The Assassination(???) Plan (2)
With most of the opposition swinging over to support or neutrality, Icarus's assassination plan was finally shifting into gear in earnest.
Of course, "assassination plan" was something of a misnomer.
Everyone present already knew that a Commander—that is, a player—couldn't suffer more than a certain threshold of pain or harm from NPCs or other superhumans. So the real objective was to terrorize Icarus's base itself, freeze his development in place, and knock him out of future competition.
Failing that, they could use the threat to force him to cancel his mercenary contract with the Justice Clan and ally with them instead.
That said, the framing did produce one minor point of discord…
"But doesn't that make it a terror plan, not an assassination plan…?"
"What… did you just say?"
"Ah."
That one trivial objection from someone in the room meant the plan didn't start with detailed operational planning.
"Anyway, the target's a Commander, so assassination still fits, right?"
"You're calling it murder when you aren't even killing him? By that logic, a car crash is a traffic assassination."
"…Sometimes that tracks, though."
"Get out!"
…In the end, because they were fundamentally just game players, they burned a truly staggering amount of precious time simply arguing over what to name the plan.
Only after roughly ten minutes had passed did they finally rebrand the "assassination plan" with the far more stylish title of "Special Operations Plan."
"Yeah, this has way more swagger."
"…"
Pointedly ignoring the look of pure secondhand embarrassment Antares was giving them, they began laying out the actual plan step by step.
And true to Humanity's character—always a little underhanded, always weirdly pragmatic—they once again chose not to go in themselves. Instead, they would run the operation through outside personnel and subordinate clans.
This time they weren't even committing a large fleet. The plan called for a pure superhuman raid: a small elite team, including at least ten SSS-grade superhumans, slipped in under the radar to seize the stronghold.
But here, a problem they had either failed to anticipate—or simply known about and quietly ignored—reared its head.
That was the problem: outside personnel were reacting to Humanity's commissions—delivered through clan officers—with nothing but open hostility.
Looked at another way, their reaction was only natural.
Last time, five players had gone in with all their superhumans and elite fleets and still gotten chewed up. On top of that, a massive pirate fleet had been waiting to finish the job. One player had even lost a precious SSS-grade superhuman, and the rest had to pay through the nose just to recover their people. Word of that had spread far and wide.
None of them had any intention of suffering the same fate, so of course they pushed back against Humanity's directives.
The clan leaders of the subordinate clans were no different.
Humanity's demand that they hand over their precious superhumans drew fierce pushback—what happens if those superhumans get obliterated? And before that, had anyone even thought about contingency plans to keep them from getting obliterated in the first place?
Antares and his officers had no choice but to sit down and think hard about how to defuse the situation.
Meanwhile, at that same moment, our Icarus was…
"Where did the Segway go, Griyanaar?"
"Wouldn't this be faster? A bio-mount I just finished building."
"Heeheehee, ain't I a fine male bug? Climb onto my plump back, heehee."
"…"
Icarus stared at the thing Griyanaar had bizarrely modified—the Femi-Canf… no, some indescribable form that might have been a pupa or a water bear—and felt a deeply unsettling aesthetic sensation wash over him.
At the very moment Icarus was refusing to ride the thing that had once been a Femi-Canf and ordering someone to bring him a normal means of transport—
"Why are they saying no?"
"They're asking what happens if their superhumans get wiped out for nothing."
"On top of the Unity Clan we threw together last time failing spectacularly, Marshmallow losing an SSS-grade seems to be the big sticking point."
"Haaah…"
Antares and Humanity began formulating a proper response to the outside personnel's hostility.
"It's not like we're assassinating the Commander and fighting a full-scale war over it, right?"
"No, sir."
"Then we just send in a high-performance stealth assault ship and slip in carefully."
"The graviton radar will pick it up. Is that even possible?"
"There's a ship that doesn't get caught by those."
"We don't have one, Clan Leader."
"…"
For this very operation, Antares—the clan leader himself—willingly(?) put up one of the ships he'd pulled from the gacha: the SSS-grade Chiral-class Stealth Destroyer, currently the most advanced stealth vessel in existence.
From there, they coaxed and cajoled, even promising massive support packages to every player who committed to the fight. If an SSS-grade superhuman was lost in the operation, they'd even hand over a gacha ticket from the clan warehouse.
And so, the usual crowd of people who believed in their own baseless luck—or who still dreamed of pulling ten SSS-grades or ten ships in a ten-pull—quietly decided to join the operation.
They squeezed every last drop they could, cutting anyone who signed up only to back out at the last second with a "yeah, actually, never mind." By exhausting every means available, the stubborn bastards of Humanity finally succeeded in assembling a roughly twenty-person elite infiltration team that included twelve SSS-grades.
Of course, once the roster was actually sitting in front of them, Humanity's staff officers still couldn't shake the feeling it wasn't enough.
"Icarus got gacha rewards from the event too, and considering he fielded at least six superhumans during the event itself…"
"Yeah."
"Factoring in the ones that seem to stay at the base, plus whoever's on standby as pirate mercenaries… shouldn't we be putting in at least twenty SSS-grades to be safe?"
They were calling for a safety-margin twenty-plus, but unfortunately reality never follows the plan.
"Even this much only happened because we promised massive resource and gacha-currency support to people who didn't want to hand anyone over—and gacha tickets until they can re-roll if they lose a superhuman."
"Uuugh."
"Push any further and the clan takes a hit."
They hadn't gathered four or five superhumans from a handful of people in one go. They'd scraped them together one at a time from SSS-grade holders, carefully picking the optimal combination. Even for Humanity—ranked first on the server—pulling more than this was a stretch.
Granted, if they truly committed to an all-out war with Icarus, they could flood the field with thousands of superhumans instead of a mere twenty. But the problem was that they weren't trying to fight a full-scale war. This was a black-ops mission.
On a job that had to stay quiet, making that kind of racket was simply impossible.
Besides, as previously noted, Icarus's superhuman count was seven or eight at most. Two of those were a long-range type and a supporter—distinctly mediocre in superhuman close combat.
"Twelve should honestly be enough, right?"
"His actual combat power is only about five, isn't it?"
"Even if the pirates have extra superhumans, the only one approaching SSS-grade would be the defense fleet admiral. Shouldn't be a big problem."
Convinced they had decent odds, they decided to push the plan through as-is.
In the process, though, they noticed something in the superhuman roster they'd pieced together from the event: Smeragi—the one who slapped brutal debuffs on anyone trying to infiltrate.
"Oh, come on."
"Yeah, this is the kind of pain you need to deal with to be a ranker."
Realizing they now had to carefully design a separate infiltration route just to account for Smeragi's debuffs, they started racking their brains over how to protect the lives of their "borrowed superhumans" while still getting maximum results.
And so, while the Humanity Clan was deep in preparations for their roughly twenty-person elite infiltration team—twelve SSS-grades, plus top-tier SS down through A-grades—