A Masterpiece Needs a Spectacular Finale

Watching their fighting spirit flare back to life, their will to battle rekindled once more, I nodded and resolved to throw every last card I had against that insane Ranker All-Star team.

A masterpiece needs a spectacular finale...! (1)

Meanwhile, our Ranker All-Star team — the ones who'd been teabagging Icarus as he filmed his own little Home Alone... no, Team Alone —

More precisely, the moment the real fighting actually started.

Everyone except Raksha, who'd vanished with a single destroyer stripped of all armor and jacked up to absurd levels of mobility and firepower, started thinking the same thing.

Did we push Icarus a little too hard?

Concerns like that were already cropping up in the team chat — that alone said plenty.

Even so, those worried voices still only amounted to a vague sense of this might get annoying.

And for good reason. No matter how strong Icarus was, Betelgeuse and Koenig — both on the same team — had already testified that he had six ships left at most.

So Betelgeuse, the one who'd delivered that intel, fired off a pep-talk chat to the fretting rankers and players.

Of course, those remaining ships included out-of-spec monsters like the Kraken-class and Hresvelgr-class. On top of that, there was Betelgeuse's intel on an "unidentified stealth ship(?)," plus the "Kraken's surprise teleport airstrike" already well-known across the gallery and among the rankers.

Stack that with the Hresvelgr's strategic missiles — the ones Arcadia, Koenig, and Betelgeuse had all mentioned — and the potential synergy was terrifying. Let that combo land a direct hit on their fleet and their capital ships would be gone in seconds, flipping the entire battle against them in an instant.

So the teabagging high cooled off in a heartbeat, and they snapped into strategy mode like the trash talk had never happened.

Especially that "unidentified stealth ship" Betelgeuse had flagged as a problem...

Monalisa had brought a Seraphias-class electronic warfare cruiser, and his Anomalocaris-class battle carrier carried EW support craft among its air wing. He was confident that no matter how high-grade that stealth ship(?) was, it would never get anywhere near their fleet.

As for the second problem — the teleport and strategic missiles...

With intel leaking out of every seam, countermeasures fell into place almost instantly.

Sure, some of the other rankers might have grumbled about going defensive after all that teabagging. But charging in aggressively only to eat a teleport ambush from behind, get your engines blown out, and sit there dead in the water? That would look a hell of a lot uglier.

At the same time, while drawing aggro in the global chat, they'd quietly run recon with stealth scout craft. The results were startling. Even with one of the enemy players fielding nothing but an aviation cruiser — completely irrelevant in this theater and written off as a non-factor — a straight-up frontal slugfest would still see the All-Stars get pushed back.

So rather than rush in recklessly, they locked into a fleet air-defense formation — a solid defensive posture built specifically to counter the biggest threats.

And just as their defensive prep was nearly finished...

Icarus's team was throwing a massive frontal airstrike at the All-Stars — seventy to eighty thousand fighters. Convinced their judgment had been correct, the rankers immediately scrambled every AA weapon on every ship into interception posture.

Not long after, the enemy teams appeared from the same direction the fighters had come from, leading every ship they had. They poured every ounce of firepower into the attack — more fighters, plus a wild barrage of guns and missiles raining down in support of the charge against the All-Stars' AA formation.

Roughly a hundred thousand missiles — including the strategic missiles and heavy torpedoes the rankers had been most wary of — came screaming toward a fleet formation already getting chewed up by fighters.

At that point, Betelgeuse and Antares, the brains of the All-Star team, could more or less read the protagonist's state of mind.

They couldn't be sure of the details, but the suspicion was that the unfair screw-job had finally shattered his mental state — so he'd decided to dump every last fighter and every last round of firepower in one "all munitions free" stress dump, then cleanly surrender afterward.

They scrapped the plan to break formation at any moment in case of a flanking attack. Instead, they launched fighters from every carrier in the fleet — including Monalisa's Anomalocaris — to fight an air war against that colossal assault wave and keep the fleet alive.

The problem was that, regardless of what Antares and Betelgeuse suspected, those seventy-thousand-plus fighters and the roughly hundred thousand missiles the charging ships were pouring out far exceeded the interception capacity of a fleet already thinned by nine consecutive battles.

Thanks to the Anomalocaris — that outstanding super-heavy battle carrier — they were steadily winning the air war. But the fleet's AA formation only managed a seventy-to-eighty percent interception rate.

Even the strategic missiles, which as previously noted were the size of a cruiser and therefore slower than ordinary missiles, were mostly shot down. But among the remaining twenty thousand or so rounds, two strategic missiles slipped through and came gliding in.

One of them slammed dead-center into the lower hull of Betelgeuse's Odin-class battleship as it tried to dodge the missile swarm. It was the textbook definition of a belly shot — a hit worthy of the reputation of its owner, Betelgeuse herself — and it set a stunning new record: the All-Star team's first battleship kill.

A masterpiece needs a spectacular finale...! (2)

Naturally, for Betelgeuse — who got her lower abdomen poked and prodded every single time she ran into Marianne — watching her precious gacha battleship not only get one-shot but specifically get a giant strategic missile rammed into its "belly" before going down was a bit much.

"WHY!!! Why does even my SHIP have to take a belly shot!!!!!!!!!!!"

"C-Commander, please calm yourself first!"

The PTSD(?) came roaring back, and she proceeded to throw every kind of fit imaginable on the bridge.

And while Betelgeuse was spewing every curse in the book, the remaining strategic missile streaked toward a Gryphon-class heavy battleship in Antares's ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fleet.

"Strategic missile approaching from the front!"

"Intercept with CIWS and evade at the same time — boosters, now!"

Unlike Betelgeuse's Odin-class, which had pushed all the way to the front line for a gunnery duel with the oncoming battleships and eaten the hit for it, Antares's heavy battleship was relatively far back. That bought them a few precious seconds.

Antares's own snap judgment and the resulting evasive maneuver paid off.

KUUUUUUUU!

"Warhead just passed directly over the ship!"

The Gryphon-class heavy battleship managed to avoid choosing a new life as Gryphon shish kebab, skewered clean through by a large and beautiful strategic missile.

But no matter how fast it moved, a ship called a "heavy battleship" had hard limits on its mobility. And the Gryphon-class had a bridge that jutted just slightly proud of the hull — a design flaw that stacked right on top of that limitation.

"Uh-oh."

"AAAAAAAGH!!!"