Base Update (1)
And so, while Raksha and his officers took up residence with the Southern Coalition and tore into the Magellan Clan on a furious campaign of revenge—
[The Zenobia Empire Territory Ablaze]
1. Looks like Humanity got its officers and invasion forces purged after the failed invasion.
2. The Loki Clan made a move, only for Humanity to pull out of Zenobia Empire territory and immediately push south — so they got reverse-trolled instead.
3. The Justice Clan seems to have stopped moving after taking in maybe a thousand nearby players.
4. Meanwhile, the Magellan Clan tried to push south and claim the southern zones Humanity abandoned, but a coalition formed around the mid-tier clans of that region is holding them off.
5. Ranking #2 Raksha has respawned with the Southern Coalition.
6. On top of that, more than half the former Rotten Water Clan officers have respawned with the Southern Coalition and are active again, yeah.
7. It's a complete mess.
Huh.
I couldn't help but stare at the gallery in mild astonishment as the situation unfolded.
"Things are getting rather complicated, Jessica."
"Complicated how? Ah… you're talking about the Zenobia Empire."
Setting aside the fact that they spent every day beating each other senseless, the community was mostly solo players. No matter how tangled or large-scale a conflict got, there was usually a ceiling to it. Over there, though, the number of players tangled up in the mess was already in the tens of thousands. That alone seemed to keep the whole theater running at a spectacular pitch.
And when people called the situation a "Three Kingdoms" scenario, I'd naturally assumed Humanity was one of the three. Instead, Humanity had washed out early — no, bailed early — and out of nowhere a Southern Coalition of mid-tier clans had formed in its place.
Fascinating.
And the ranking #2 player, last heard of as having gone completely dark after getting wrecked, had crawled back from the dead and was now operating as a pillar of that coalition?
"Looking at stuff like this, you really never know how the world works."
"You're telling me."
And right after I'd said that, still reeling from the surprise—
[Mosaic-censored interview footage with a Magellan Clan officer.swf]
Three-line summary for the lazy bastards who won't watch:
1. Raksha once completely wrecked Monalisa's base.
2. After that he kept screwing over Magellan and other clans on a regular basis, so this was payback.
3. And now Raksha's the one crying about revenge over getting hit back? Real classy, yeah.
I won't go into further detail. I'm just here to deliver the info.
I marveled at the flood of astonishing news from the other side of Earth — no, the other side of the universe — and at the same time watched reactions pile onto the info posts exactly the way comment sections used to under news articles in my previous life. People really were the same no matter where you went.
Base Update. (1)
Of course, for Humanity to be doing anything of the sort regarding the Zenobia Empire… well. They were pouring enormous effort into hunting down the purged members of their own weakened roster, so in practical terms they had zero interest in the Zenobia side of things at all.
And what people were calling "Humanity reinforcements" were, in reality, just other players flying ships seized during the invasion, or scavenged hulls left adrift. But it would take a long time for that truth to come out — so at this point, it was information I had no way of knowing.
At any rate, that was the kind of life I was living: checking in on the civil war(?) raging in the far-off Zenobia Empire, among other things. And then—
> Additional Docking Facility construction complete!
> Fleet Point 650 ⇒ 750
Finally.
The moment the event message popped up confirming that the docking facility I'd queued last time was finished, I immediately set about building another one.
> Additional Docking Facility under construction…
> Time remaining until completion: 11 days 1 hour 5 minutes 30 seconds
And right after kicking that off, I decided to check how many resource mining ships I currently had.
Not that I was going to dig through the menus myself, of course.
"Jessica. Resource mining ships."
"Twenty-eight, sir. Though… can't you check that yourself?"
"Sometimes a man just wants to make the people around him do things for him."
"…"
I got my answer through Jessicaemon, who was always on standby at my side.
Having confirmed the mining ship count, I stuck to the original plan of bringing it up to thirty and immediately ordered two more mining ships at the shipyard. Then I scrapped one destroyer — not a transport, a combat destroyer — to free up Fleet Points. The hundred points that opened up went straight into the capital shipyard: Battlecruiser Unit 6 and Large Carrier Unit 2, both put into production.
And the result: