Assassination Plan (1)
Four hours later.
Dimension Causal Fixing Ticket × 10
Minerals 750,000 · Rare Resources 80,000
Dimension Causal Fixing Ticket × 10
> Ranking Reward Delay Compensation Notice
> We apologize, Commander.
> As compensation for the delayed ranking rewards, all Commanders will receive Dimension Causal Fixing Ticket × 5.
"Hell yeah."
"Wow, that's incredible."
Good lord. Our notoriously stingy admins were actually throwing rewards around like this?
Of course, snagging twenty-five gacha tickets in one go was purely because my ranking was absurdly high. Whatever the other players got, it was bound to be far less than mine.
With that thought in mind, I decided to put these amazing rewards to work immediately and beef up my forces. And by now, even Jessica — hell, even I — had no choice but to admit a certain truth…
"Then with everything we stockpiled during the event, our resources should be looking pretty flush overall!"
"…Yeah."
I didn't have the faintest expectation that rolling the gacha would actually produce anything useful, so I headed toward the gacha machine with the casual air of a man out for a stroll.
Meanwhile, at the same time…
With the southern campaign over and the event concluded, the Humanity Clan had planted its headquarters conspicuously close to Earth — the better to stage their coup against the Earth Federation. Inside the command room of that clan headquarters, Antares and his staff officers had just finished one agenda item and were moving on to the next.
"Alright, next topic. Our plan for dealing with this Icarus character."
"Hmm…"
"Looking at his combat power during the event, if we can't bring him into our fold, we need to terrorize him and crush him by any means necessary."
The problem, of course, was that the topic in question was a plan to take out our protagonist, Icarus.
A few dozen minutes of complicated discussion boiled down to roughly the following:
"So to summarize… we use forces that include our superhumans to steamroll Icarus's base for the purpose of terrorizing him?"
"Well, yeah… you skipped over a lot of the middle parts, but that's the gist."
But the majority of Humanity's executives were thoroughly unenthusiastic about the idea.
"Do we really need to mess with someone who's just sitting there minding his own business?"
"During the Central District invasion last time, sure, maybe. But right now there's no reason whatsoever to touch the Central District."
"If we poke him for no good reason, aren't we just wasting precious superhuman assets we need for the Federation coup?"
"We already threw five of our frontline fighters at him — everything short of base defense — and still lost. How much more force are we supposed to burn on this guy?"
The wording varied, but the summary was always the same: Why pick a fight with a guy who's leaving us alone and get ourselves hurt in the process?
The staff officers on the other side of the argument simply shook their heads.
"Think about it. Icarus just held third place three times in a row, and he made a name for himself during the last Central District invasion, didn't he?"
"According to Indefatigable — who we can count as one of ours — Icarus is basically the leader of the Central District at this point."
"Up until now he's been pathologically obsessed with solo play. But what if he drops that and decides to found a clan?"
"Or what if, instead of founding one, he joins an existing clan…? There's a real chance we get stabbed in the back right in the middle of the Earth Federation coup."
Their argument, boiled down: Our backs are itching — let's hit him first before he hits us!
But no matter how logically the staff officers tried to argue and persuade, the plan itself was designed to turn Icarus — currently a neutral party who was neither particularly friendly nor hostile toward Humanity — into a definite enemy. So the rest of the staff, along with the executives who included former Unity Clan members (the clan having since been disbanded) whose capital ships Icarus had blown to pieces last time, just kept shaking their heads. Not a chance. Some of them even started laying into the officers who'd proposed it, demanding to know whether they were thinking about the bigger picture at all.
But that only lasted so long.
"Ahem. Alright, let me put my own opinion on the table."
"Ah, Clan Leader."
The moment Antares, who had been watching the situation unfold, opened his mouth in earnest, the chaotic Humanity Clan meeting fell into a temporary lull.
And as Antares continued speaking, the executives realized something that made them uneasy: the proposal the staff officers had put forward wasn't the staff's own idea at all. It was a dressed-up version of the opinion their own Clan Leader had brought back after finishing the event.
"Personally, I'm in favor of that plan."
With the situation now clear, the executives' objections shifted from the staff officers to Antares himself.
"Clan Leader, even so — do we really need to mess with Icarus?"
"I think the same. Wouldn't it be better to take the funds we'd sink into that operation and just bribe Icarus instead — pull him in the way we did with Indefatigable?"
"Mmm…"
"I agree with that. Icarus is a solo player anyway, right?"
"For real."
Antares closed his eyes and held his silence for a moment. Only when the stream of objections had died down somewhat did he open them again and speak, calm and measured.
"Let me say this upfront — I don't think that idea itself is wrong."
"Excuse me?"
"What do you mean…?"
Confusion settled over the faces of every executive in the room. Antares paid it no mind. He let out a long, heavy sigh, then decided to briefly explain why he had tilted toward eliminating Icarus.
"The problem is this. Something I learned during the event… that guy is essentially functioning as an external mercenary for Arcadia's Justice Clan."
"What?"
"Wait, what are you talking about…?"
"Hmm."
"Is that true, Clan Leader?"
The executives reeled in shock at Antares's statement. Some of them tilted their heads, wondering if it could possibly be real.
But only for a moment.
"It's true."
Antares nodded with a deadly serious expression. Speaking for the executives, the vice clan leader carefully raised a question.
"Clan Leader, do you have any solid evidence of that?"
"Well… Arcadia herself said as much during the event. She talked about having claimed Icarus first, that sort of thing."
"Clan Leader, that alone hardly counts as evidence, does it?"
"Of course not. If she'd just been bragging on her own, I would have written it off as a way to keep a solo player in check."
"Then…?"
Faced with the vice clan leader's lingering doubt, Antares rubbed his temple as if his head were throbbing. He sighed once more, shook his head, and spoke.
"Just in case, I also checked with Koenig and that damn Betelgeuse — both of whom played alongside Icarus. And wouldn't you know it, the two of them cross-verified the whole thing perfectly."
"Oh… damn."
Naturally, murmurs surged through the ranks of the executives.
"Hold on a second — so that means they've turned two out of the four solo rankers into their personal mercenaries?"
"Isn't Raksha a solo ranker too?"
"Second place has a clan. It's just small."
"Ah, right."
"Laura is one thing, but if they pull in Icarus too, things could get genuinely dangerous down the line."
And a short while later…
A few dissenting opinions remained, but even those amounted to nothing more than suggestions that they try recruiting him themselves first.
"Think about it. During the last Central District invasion, the Justice people threw serious support behind Icarus, didn't they?"
"Huh. You're right."
"Hmm…"
Almost by accident, every piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.