A Commander With No Friends
"Huh?"
"You don't have any friends, Commander. So how exactly were you planning to start a clan?"
"What."
What.
Watching Jessica casually drive a verbal fist straight into my solar plexus — as natural and fluid as a Tai Chi form — I opened my mouth with the calmest, steadiest composure I could muster.
"What are you talking about, Jessica? Me? No connections? Please."
Who did she think I was?
The charming Rank 3 player who got courted with gifts and personal visits from all three mega-clans. The Man of Three. The idea that someone like me had no friends was pure linguistic absurdity.
But even as I fired back with all that swaggering confidence, Jessica kept landing bone-deep hits.
"Commander, be honest. Of all the people you've actually sat down and talked with since arriving here — how many of them aren't already in a clan?"
"…Huh?"
She was right.
What good were connections if they were all spoken for?
Arcadia? Betelgeuse? Clan leaders of two of the five largest mega-clans on the server. Tiara, who I'd met not long ago and still chatted with occasionally? Humanity Clan. And everyone else…
…There was no one else?
Wait, why is there no one else?
Desperate to push back against Jessica's cowardly, vicious fact-violence, I wrung every last acquaintance out of my memory like a wet rag…
"M-Marianne is…"
"Marianne isn't a commander, Commander."
Nothing.
It was a freshly painful realization, but the truth was simple: in all my time playing this game, I had barely interacted with other users at all.
Jessica's merciless truth-bomb hit me square in the chest, and I felt my enthusiasm for founding a clan plummet at an exponential rate.
I was, it turned out, extremely short on friends.
As the ruthless fact-violence crashed over me, I chose resistance over silence. The problem was that resisting didn't change the reality that I had no close friends whatsoever.
If there was any escape from that vicious truth-bomb…
This Solo Rankers' Room was about the only hope I had left.
But as I'd already learned once before… calling the people in this room "pure solo players" was a bit of a stretch.
Setting aside my own calmly delivered messages, the other four "solo" rankers in the room were solo in name only. In practice, every one of them was either sponsored by someone or effectively attached to a faction.
Take them by ranking. Laura, Rank 6, was essentially an external advisor and long-term contracted mercenary for Arcadia's Justice Clan. Indefatigable, Rank 7… well, he was a mood-driven type who took jobs from whatever clan caught his fancy. He accepted contracts from Justice and Loki, sure, but Humanity's commissions always came first — so he was basically Humanity's outside contractor.
Menaldo was probably the closest to me in this room, and the one you could most reasonably call a true solo player… except.
As the chat that popped up right after that thought made clear, three mid-tier clans from the Zenobia Empire faction were competing to recruit Menaldo. Before long, he'd belong to a clan entirely.
And finally, there was Koenig…
"Hahahaha! Look at this, Jessica!"
"What is it, Commander?"
"There's someone else like me out there!"
"…"
It felt a little pathetic, admittedly. But the relief of discovering that a being like me (?) existed somewhere was real enough. I immediately shoved the chat window at Jessica — only for that brief triumph to evaporate moments later.
Because Koenig then revealed that he was successfully running the exact playstyle I'd once considered and then half-abandoned because I got too busy.
"Hmm…"
"Well. There you have it."
"I figured a solo player would be living in the Central District, but apparently not."
Reading that, I realized Koenig wasn't holed up in the Central District — that den of clanless losers — but somewhere with a decent population of small-to-mid-sized clans. So I casually asked which zone he was in.
Koenig answered without hesitation, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
And in the same breath, I accidentally learned where the rest of the solo rankers lived, too.