets on standby at all times.
To my genuine surprise, a post had gone up in which roughly ten veterans openly declared they would hunt down the malicious trolls and help the newbies.
Oh…
Was this that thing they called humanity? Human kindness? Something like that.
To be precise, the veterans' post was closer to a support package for newbies who couldn't hold out against pirate raids — and for the malicious trolls, it amounted to little more than a warning. But there was only one troll, while on the other side, just from the fleet counts and the wording of the post, it was clear that at least ten people had formed a kind of loose coalition.
Watching a player alliance take shape faster than I'd expected, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was genuinely interesting. When I ran the situation by Jessica and asked for her thoughts, she considered it for a moment, then nodded and spoke with quiet certainty.