Remember Me!
Just as they had said — and just as anyone could tell from looking at the thing — the Hresvelgr was, at the end of the day, a ship built for one job: lobbing missile swarms from extreme range while staying safely out of harm's way.
Trying to force a close-quarters brawl in that condition, riddled with damage from stem to stern? The particle beams would reach the Hresvelgr's hull long before any of its missiles could leave the tubes and find their targets. That much was obvious.
So the visual shock of a "massive battleship mindlessly ramming through an asteroid field" was all it had really been. Once the initial jolt wore off, they decided the Hresvelgr's charge itself wasn't a serious problem, calmed down almost immediately, and shifted their focus back to the rest of Icarus's fleet.
The Hresvelgr's exterior — looking for all the world like a ghost ship or a floating wreck — only reinforced that conclusion.
Of course, they couldn't ignore it entirely. They had no spare ships left, but the Hresvelgr's armor might have been paper-thin; its mass was anything but. To avoid getting sideswiped by that mindless charge, they reshuffled the fleets they'd stationed opposite the Kraken and peeled off two or three vessels to set up an interception screen against the absurdly oversized Hresvelgr.
And it was right in the middle of that frantic repositioning that—
By pure chance, Monalisa's adjutant had spotted it — something glowing a brilliant, terrible red inside the Hresvelgr's launch tubes.
Strategic missiles that had already reached critical mass and entered self-destruct mode. Warheads of every kind, primed and waiting.
The rankers stared in horror as the truth hit them: the Hresvelgr wasn't just charging them out of pure rage. The entire ship had transformed into a colossal bomb, and it was coming straight for the heart of their fleet.
Betelgeuse — who had been silent until now, citing some kind of condition issue — came roaring back online and started barking orders. Everyone reeled at Icarus's sheer willingness to turn precious strategic assets into a fleet-killing suicide bomb, but they scrambled to follow Betelgeuse's command all the same.
There was just one catastrophic problem.
That was the situation. The bulk of their fleet power was locked down on the front, where at least eight players were pouring in. With no reserves to spare, two heavy cruisers and a single destroyer simply could not stop a Hresvelgr five times their size.
> Icarus's Kraken-class Assault Combat Carrier has sunk Laura's standard-grade heavy cruiser!
> Icarus's Pashtura has sunk Menaldo's standard-grade heavy cruiser!
As a last resort, Laura threw the destroyer from the interception screen into a full ramming charge against the Hresvelgr. The size difference was simply too vast. Even at full speed, even with three heavy torpedoes launched on approach, the Hresvelgr's remaining point-defense systems swatted every torpedo out of existence — and then crushed the destroyer flat like a tin can under a boot.
Watching it happen, Betelgeuse and the other rankers arrived at a fresh and painful realization: teabagging really did need to stay within reasonable bounds, or you ended up walking straight into one of Icarus's vicious little schemes with your eyes wide open.
And then, just as they were halfway to giving up—
> Melon's standard-grade battleship has self-destructed alongside Icarus's Hresvelgr-class strategic missile platform battleship.
Melon — who until now had been a non-entity in the actual fighting, useful only for the occasional snide remark in chat — floored his battered battleship and drove it straight into the Hresvelgr at full speed.
His superhumans had barely managed to hold the engine room and the bridge. The bridge itself was already compromised; enemy supers were visible through the viewports, fighting inside. None of that stopped him. He rammed the wreck of a battleship into the Hresvelgr and detonated in a glorious mutual suicide.
The rankers, who had been quietly writing him off this entire time, rose from their seats and gave him a standing ovation for a genuinely excellent call.
They say a masterpiece needs a good ending...! (6)
There was no time to mourn the Hresvelgr's death — if you could call it that. The next thing thrown into the fray was—
> Indefatigable's Abukuma-class protected light cruiser has been sunk by Icarus's Kraken-class Assault Combat Carrier.
—the Kraken, cheerfully nomming another light cruiser into its maw.
But even a satellite-sized Kraken was still facing players who ranked not in the top 0.1%, but the top 0.002%. They weaved through the dozens of lush, flowing strands of the Kraken's hair — tentacles, rather — and systematically tore them free or blasted them apart.
The Kraken, suddenly reduced to the aesthetic of a balding forum lurker, did not choose suicide out of grief. Instead — main guns already wrecked — it lunged with that vast and beautiful maw, clamped onto one of Laura's battleships, and tore it apart. A successful kill.
And then, immediately after—
With word choice carefully calibrated to trigger Betelgeuse's PTSD, the remaining ships poured concentrated fire into the Kraken's gut while it was still busy chewing on a battleship. Every escort heavy cruiser that might have screened that kind of focused barrage had already been sunk long ago. Shells, beams, missiles, and everything else slammed directly into that temptingly swollen belly.
KRAAAAAAANG!!!!
Puhwaaaaak!