The Walpurgis Exodus
Around the time our Icarus was boldly throwing himself into a worker rush, pouring everything into fleet repairs—
the gallery was in the middle of an unseasonable witch hunt.
Though to be precise, calling it a witch hunt would be underselling it. It was more like a gleeful, full-blown gank-fest.
[jpg of a Walpurgis-affiliated player's fleet scrambling out of a base they're abandoning], [jpg of a Walpurgis Coalition clan player's fleet sacrificing their small ships to slip the noose the second pursuit closes in]
lololol
Some of them dodge pretty damn well, and a few even punched straight through after the encirclement had already closed.
[image of a toad clutching a lit cigarette and sighing]
TL;DR goes like this.
1. About fifty clans banded together to gank Icarus, the #3 ranker, and steal his base
2. Except those fifty-odd… no, precisely fifty-three clans turned out to basically be one single mega-clan
3. So the pissed-off players and rankers all piled in and administered a little public education
4. And now, after thoroughly wrecking them and collecting a bit of resources as war reparations,
5. the culprits—the players who belonged to that 53-clan Walpurgis coalition—have all booked it, and
6. for the crime of secretly building a 500+ member clan in the Central Zone, where even a ten-man clan makes people nervous, and then using it to dogpile a solo ranker, every last one of them is still being hunted down lol
Hell, Central Zone players seem to treat it like someone finally handed them a toy they can beat on without worrying, so everyone and their mother keeps jumping in. At this point the entire clan is basically a write-off.
That about cover it?
Their ambition—to seize the world with a mere five hundred people—was admirable enough.
Unfortunately, they were no Guan Yu. Five hundred simply wasn't going to cut it.
A handful of players who read the room fast enough ditched the clan entirely and fled as free agents. Everyone else—
every last base belonging to the Walpurgis Coalition players who'd gathered to conquer Avalon was destroyed.
The survivors, stripped of their bases and left with nothing but a limited handful of ships, cobbled together a kind of "refugee fleet" and drifted on without destination.
The problem was their karma. Most of the Central Zone was openly hostile to them. On top of that, random mobs kept popping up—unaffiliated space pirates, wild Space Kaiju, the usual—to make their lives worse.
So the Walpurgis Coalition—or rather, the outfit now dubbed the Walpurgis Immigrant Fleet—scrambled and clawed for every scrap of survival they could find.
Left to their own devices, no matter what they tried, they would have ended up like countless other players before them: nameless, forgotten, forever adrift in the void.
But they had grit in the strangest places. Having survived the endless raids and hardships that followed their defeat at Avalon, they finally declared—
"That which does not kill us makes us stronger!"
"???"
—and with that, they pushed the bulk of their ordinary ships toward the Pirate Coalition as a decoy, while the gacha ships carrying their commanders, superhumans, and critical systems peeled off at maximum speed and successfully bolted for the Earth Federation.
They lost nearly half their people in the process, along with a significant number of gacha ships and superhumans, but still—
That grit and effort earned them recognition. They settled in Earth Federation territory and successfully folded themselves under Humanity's banner.
Die already, you absolute freaks.
And the news that the Walpurgis Coalition—starting from right next to Avalon Fortress, deep in the heart of the Central Zone—had punched through wave after wave of hostile players and somehow escaped all the way to the Earth Federation…
reached me through the gallery a full week after the fortress siege.
[png proof shot of the Walpurgis clan joining as a subordinate of the Humanity Clan]
The Walpurgis Coalition members who'd been hunted for breaking Central Zone rules, general scumbaggery, and cowardly dogpiling successfully escaped into Earth Federation territory three days ago.
Earlier reports that they'd been completely wiped out were apparently based on the "unmanned" fleets Walpurgis players left behind—basically most of their ships running on autopilot as decoys.
For the record, some Central Zone players are pissed at Humanity over this, but Humanity's position is a hard line: "That's Central Zone business. This is Earth Federation territory."
"Hmm."
"Is something interesting going on, Commander?"
"No—it's those humans who invaded us last week. Apparently they actually managed to flee all the way into Earth Federation territory."
"Whoa. They punched through everything from here to there?"
It was genuinely impressive grit. And they hadn't even gone in a straight line to the Earth Federation—they'd feinted toward the Pirate Coalition first, then cut a hard curve. The thought that all that tenacity had been aimed at me left me feeling oddly complicated.
Anyway. That "nyews" made it clear I wouldn't be dealing with the Walpurgis folks anymore. I decided to stop thinking about them and focus on the situation at hand.
A full week had passed since the siege ended, and in that time, both our base and Avalon had improved considerably on multiple fronts.
First and foremost: every ship that had been limping around half-wrecked or critically damaged had finally finished repairs.
With the shipyard's repair capacity alone, fixing them all in a single week would have been nearly impossible. But between the shipyard and twenty-five resource harvesters accelerating repairs on ships docked at the berthing facilities or undergoing self-repair outside the fortress, we'd pulled it off. Resources had burned at a painful rate, but every remaining ship was now pristine.
In particular, the ships I'd mindlessly shoved into the Capital Shipyard docks ahead of time—still mid-repair—got pulled back out, and with eight resource-harvester-slash-repair-ships swarming each one, they were back to full operational status far faster than expected.
And after all that…