Solo Player vs Troller (3)
I figured it would be best to keep my head down for a while — run some upgrades, watch how things developed.
But about a week after that thought crossed my mind—
You have lost a resource zone!
Ha.
That was when I was forcibly made to understand exactly why every other player had been so obsessed with joining alliances.
Solo Player vs Troller (3)
Just before Icarus lost his resource zone.
Rewind the clock a little.
Around the same time our protagonist Icarus was stacking development on top of development, there was another commander operating nearby — one whose style was the complete opposite of his.
Where Icarus built fleets out of cheap, easy-to-produce basic ships and propped them up with SSS-grade and near-SS-grade supers, this commander had a very different philosophy.
"Why the hell would you only pull characters? At the end of the day, this is a fleet battle game."
He was a textbook fleet-combat purist, and that conviction alone would have been enough to set him apart. But unlike Icarus, he had somehow pulled the SSS-grade cruiser Overseer from the gacha instead of an SSS-grade super.
The result was a pure long-range firepower build. In raw power and firepower alone, the Overseer rivaled even upper-tier S-grade battleships — vessels two full ship classes above it. The unique nature of the SSS grade meant he could never pull a second Overseer, but starting the game with a ship that hit like a battleship was more than enough.
The Overseer's overwhelming range and firepower completely suppressed the possibility of close-quarters combat ever breaking out — something no other player could claim. Of course, he had read the recent chat logs about the Pirate Empress, so he knew he ought to prepare for boarding actions.
"If I just melt them from long range fast enough, the chance of a close-range fight disappears entirely, doesn't it?"
It was, in its own way, a perfectly reasonable line of thinking. And unlike his luck with ships, his luck pulling supers had been terrible. Where Icarus was swimming in high-grade characters, this commander's supers hovered somewhere between A and S-grade at best.
So why bring him up all of a sudden?
Because he was the one who had just attacked one of Icarus's resource zones.
"Ah, for fuck's sake. What a piece of shit."
Pirates had been showing up at resource zones so often that he'd started attaching escort fleets to his mining operations — and while he was at it, using the ships' cargo holds to haul more resources per trip. Then some other commander had shown up near his base with a massive fleet of his own and told him to get lost. The result: the gallery's most toxic anonymous troll — who in reality went by the username Melon — had lost the resource zone he'd been using, and the taste in his mouth was bitter as hell.
"Who the fuck does that guy think he is, throwing a fit over me sending a fleet to a resource zone?! God dammit!"
"P-please calm down, sir."
Deep down, Melon wanted nothing more than to drag his main fleet — Overseer included — over there and smash both that commander's ships and the pirates in one go. But the other guy was running two SS-grade flagships. Even if each one was a rank below the Overseer, two of them plus a larger overall fleet made the math ugly. So Melon, despite his usual garbage personality, had no choice but to swallow blood and abandon the zone.
If that had been the only resource zone he'd scouted, he might have gritted his teeth and fought to the death. But—
"Maya! Reroute the fleet to the area we scouted earlier, right now!"
"Yes, Commander!"
Fortunately, Melon and his fleet already had their eyes on a newly discovered resource zone. He pulled his ships out of the contested area and sent them straight there. And when he arrived to find another fleet already mining the place — his mood already foul beyond reason — Melon opened his mouth and said something that made you seriously question whether he had a brain at all.
"Who the hell are these assholes? They're eating the spot I had my eye on?"
He confirmed the fleet peacefully collecting resources in the zone, then fired off a one-on-one chat to its owner — a message that was, by his own standards, extremely calm and measured — telling them to get the hell out.
And the commander of that fleet, upon reading the chat that had just landed in his inbox—
"What the hell is this."
—our Icarus was watching his sanity leave his body as he stared at the most arrogant chat message he'd ever received.
For a moment, the sheer randomness of the one-on-one chat left me speechless. Then I shook my head and made my refusal clear.
And I meant it. The zone one of my resource fleets was currently mining was packed with asteroids far larger than anything in the other zones, pouring out mineral resources with no end in sight. The scale was so massive that my measly three ships barely made a dent — the guy messaging me, plus two more players on top of that, could all set up shop and there'd still be room to spare.
So from where I was sitting, I genuinely could not figure out what this weirdo was thinking. What was the point of monopolizing a resource zone so enormous you couldn't even process it alone, whether I was there or not?
But contrary to my reasonable expectations, the other party shoved forward with a level of stupidity that defied imagination.
The phrase "road rage" didn't even begin to cover it. My mood was deteriorating at an alarming rate when—
"Commander, we just received enemy fleet data from the ships at that resource zone!"
"Put it on the main screen."
"Yes, sir!"
Jessica pulled up the fleet power comparison on the large monitor installed in the command center.
Oh, for fuck's sake.
The bastard had brought his main fleet — SSS-grade ship and all. The power gap wasn't just bad; it was catastrophically bad. For now, I had no choice but to play along with whatever this guy wanted.
That didn't mean I wasn't pissed, of course.
Hah. What an uneducated piece of trash.
The silver lining of having conducted this entire exchange over chat was that I didn't even need to manage my facial expression. I closed the window and told Jessica to recall the resource fleet from that zone immediately.
"Haaah. Jessica."
"Yes, Commander."
"That fleet at Resource Zone Four… pull it back to base right now, before they get hit and we end up donating free resources."
"Understood. I'll handle it right away."
After giving the order, I leaned back in the commander's seat and sank into thought. Roughly half of that thinking was pure irritation at the rude bastard I'd just dealt with. The other half was an assessment of his unpleasant strategy.
At a glance it looks like he's just acting on pure impulse… but if you stop and think about it, he's actually being deliberate about this.
Instead of coexistence, he was making it clear he intended to hold overwhelming superiority over me. It was actually one of the strategies that used to show up in this game from time to time.