The Approaching Storm (1)
Resource Mining Fleet #3 Under Attack!
Melona Clan fleets are attacking the Commander's fleet!
Resource Mining Fleet #3 returned via emergency warp
└ Ships Sunk: Destroyer ×1
…Huh?
And while a flood of those "under attack" messages kept popping up one after another, a closer look revealed something that sent a genuine spike of rage through me — this wasn't just one or two clans coming after me.
Why is it always me?!
The approaching storm. (1)
It didn't take long to piece the situation together, and once I had, the anger came boiling up hard.
These bastards are crossing the line…
And for good reason. From the damage reports stacking up in my messages, the number of hostiles hitting me right now was — at a conservative estimate — at least five or six clans.
Of course, that was still just a guess.
"Anything on the graviton radar?"
"No, sir. Nothing's entered detection range yet."
"…Hmm."
Whoever these people were, they were only hitting the forward bases and the resource zones far from home — carefully staying outside the sensor envelope where I could actually get a read on their forces.
Goddamn pieces of shit.
So for now, I ordered repairs on the resource fleets that had gotten wrecked, then issued sortie orders to the Rhodes Mercenary Group and the Avalonia Security Fleet under Lepahn and Aquarius.
"Commander, what about the Beast Faction… I mean, Princess Luca's personal guard fleet?"
"Yeah, talk to them too. In a situation like this, every extra hand counts."
"Understood."
On top of that, I blocked the security fleet that was about to launch toward the sector just because a forward base had gone down. When you don't even know how many enemies you're dealing with, there's no reason to burn precious defensive assets for nothing.
Still, looking at the six or so clan names already showing up in my messages… and factoring in that the latest update let even "Friendly Neutral" players dock at bases… there were almost certainly more clans that hadn't even registered on the alerts yet. Realistically, the number of clans trying to push into my territory had to be ten at minimum.
At that scale, combining my own fleet with the base defenses, I could not only hold the line — I could counterattack. The thought that I might stop this invasion without wasting the resources I'd been stockpiling for the Tannhäuser raid filled me with a fresh, growing confidence.
…The problem came about an hour later.
"Commander, enemy fleets detected on graviton radar!"
"Finally. So how many showed up?"
"…"
"Why the ominous silence?"
Jessica's uneasy quiet made my heart race for all the wrong reasons. I pressed her for an answer, and after a long, heavy sigh, she delivered the report in the most carefully neutral tone she could manage…
"I'll be honest with you, Commander."
"Hearing that already makes me not want the report."
"There are at least five hundred fleets advancing on us — each one roughly the size of your main force, or just slightly smaller."
"…What."
"Over fifty clan marks."
"HOEEEEEEEEEEH?!"
The moment the report hit, my brain simply refused to process the sudden shift in scale. Everything went blank.
And at the exact same moment Icarus was screaming like a fifteen-year-old middle school girl, the bridge of the Odin-class battleship serving as flagship for the Walpurgis Alliance Clans — which had just casually stomped the forward base near Avalon Fortress and was now leisurely continuing its advance — was hosting a strategy meeting of some fifty clan leaders.
Well, not hosting them in person. They had the chat window open and were talking there. And aside from the fact that their so-called strategy meeting ran more like a Discord server with orders dropping from on high…
…they were taking it seriously enough that nobody bothered pointing out how ridiculous the format was. Smooth, steady, and unhurried, the invasion of Avalon Fortress rolled on.
And maybe because — contrary to the worries floating around the alliance chat — not so much as a single hair of Icarus's fleet had shown itself, the tension that had been there when they smashed the forward bases was quietly melting away.
And into that vacuum, a kind of arrogance and premature victory started settling in.
But the players with their heads still screwed on straight cut that arrogance off at the root.
Avalon Fortress's total security fleet points added up to at least forty or fifty thousand. In other words, they'd failed to wipe out the equivalent of fifty to sixty Stage-8 players' worth of force in the opening phase. The reminder snapped the victory-drunk players back to reality, and with a slightly more serious attitude, they pressed the advance.
But while they were fixating on the security fleet, one cold, hard fact they'd completely forgotten came back to slap them across the face.
Namely…
A tactic that, even limited to once a day, made every player who ate it absolutely lose their minds. Currently Icarus's exclusive patent: the Kraken–Hresvelgr combo — point-blank strategic missile teleportation.
And the price of forgetting about it was one alliance clan leader watching every single one of his capital ships get reduced to scrap…