A Forced Taste of Peace
[gif: A Hresvelgr-class bursting out of an asteroid field the way a whale breaches the surface]
Ramming a missile battleship famous for its paper-thin armor into an asteroid field that deals DoT the second a capital ship so much as enters it — just to force a flanking route — is already insane.
But the fact that the whole point of that maneuver was to self-destruct the entire thing for a comeback win? Absolute legend.
The community had decided I was some kind of freak — the sort of lunatic who takes out three cruisers in a corvette while wearing nothing but his underwear, or a weirdo like Raksha who, even though he came out of a gacha this time, runs around slaughtering battleships and cruisers with a single destroyer.
And that particular brand of bait just kept coming.
As dozens — hundreds — of posts like that sprouted up one after another, Jessica, who was browsing the gallery beside me, shook her head with a weary little sway.
"Truly unpleasant posts, aren't they."
"So you think so too, Jessica."
"Our Commander is most certainly not some underwear-wearing pervert of that sort."
"Mm-hmm."
Jessica, you're the only one who understands me. Sob.
"Commander simply has a touch of mania, that is all."
"Jessica…?"
Not understanding. Just a correction.
At Jessica's unexpected follow-up, a cold bead of sweat rolled down my forehead under a sudden wave of dismay.
Of course, that feeling didn't last long.
Before long, a handful of users had started analyzing my so-called eccentricities and evaluating the actual validity of what I'd done — and I found myself nodding along in spite of myself.
[gif: The Kraken charging in and dumping its entire payload]
Looking at the strategy as a whole, it wasn't bad at all.
1. Force the All-Star fleet's combat power into a frontal concentration and compel a fleet decisive battle.
2. Load only the Superhumans into assault pods, teleport them in, and open a second front in the rear.
3. At the same time, split the Kraken plus his light carriers and battlecruisers into two halves and stab both flanks.
4. And if that still wasn't enough — throw the Hresvelgr, whose firepower is mediocre without strategic missiles anyway, and inflict catastrophic damage on the enemy team.
The timing on each of those layers was so goddamn artistic that an All-Star team of nothing but rankers (minus one) got completely jerked around.
The problem is how hard 3rd place got screwed by pure bad luck.
1-1. He forced a fleet decisive battle… and three giant-clan leaders who are the best in the game at fleet decisive battles just happened to be sitting on the same team, so his side couldn't break through.
Holy shit this was actually wild to watch. Somehow holding rotating defense and mobile defense at the same time while still scraping reinforcements out of the rear and feeding them forward — genuinely astonishing.
2-1. He sent like a hundred Superhumans, but Anomalocaris was so massive that the boarding conquest dragged, and in that window everyone who wasn't tied up in the fleet battle just dumped SSS-grades in a swarm and crushed them with raw weight class.
It's not that Icarus and the rest of 3rd place's players are weak. It's that the other side is wall-to-wall rankers, so a minimum of three or four SSS-grades pop out and the remaining Superhumans just get rolled lmao
3-1. He tried to stab the flanks with the bypass fleets — and one of them ran straight into Raksha, who happened to be passing by, and got wiped.
That shit looked actually broken. Makes you wonder if 2nd place is just running around with a nuke.
So the fleet that was supposed to face the Kraken should have been cut down to a quarter or a third of its strength right there —
Instead every last scrap of combat power got thrown in with zero mercy, the Kraken's escort fleet got shredded, and even that broken ship couldn't punch through the defense.
4-1. And this one is the unluckiest break of the unluckiest breaks.
With all three methods above shut down, he goes straight for the Hresvelgr self-destruct —
and who the hell expects some newbie getting his ships stripped by Superhumans to take his one remaining ship and ram a battleship with it like an intercept missile?
3-Line Summary
1. 3rd place literally used every method available to him.
2. Done well, he could have won — or at worst forced a draw.
3. Bad luck and the weight-class gap just buried him.
[jpg: A standard-grade battleship with assault pods jammed into it all over, smoke pouring off the hull, Superhumans visible fighting through the bridge windows — two seconds before impact with the Hresvelgr]
[A swarm of white toads gripping their spears and screaming "I'll remember!"]
Somewhere in the middle of all that, a minor side event involving a sudden crop of V8-worshipping cultists did crop up — but that was neither here nor there.
What mattered was that once analytical posts like those became the main current, the brain-dead garbage threads and pure shitpost bait stopped flooding in.
I felt deeply satisfied watching that shift take hold.
And then the thought settled in: until the event results dropped, I could just leisurely gather resources and enjoy a quiet country life.
The funny part was that even while thinking that, I was already naturally waiting for the next wave of pirates to respawn.
[gif: An Oviraptor-class light cruiser completely unable to push past the zone boundary]
What the fuck is this
Whether the admins did it on purpose or simply forgot to lift the restriction, the result was the same: nothing could leave the zone, and nothing could enter it either.
Faced with that bizarre situation, we spent the full week until the event results dropped huddled together inside the base and the zone, living a life so leisurely it bordered on the absurd — whether we wanted to or not.
Third place. Three times running.
I didn't know the exact reason, but the admins had locked players from leaving the zone and, at the same time, sealed off any entry from the outside — pirates included.
"Peaceful, isn't it."
"It really is."
Pirates, passing wild Space Kaiju, Earth Federation scout elements and stragglers, Zenobia Empire patrol fleets — every possible form of raid had been sealed off at the source.
With no zone-intrusion "alerts" of any kind, the quiet, peaceful days just kept rolling on.
I took a long, slow sip of the cocoa Jessica had made for me and thoroughly enjoyed this unseasonable stretch of ease.
— Slurp.
Now I get why powerful people retire to the countryside the moment they set their power down. This is actually great.
Rest handed to you right after fucking combat, fucking base management, and then a fucking hardcore event battle on top of that.
Ah, how sweet it was.
Waking up to something other than "Pirates are attacking!" — instead, a leisurely morning coffee, a light clear of the daily quests, then a casual stroll around the base interior… which failed immediately because the place was simply too big…
So I'd hop on the nuclear-fusion superconducting-battery-equipped Segway Griyanaar had built for me and cruise around instead.
Or I'd go watch Ignis and Partia's live muscle-training party.