They Say Ruining the Ending Is What Makes a Masterpiece...! (5)

And the moment that crushing mass shattered the fleet's battle line, the Kraken unfurled its dense thicket of tentacles.

Whipping appendages with the firepower of a heavy cruiser's main guns in every direction, it plunged headlong into a full-blown melee.

Of course, the rankers had been rattled at first — dumping every scrap of firepower into the Kraken's frontal armor like complete amateurs. But once they'd taken a few hits and gotten their heads on straight, they immediately swung around to its flanks, aiming for those "soft, blubbery, fat-lump" sections that looked so vulnerable.

Then —

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

KRA-KOOM!

With every player except Betelgeuse fielding barely more than ten ships at best, and most of those vessels already locked down by the nine-player fleet pressing from the front or the hundred-strong suicide squad in the rear, the three users assigned to this sector had fewer than twenty ships between them.

Under normal circumstances, four heavy cruisers would have been swept aside in seconds. But with their own noses buried three feet deep in problems, all they could do was take potshots from behind the Kraken's ass — and the frustration was boiling over.

Meanwhile, at the same moment —

While the three users' fleets were being carved apart by the Kraken and still trying to hold the line, Antares — who had taken over command after Betelgeuse went dark — found himself starting to miss someone.

That someone was, of course, Raksha — the human weapon ranked second on the server, the man who had gone nine-for-nine in a heavily modified destroyer and utterly demolished a fellow ranker. But he'd taken off alone with just his destroyer at the start of the battle, and now there was no way of knowing where he'd gone.

Surely a guy who climbed all the way to rank two wouldn't just quit the fight and hole up somewhere… right? The suspicion was starting to creep in.

But then, astonishingly, right after Antares started howling for Raksha in the chat — two kill logs dropped, and Raksha's messages came flooding in.

Naturally, the moment Raksha's chat appeared, the enemy fleets charging from the front started moving in ways that felt… complicated. Antares and company finally pieced together Icarus's plan and let out deep, collective sighs of relief.

Nobody knew exactly how he'd pulled it off. But this was the same guy who'd once toyed with three cruisers while wearing nothing but underwear and piloting a single corvette — so what couldn't he do in a destroyer? Raksha's very existence was a walking plot convenience, and all anyone could do was nod along.

At which point Melon, who had been silent again until now, opened his mouth — or rather, opened the chat.

The question buried in Melon's chat — Where did our Hresvelgr go? — sent a ripple of unease through everyone still fighting while watching the feed.

But less than a minute after that question took root, the Hresvelgr they'd been hunting for made its grand entrance from a place none of them had anticipated.

The problem was where the Hresvelgr appeared.

Incredibly, it was bursting out from between the asteroid fields — the very terrain they had chosen at the start precisely because they believed Icarus and the enemy players' capital ships could never navigate it.

Of course, after slamming into every obstacle and asteroid packed into that field, the Hresvelgr's armor plating was crumpled and dented like thin aluminum foil across its entire hull. At least a third of its VLS launch tubes looked like they'd taken direct meteor hits — armored covers completely torn away, exposing the missile tubes inside, or else caved in cover-and-all as if some rock had screamed Quiet down! and punched straight through.

And with the armored covers in that kind of state, the rest of the ship was no better. Wings twisted, external antennas shattered — at a glance, it looked like a ghost ship.

But the important thing was that despite looking like absolute hell on the outside —

— its rear thrusters were pouring out a ferocious blaze of light, driving it at full speed straight toward the heart of the fleet.

Melon and Monalisa, watching the Hresvelgr commit to the same ramming charge as the Kraken, reacted with pure alarm — scrambling for any way to intercept it. The others, however, were far less panicked.