Lone Wolf vs. Troll (4)
A strategy of deliberately interfering with nearby players' growth just enough to keep them manageable, then swooping in with your own fleet to devour them the moment they looked like they'd gotten somewhere.
By its nature, unless your fleet had already grown properly, it was just as easy to end up on the receiving end of that same treatment later. Grudges piled up in an instant, and more often than not the karma came back around — which was why, further down the line, it became a method nobody dared use unless they belonged to a major clan.
Running wild with an SSS-grade cruiser, huh? That's genuinely not an easy play.
I figured I wasn't the first person this kind of player had pulled this on. With the thought that the bastard would get his proper karma soon enough, I was about to order the resource fleet — due back any moment — to head for a different resource zone and start mining there instead.
But right then, a new post appeared on the community window's "Featured" tab that I'd left open this whole time. Without thinking, I clicked it just to see what it was.
The second I saw that title — and then the contents inside — every rational thought I'd been holding onto went straight out the airlock. I decided then and there to put the pedal down on preparations to thoroughly ruin that bastard's day.
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"Heh heh heh heh heh heh."
There were a ton of comments stacking up, but before I even read them, irritation came roaring up like a tidal wave.
This son of a bitch was fabricating the narrative right out in the open.
So, to bleed off the irritation that had climbed all the way to the top of my skull, I decided on the spot to assemble a force that could counter him immediately.
"Jessica. That bastard who just ambushed our resource fleet."
"Yes, Commander."
"I want a fleet composition that can catch him and grind him into paste. I'm going all-in on this, so help me out."
"Yes, sir!"
Of course, no matter how pissed I was, charging his fleet head-on wasn't an option. The firepower of his cruiser — the Overseer — was far too strong for my fleet, which still hadn't built a cruiser of its own, to tank from the front. And on the flip side, the Overseer's sheer tonnage could simply shrug off the firepower of our damage dealer, Pashtura.
So instead of hitting his fleet head-on, I was putting together a bait operation using aggro. The plan: his precious cruiser was so overwhelmingly superior to the rest of his ships that the moment it broke formation and lunged out ahead of its escorts, we'd ambush it and snatch the whole damn thing.
Naturally, unless the guy was a complete idiot, he'd have at least an S-grade Super or higher defending inside the cruiser. At bare minimum, I'd need to deploy Ignis and Belial together for a speedrun — seize the Overseer's command-and-control systems as fast as humanly possible.
Anyway, while I was deep in planning, I suddenly realized I still had the community window half-open. I figured I might as well finish reading the comments under that garbage post…
Wait, what?
To my surprise, the comments under his post were almost entirely unfriendly.
As the comments tearing into the post kept coming, the newbies' curious reactions started pouring out alongside them. And a short while later, I watched a new post pop up with a cheerful little chime — one that looked an awful lot like a direct hit piece on that damn Melon bastard.