The Ranker All-Stars
I exchanged greetings with my allies as they welcomed me warmly, all the while sizing up the state of our fleets…
Just like me — stuck with a mere seven ships, counting resource harvesters that doubled as repair vessels — none of them had more than ten ships to their name.
Okay. At this level, we might actually stand a chance.
The opposing team had clawed their way through ten straight victories, so they must have lost a considerable number of ships themselves. Their numbers wouldn't be that high either. If we managed our resources carefully and coordinated our fighters with long-range fire support… I was starting to think we could actually hold our own against them.
But those dreams and hopes of mine shattered into a thousand pieces the moment I finished greeting my allies — courtesy of a notification from the global chat window, and the enemy players waving at me like we were old friends.
First there was Koenig — the political officer who'd held down the rear so reliably last time. And then Arcadia, who'd been my rock-solid running mate from the sixth match all the way through the ninth, sitting right there on the other side.
And out of nowhere, Betelgeuse was over there too.
Then, one after another, the rankers sitting at 7th, 10th, 5th, 1st, and 2nd all started firing off messages at me from the enemy team. Me and my allies alike could barely hide our sheer disbelief at the absolute insanity of it.
Maybe it was because they already considered the match as good as won. The opposing side — no, the Ranker All-Star Team — had been chatting away at a leisurely pace in global chat for ages after the battle had already started.
Of course, they weren't complete idiots. Not a single one of them said anything like "we're over here, come get us." Still…
Thanks to that, I also learned the status of the two rankers I'd never met — 8th place (eliminated early, then died to a natural disaster) and 9th place (nobody had a clue). And while we were at it, I got a natural introduction to the remaining three members of the Ranker All-Star Team…
"Well then."
Watching them dismiss a one-ship leftover as not even worth counting as combat power, I lifted my head again and checked our nearby allied forces.
"We've got two people over here with only one ship each, you know."
"And one of those is a battlecruiser, while the other is an unarmed aviation cruiser."
The fact that the force they'd casually written off as their "weakest link" was equivalent to two of our entire team members — combined with the commander going by "Monalisa" openly admitting he was being "sponsored" — made it crystal clear that he had to be packing some seriously stacked ships.
No matter how much our people had fought their way here, no matter that they ranked among the top 0.1% of all players… the sheer, overwhelming gap in overall combat power sent our entire team straight into mental freefall.
Whether they'd already decided victory was impossible, the fighting spirit that had been half-extinguished even before the battle started was now not just snuffed out — someone had dumped a bucket of water on the embers.
And there was no way the rankers on the other team would miss a situation like this. Especially not the clan leaders who spent their lives reading people — Antares, Arcadia, and Betelgeuse.
At the precise moment our allies' mental state was wobbling, they drove right into the crack and started shaking it even harder with global chat messages like that.
And it wasn't just those three who could talk.
The rest of them piled on without mercy, blasting action beams and putting in a heeeeeroic effort to teabag us.
But there was one thing they failed to account for…
Sure, our team's rankings and skills were a notch below theirs — that much was true. But excluding me, every single person on our side still ranked among the top 0.1% of hardcore veterans. And watching the enemy team keep poking at their pride like that…
"Grazie!"
The result of dumping teabagging — pure high-octane gasoline — onto a fighting spirit that had been dying out.