They Say Wrecking the Finale Makes a Masterpiece...! (4)
And so, following Icarus's plan, the Hundred-Man Suicide Squad was deployed.
Well — they only called it that for the dramatic flair. Between supers lost over the course of the fighting and users like Icarus himself who simply didn't have ten supers to begin with, the actual number of supers committed was closer to eighty. Still.
"Taste the power of the Hundred-Man Suicide Squad, you scrub-tier trash!"
"What — they fielded a hundred supers?!"
The bluff worked beautifully. The enemy assumed far more supers had been committed than actually had, and that alone made the whole thing worthwhile.
Anyway — Icarus and the other nine users' supers, totaling eighty-seven… no, the Hundred-Man Suicide Squad — along with the dedicated boarding assault troops loaded into the assault pods — used the Kraken's teleport. They slammed straight into the rear line: Monalisa and Koenig, Melon with his single battleship, Betelgeuse, Laura, and Menaldo's carriers, with the Anomalocaris at the center of it all.
Naturally, the news that a full hundred supers had been committed left the All-Star Team's users thoroughly rattled.
"Ah, shit."
"Anka, grab every super we've got here and go reinforce them — now!"
"Understood, Commander!"
Laura and Indefatigable, who happened to be closest, immediately threw every super they had into the support effort. At the same time, Betelgeuse and Menaldo started frantically dumping their own forces — including SSS-grade supers — into the fight, partly to protect their carriers.
But there was a hard limit to how much force they could actually commit.
Antares and Arcadia were holding the front with raw tanking and evasive defensive maneuvers — no supers, no proper command buffs, just brute force against a fleet that kept ramming forward without a single thought in its collective head. They had zero room to peel off even their close-combat supers.
Which left Betelgeuse and Menaldo, stuck in the middle, sending their supers to the rear while simultaneously pushing their fleets forward — fighting a two-front war whether they liked it or not.
Of course, Betelgeuse had the largest fleet of anyone, which meant that while everyone else was dealing with one or two ships under boarding assault, she alone had five or more ships being boarded at the same time.
"Commander, two cruisers and one destroyer are about to fall!"
"Ah, screw it — throw a few ships out as bait and swing the rest of the fleet to the front!"
She was the only one with ships to spare, so she used that. A handful of vessels were deliberately sacrificed as decoys, peeling Icarus's team's supers off the main fleet, while the bulk of her ships joined Menaldo's fleet and pushed forward to meet the incoming enemy.
If nothing had gone wrong from there, Antares would have held frontline command while Betelgeuse ran support from the rear, calming the chaos and shutting down Icarus's strategy cold.
But…
— KRA-BOOOOM!
"C-Commander! Enemy supers have boarded the ship!"
"Oh, for fuck's sake. Of all the luck."
As previously mentioned, Betelgeuse preferred riding something small and inconspicuous over a flashy flagship. So when she heard that enemies had boarded the Dandelion-class light cruiser she'd been using in place of her previously sunk Odin-class battleship — right at the exact moment she'd sent every last super to the rear — she just shook her head in weary resignation.
"No choice. Bail out fast and transfer to another ship."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Losing a gacha ship was a shame, but getting herself captured would be infinitely more annoying. With her usual sharp judgment, Betelgeuse decided to evacuate the Dandelion-class as quickly as possible and designate a new flagship.
There were just two minor problems. First: the supers had punched their assault pods in right next to the bridge. And second…
— BANG!
"Finally found the bridge— oh my? Long time no see."
"Hiiik—!"
The super who walked through that door happened to be Marianne — and the mere sight of her slammed every deeply conditioned trauma and thoroughly drilled instinct Betelgeuse had ever acquired into overdrive.
And so, while Betelgeuse — boarded by Marianne — dropped off the grid under the convenient excuse of a "condition issue"…
Monalisa's Orchid-class light carrier has been captured by Icarus's Smeragi, Griyanaar, and Pampakapam's August!
The remaining users had lost Betelgeuse — their de facto brain — to a sudden disappearance, but the strategy she'd left behind was solid enough. Following Koenig's additional chat suggestion, they split their response in two: fleets to the front, supers to the rear.
What they had forgotten, however, was about to come crashing down on them.
The moment they tried to split and redeploy their fleet power—
While the nine users were still mindlessly ramming the front and the All-Star Team's mobile defense was saturating itself trying to hold them, something came screaming in from a slightly off-angle approach — the Kraken, over six times larger than any ordinary battleship or battlecruiser, so massive it might as well have been classified as a satellite, charging at them at full speed.
And it wasn't just a blind ramming run, either.
It was dumping every scrap of firepower it had — a literal all-weapons barrage — while four escort cruisers rode alongside it, and its absurdly thick frontal armor simply chewed through every interceptor shot thrown its way.
They say wrecking the finale is what makes a masterpiece…!
Most of the All-Star Team hadn't become rankers for nothing. Shock and awe aside, they opened fire on the Kraken in under a minute of spotting it.
The problem was twofold. First, despite everything they'd heard about its specs, the Anomalocaris — a fellow combat carrier — had had its armor punched through far too easily by the assault pods, which colored their expectations. Second, the Kraken was currently dumping every weapon system it owned at full throttle — missiles, main batteries, additional assault pods, and a handful of strike craft — and its sheer size and grotesque silhouette generated so much raw intimidation that the All-Stars, without even realizing it, made a critical mistake: they poured every shot into the frontal armor instead of targeting the flanks or weak points.
And the price of that mistake was steep. During the precious window when they might have stopped the Kraken's charge, their firepower concentrated not on the flanks — which Princess Luca had once described as "as soft and sensitive as Pashtura's fat rolls" — or any other vulnerable section, but on the one thing nobody else in the current meta possessed: dreadnought-grade frontal armor.
The result:
The cruiser Indefatigable had stationed on flank defense got cleanly yeeted straight into the Kraken's maw — and our Kraken, looking for all the world like a transfer student sprinting down the hallway with a piece of bread clenched in its teeth yelling "I'm late, I'm late!", charged onward with the cruiser still clamped in its jaws and sheared clean through the midsection of Indefatigable's Royal-class battlecruiser right behind it.