Always Watch Your Back (1)
Right before my eyes, an event message popped up with a cheerful little chime, announcing that the fortress and all its defensive forces had been completely secured.
Nice. Delicious.
And unlike yesterday, today all the urgent business had already been handled, leaving me with time to spare. So I decided to screenshot the event message and post a verification shot to the gallery.
[Screenshot of the message confirming Avalon Fortress combat fleets have surrendered]
yep
lol
Gate repairs already done, you're welcome
Of course, posting a verification shot like this wasn't purely for bragging rights. It was a preemptive declaration: I'm fine, and anyone who messes with me right now is absolutely not walking away in one piece. In other words, a calculated flex.
So alongside the event message screenshot, I casually slipped into the post that the spaceport gates — which, aside from Gates 2 and 5, still weren't usable — were "perfectly fine."
And maybe that little touch did the trick. Barely a few minutes after uploading the post, I watched so-called "begging posts" start flooding in — full-blown prostration-and-apology threads.
Meanwhile, as the fortress's defensive posture gradually returned to normal, I realized that at this point the systems of my original base and the fortress had merged to a considerable degree.
To give an immediate example… well, the shipyards had expanded dramatically.
Previously, the Standard Shipyard had only four docks total, and the Capital Ship Shipyard a mere one. But with the base not merely docking to Avalon Fortress but fully integrating with it, the results spoke for themselves.
— Dock 1
Battlecruiser under repair…
Time Remaining: 5h 5m 5s
— Dock 2(Fortress-Provided Facility)
Standby
Hoooooooooh—!
The Standard Shipyard and Capital Ship Shipyard had each gained two docks and one dock respectively. Of course, as the parenthetical labels reading (Fortress-Provided Facility) made clear, these facilities were only usable so long as our base maintained its docked status with the fortress…
But do I really have anywhere else to go?
Unlike other players, I'd been a homebody who stuck to the same spot for nearly two years straight. There was zero reason to abandon a newly acquired nest this good. That particular worry wasn't even worth entertaining.
Anyway, setting aside those idle thoughts, I went back to checking the rest of the base facility status. It wasn't just the shipyards — the resource warehouses had integrated with the fortress warehouses as well.
> Icarus — Astral Base Resource Warehouse
> Currently docked with Avalon Fortress Resource Warehouse
> Max Resource Storage: 16,500,000(6,500,000 + 10,000,000)
The maximum resource storage capacity had jumped by a full ten million. Beyond that, facilities that originally belonged to the base — the lounge, the training room, and the like — had also integrated with fortress facilities, becoming noticeably larger and more lavish.
The lounge in particular was no longer a mere "lounge" — calling it a full-blown resort wouldn't have been an exaggeration. It had restaurants, every kind of entertainment facility imaginable: an amusement park, a recreation complex, an alien zoo… there was even a virtual reality gaming zone. I genuinely had to wonder what kind of place this was supposed to be.
The base's resource synthesis production facilities had also transformed into something… no, something enormously vast. The Astral Base had already been growing massive with every level-up, so our production facilities had already been large enough to swallow a real-world industrial complex whole. Integrating with the fortress production facilities — which were even larger than the base itself — produced a result that defied description.
"Hmm… so this is the current state of our resource synthesis production facilities… or rather, our production industrial complex?"
"Yep. Thanks to that, the base is on track to produce thirty thousand resources a day."
It was an industrial complex in name only. On the command center screen, a factory complex so vast that — by the standards of my previous life — it looked like the entire southern half of the Korean peninsula had been paved over with factories was churning out resources at full tilt. The sheer SF scale of it was staggering, and I found myself nodding along in spite of myself.
And right as I was nodding at that very thought—
With impeccable timing, a message appeared announcing that the resource warehouse construction — which I'd queued the moment the Air Command finished building — was complete. At last, the final key to pushing our base past Level 7 had arrived: it was time to build the Fleet Association. A deep surge of satisfaction washed over me as I immediately set the next construction in motion.
You always have to watch your back in this world. (1)
> Fleet Association under construction…
> Time Remaining: 25 days, 1 hour, 3 minutes, 50 seconds
Aigoo, that's a long one.
True to form for a facility whose resource requirements shattered every previous record among the auxiliary buildings, the Fleet Association demanded nearly a full month of construction time. Then again, the other auxiliary buildings — the Air Command and the Special Design Bureau — had each eaten up over twenty days themselves, so…