Holding Out Is Always the Answer (2)
And without even a moment to mourn the Overseer's death…
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
"Uwaaaaah!"
Pashtura, who had been aboard the Overseer, managed to eject successfully — only to get caught in the blast and hurled straight out into open space. At this rate, there was a very real chance of turning one precious SSS-grade Superhuman into a permanent deep-space missing person, so the moment I saw it on screen I let out a raw, wordless scream.
Fortunately — truly, blessedly — one of the corvettes that had somehow survived the chaos managed to snatch her up. Pashtura would not be becoming a lost soul of the outer void today.
But that was a separate matter from the battle itself, which was growing more lopsided by the second.
The moment I committed my second wave of mercenary fleets, the other side finally seemed to remember that they, too, could hire mercenaries. On top of the forces already in the field, the remaining players scrambled to contract mercenary companies from their own bases and slam them into the fight.
Of course, any individual player other than me had a hard cap on how many mercenary companies they could hire… but when more than five hundred players scraped together every last scrap of capacity they had, the result was a mercenary armada worth over a hundred thousand points.
"Crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy crazy."
Naturally, the sight of that made me lose my mind. I frantically dumped another two-point-five million minerals and five hundred thousand rare resources in a single lump-sum payment and hired a full five hundred additional mercenary companies.
Even so — "a hundred thousand" was the polite way of putting it. In reality, more than a hundred thousand points of extra firepower had just been added to their side. The result was a dead heat… no, the opposing players still held a slight edge. From the receiving end, I was getting a masterclass in exactly what "bleeding out" felt like.
But Icarus was not the only one having those thoughts…
The leadership of the Walpurgis Coalition Clan — the ones currently fighting Icarus — had now played their absolute final card: mercenary spam. And yet Icarus, even if he couldn't quite match them, still managed to call up a mercenary force of nearly identical scale. The sight of it left them thoroughly rattled.
If the fighting continued like this, Icarus would eventually lose purely on the strength of his fleet composition — that much was clear. The problem was that their grand plan — overwhelm Rank 3, smoothly seize a Level 5 stronghold, and grow fat off the spoils — was already a catastrophic failure. Even if they drove Icarus out and took Avalon Fortress, the losses would be so staggering that recovering from them would take an agonizingly long time.
Still, the leadership had calculated that once they held a Level 5 stronghold, rear-line defense wouldn't be much of an issue, so they could just grind hard on fleet reconstruction in the meantime…
Unfortunately, a mere two hours later:
Somehow — no one could say how — the surrounding solo players had caught wind of the Walpurgis Coalition Clan's existence and were now converging from every direction to enforce the Rules of the Central Zone.
The leadership instinctively understood: the plan they had spent so long preparing was on the verge of collapsing into nothing.
Holding Out Is Always the Answer (2)
But how on earth had they found out?
Neither the leadership of the Walpurgis Coalition Clan nor their opponent Icarus had any idea…
In the end, the reason was nothing more complicated than this: the situation had been so much more catastrophic than expected that some of the clan members had completely lost their minds. That alone wouldn't have been enough to twist the whole board. But among those broken players was, of all people, one of the aides who had access to the Walpurgis Coalition leadership's secret chat room.
And when that person "coincidentally" glanced at the clan leader's chat and realized they weren't part of some friendly little social club — that they belonged to an organization with ambitions of seizing hegemony over the Central Zone, of growing into a massive clan that could eventually rival the Big Three — the truth hit them like a truck.
"Shit. If this gets out, the whole Central Zone is going to dogpile us."
"Commander, even so — five hundred people with a stronghold between them should be fine, right?"
"Yeah, no."
With their mental state already shattered, that revelation was the final straw. The player decided to desert just to save their own skin.
And while Icarus was busy fighting a one-versus-five-hundred infinite defense war, and while the players raiding him were too occupied to deal with anything else, this deserter quietly pulled back from the front line, let their fleet rest for a moment — then immediately posted a thread on the gallery and dumped the information into the Solo Players' Room, the de facto Central Zone user chat.
Once that information spread, the Central Zone players were, of course, absolutely furious.
"Oh, so these bastards dare try to build a mega-clan in the Central Zone?"
"For real? Have they lost their minds?"
"Wreck them! Kill them all!"
…And as talk like that kept flying, the player who had leaked the information started thinking it was about time to quietly bail mid-battle.
But… contrary to their expectations, reality turned out to be colder — and far more miserable — than they'd hoped.
"…So those people who said they'd smash any mega-clan that forms — when are they showing up?"
"How would I know, Commander?"
The whole story about Central Zone players dogpiling any clan that grew past ten members — was it closer to an urban legend than anything real? The response from the player base was so pitifully weak that the thought kept creeping back.
"Maybe the reason those horror stories circulate in the Central Zone in the first place, Commander…"
"Hm?"
"…is that every commander finds it too much of a hassle to enforce the rule themselves, so they spread it as a ghost story and let it self-police."
"…Ah—?!"
When the adjutant floated that analysis of the suspicious situation, the player who had been watching it all unfold suddenly wondered whether they'd been played by a handful of trolls into making the wrong call. Maybe the leak would get traced back to them, and once the clan seized the stronghold, they'd be purged for it. Their chest tightened with dread.
But just as the leaker was lamenting that they'd been completely baited by a tiny handful of pranksters…