I Won't Give You Time to Prepare (2)
Meanwhile, roughly a month after the Erosance contest.
While Icarus was grinding away — gathering resources, gathering more resources, gathering still more resources — pouring every last scrap of effooooort into eventually swallowing the Tannhauser Gate Fortress whole…
…a conspiracy was quietly taking shape at the headquarters of the Isekai Clan, right in the heart of the Central District.
And the nature of that conspiracy was none other than…
A conspiracy of staggering scale, binding together no fewer than fifty clans — the Isekai Clan among them.
In short: grow into the sole mega-clan of the Central District, then forge a true heavyweight that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Big Three. That was the will they intended to unleash.
And to give that will some teeth, they had drawn up a fairly meticulous plan of their own.
As plenty of people had already pointed out — and as more than a few had learned the hard way by blowing themselves up trying — the Central District, unlike other zones, simply did not tolerate being dominated by any single power. Players would not suffer the existence of a clan larger than ten members. Building a giant clan from day one was, practically speaking, impossible…
"Oh, so if a clan hits ten-plus people, the locals jump them?"
"Then why not just make a bunch of clans under ten, grab a solid stronghold, and call it a day?"
There was no shortage of schemers in the world. If you couldn't field a clan of ten or more, then recruit across dozens of sub-ten clans, seize a stronghold with decent defenses by any means necessary, and use that as the launchpad to formally found the alliance as a proper clan. That was the plan.
As long as it wasn't a Level 7 stronghold, they figured, throwing their combined forces at it would be enough to crack it open.
Unfortunately, that plan ran headfirst into the very "defense-specialized stronghold" the Walpurgis Alliance Clan had been eyeing — Avalon Fortress. Of all the rotten luck, Rank 3 Icarus had come out of nowhere, exploited unlimited mercenary hiring, and solo-sieged the city in two days with a fleet worth over a hundred thousand Fleet Points. Total catastrophe. Every schedule they had carefully laid out went up in smoke.
Naturally, having botched the first button, the Walpurgis Alliance Clan scrambled to pivot toward some other stronghold…
But they had already abandoned their old territory and warped their bases over specifically to take Avalon. Which left them in a rather awkward position.
"Let's just move the bases and hit something else."
"Yeah, except everyone's on cooldown. We gotta wait a month."
"…Ah."
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they found themselves living the sudden life of refugees near Avalon, scraping by on whatever meager resources they had left.
Of course, the abrupt change of fortune was hard to swallow, and their first impulse was pure violence — a full-throated urge to throw themselves at Icarus.
"Let's wreck Icarus and take that Level 5 stronghold for ourselves!"
"Yeah, except the guy's got a Pirate Union protection fleet on standby."
"Plus the unlimited merc fleet and the base defense fleet. We throw down now, we get flattened, no?"
"…Yeah, fair."
As the saying goes, a mad dog needs a stick. The moment they pictured the fifty thousand ships Icarus had fielded, plus the city's own thirty-thousand-strong garrison fleet, slamming into their main battle force… the mental image of the absolute slaughter that would follow was enough to inject a sudden dose of manners into the lot of them.
And once that forced etiquette had cooled their heads…
"Icarus can't keep that fleet forever."
"For real."
"A week tops, but just to be safe, let's wait about a week and then hit him."
"Sounds good."
Convinced that even that enormous mercenary army couldn't be maintained indefinitely, the Walpurgis leadership decided that a gentleman's revenge was never late even after a week — and settled in to wait with patience.
The problem was what happened not long after that.
"…What the hell is an Erosance contest?"
"lmaoooooooo"
"Ah, for f—"
"The timing on this is absolute garbage."
Icarus himself hadn't meant anything by it, but the excessively voluntary and explosive participation of certain… refined gentlemen among the player base had birthed the Erosance contest. And as a direct result, a clan some two thousand three hundred strong had materialized out of thin air right next door to Avalon Fortress, where Icarus lived.
A force that dwarfed anything the defense fleets they had been so carefully watching could muster. Naturally, the Walpurgis Alliance Clan's plans to attack Icarus received another forced injection of manners — and their heads sank right back into their shoulders.
But all of that was in the past now.
After a long stretch of oppression and humiliation, an opportunity had finally come knocking for the alliance clan.
For reasons they couldn't quite pin down, Icarus had been focusing exclusively on stockpiling resources — no expansion, no combat to speak of.
Which led them to conclude that Icarus no longer had the capital to hire a large-scale mercenary force — and they were preparing to put that conclusion into practice.
But as time had passed, their reasons for targeting Icarus had multiplied considerably.
Ever since Raksha's Rotten Water Clan had collapsed, and Magellan Clan had cemented itself as the zone's top dog by crushing the Rank 2 player… the Walpurgis Alliance Clan had drawn the same lesson. If they could defeat Rank 3 Icarus — a player capable of solo-sieging a stronghold — their position as the undisputed premier clan of the Central District would be locked in for good.
That burning will pointed them toward a concentrated assault on Icarus and Avalon Fortress. Topple a ranker the way Magellan had, ride the fame, and claim their place as the Central District's mega-clan. That was reason number one.
On top of that, as already mentioned, simply holding a Level 5 stronghold would be enough to keep most solo players from even thinking about rushing them. And then there were the clan members who just wanted to gank him because he was famous, for no better reason than that.
After deliberation upon deliberation, the Walpurgis leadership made one final check of their forces.
Perhaps because a majority of the fifty clan leaders who made up the leadership had voted in favor, orders went out to every member of the alliance: give everything they had to take Icarus and the city he controlled.
And just as that little "prank" of the Walpurgis Alliance Clan was about to begin in earnest…
What was our Icarus up to?
Marianne had stepped out again for a bit to handle internal discipline within the Pirate Union, and in the meantime—
"Jessica, current resource status?"
"Six point two million minerals, one point seven five million rare resources."
"Is the Strategic Tactics Research Lab still under construction among the annex buildings?"
"Yep. About three days left, roughly."
After checking through the basics—
"Finally time for something new to drop."
"It's about that time, isn't it."
—he was looking on with real anticipation as the Behemoth-class Mobile Growth Platform, or whatever it was called — that giant space cocoon, at any rate — neared the end of its growth cycle and looked ready to open.