The Commander Complement Plan
The thought even crossed my mind that maybe the reason Humanity and Loki had handed over their Gold so willingly was for something like this.
Anyway, was that why?
[Image of a personal chat window, appropriately mosaicked, showing a trade conversation with someone]
It's a pain in the ass, but just trade Gold person-to-person or whatever.
If you post that you're looking to trade in the global chat, somebody's gonna DM you.
Oh, and fair warning — private trades have this tendency where people try to barter goods instead of using Gold, lol.
Watching barter trade — actual goods-for-goods exchange — make a sudden comeback left me genuinely at a loss for how to even describe the situation.
And while I wasn't paying attention to any of that...
Meanwhile, after wrapping up his survey of the auction house and the trade market, Icarus was sitting there going hoeeeeng, fretting over what he was supposed to do next.
At that very same hour, the superhumans who had finished clearing the "daily quests" he'd assigned them were seizing the rare free time for a long-overdue gathering of their own.
But Jessica, who served as Icarus's adjutant, was of course present — and so were all the other superhumans except Partia. Marianne was there. Even the newcomer Tiamat had shown up. And the vibe of that little assembly was, how to put it...
"Alright, everyone's here?"
"Mm..."
Maybe it was the fully darkened lights and the solitary shimmer of a special hologram in the conference room, but the whole scene gave off the unmistakable energy of a secret shadow council plotting something sinister from behind the government — the kind of gathering that reeked of damp, underhanded schemes.
It looked so thoroughly primed for some dark and wicked conspiracy that if Icarus ever laid eyes on it, he would absolutely seize up and scream something like —
"Whoa! What the h—!"
— at the sight of this mysterious superhuman cabal operating inside his own base.
But for all that ominous exterior...
"Uh, so..."
"Do we really have to meet like this, though?"
"I mean, we all know each other already... it's kind of weird, right?"
"Then just turn the lights on."
The room that had been drowning in shadowy-mastermind atmosphere transformed in an instant into something bright and cheerful — someone flipped the lights on because the hologram was so blindingly bright against the darkness that it hurt their eyes.
"...So what exactly did we gather for?"
"Hmm. Come to think of it, this is Tiamat's first time joining us."
"Yeah. She's been so busy with carrier aircraft training she barely had any free time until now."
Tiamat — first-timer — watched the whole spectacle with a face full of pure suspicion, wondering just what on earth she had walked into.
But that thought only lasted a moment.
"Since everyone's here, I'll go ahead and declare the meeting open~♡"
"Right then. As always, we'll proceed straight to the first item on the agenda."
"Agenda?"
"That's right."
"It's the absolute top-priority item Griyanaar proposed last time, too♡"
"???"
"The very purpose of this meeting: the grand plan to extract the Commander's genetic material and distribute one Commander clone to every single superhuman."
"Also known as the Commander Complement Plan. Progress report on that is our first order of business."
"..."
From the perspective of poor Tiamat, who had walked in knowing absolutely nothing, this was... something else. The superhumans hadn't gathered for a friendly hangout, and they weren't forming some base-internal clique either. No — they were sitting here hatching a damp, bizarre scheme to acquire the genetic material of their base Commander, Icarus, so that each of them could claim a personal clone of him.
Her face twisted into a spectacular knot as she tried to figure out how she was even supposed to process that information.
And while our pitiful Tiamat was busy running a full where am I, who am I diagnostic, the moment Pashtura announced the start of the meeting, Belial on the far side immediately began tearing into Griyanaar...
"You always swagger around claiming you can do anything. So why is it that the Commander's clone is the one thing you can't make, Griyanaar?"
"Khh..."
"Amateur."
"Nnnngh!"
Ordinarily, Belial was pure by-the-book military, and Griyanaar — slippery as oil — always managed to dodge and weave around her, making their relationship a one-sided scolding session. But this time, she was failing (allegedly) in her own specialty of science and research. Watching Belial hit her with every regulation-grade takedown in the book and throw her own teasing lines right back at her, Griyanaar trembled, accepted reality, and shook her head with a helpless little shrug.
"I've already said this, but you can't create something from nothing."
"Mm..."
"To make a clone, you need the Commander's genetic material — not a little bit, a lot of it. And the problem is, collecting it is a real nightmare."
"She's right. Just as Professor Griyanaar says, extracting genetic material from the Commander is extremely difficult."
At Griyanaar's response, Smeragi and Pashtura each raised a hand with a question.
"What about last time, nya? Like with that Rakan guy — can't we just sneak in through the pipes into the Commander's bathroom, nya?"
"I was thinking the same thing. Even if not the bathroom, there should be ventilation ducts and all sorts of other routes, right?"
But to both of their questions, Professor Grigori Griyanar and her assistant (?) Rain answered that it was impossible.
"It's not as though we haven't tried..."
"Here's the wild part — the Commander's quarters are under a complete lockdown and spatial isolation system."
"Aside from communications, every pipe, every wire, and every other lifeline in the base is cut off from that room."
Of course, that was nothing more than a kind of "forced protection" generated by the System itself. But the women gathered here had their minds locked in such a way that they couldn't even begin to grasp the concept of "System protection" — which meant breaking through it was, quite literally, impossible.
"If we just get enough genetic material, we can use the equipment in the Nest of Life to replicate as many as we want after that."
"With sufficient resources, we could fill the entire base with Commander clones."
"...Which is exactly why we're holding this meeting, because we can't."
"Right. That's precisely the problem."
And so, while Belial, Pashtura, Griyanaar, and the Smeragi and Rain who had been influenced by her all groaned and clutched their heads, Ignis — who had somehow become the most senior superhuman on the base — suddenly floated a thought that set her apart from the rest of the lust-addled crowd.
"Hold on, though. If we can mass-produce clones on that scale... couldn't we use our own genetic material to create a clone superhuman army?"
"Huh?"
"Ignis, that's not what we're discussing right now..."
Naturally, the other superhumans looked at her like she'd just said something completely out of left field. But only for a moment.
"I mean, if we just steamroll everything with sheer numbers and rack up overwhelming battle records, wouldn't the Commander bestow his favor on us?"
"...Hmm."
"Trying to force it — and Griyanaar not even being able to hide that she's trying to milk him dry — is only making the Commander's guard go up higher, isn't it?"
She jabbed right at the sore spot, and the rest of the superhumans had to admit she had a point.
But the ones who would actually have to produce those "clones" — Griyanaar and Rain — went pale in an instant.
"Unfortunately, stuffing superhuman genes into something doesn't mass-produce superhumans."
"Wait, why not?"
"Life doesn't work that easily. Even if we used our genes to build a clone legion..."
"They'd only share the appearance and personality. None of the special abilities required of a superhuman would come through at all."
"Ah... damn."
Griyanaar shook her head with clinical finality, declaring it "impossible." Belial and Oxianor nodded along — and then a sudden suspicion flickered through both of them.
"Wait... the way you're reacting. You've already tried this, haven't you?"
"Yep. Last time I cloned from stem cells just to check, and all I got was a kid who looked like me."
"Aha."
"But her intellect was low, her physical abilities were completely ordinary civilian-level, and only the personality carried over — so I just chucked her into the chimera production plant."
"...?"
Confronted with Griyanaar's bright, utterly shameless admission that she had used her own clone as biological components for the chimera production plant, the two of them could only nod in acknowledgment of that particular brand of madness.
But no matter how the process had gone, the result was the same: creating a clone of the Commander had failed once again. And so, with the exception of Ignis — whose head was still full of flower fields and the simple wish that it would be nice to have one more Commander around — the rest of the superhumans steeled themselves.
Someday, without fail, they would claim a future where every single one of them had an Icarus of their own.