There's Only One Thought on Everyone's Mind (2)
Obviously I wasn't about to just sit there and take that.
"What the hell are you talking about, Jess-Jess?"
"Well…"
"Latten Water Clan and Magellan Clan weren't even a proper force. They wrecked the place with fewer than four hundred players, right?"
"That's true, but—"
"Which is exactly why I've been grinding fleet reconstruction and scraping together resources this whole time — so I can throw an even bigger fleet at it."
"Is that so."
Watching me fire back without missing a beat, Jessica gave a small nod — then shoved a stack of documents across the desk at me anyway, the kind the uncles over at the Strategy and Tactics Research Institute had put together. At least look at it once, her expression said.
Of course the materials were packed with every form, graph, and high-difficulty technical term that smart people love to use, rendering the whole thing completely unreadable…
Fortunately, the moment I took the papers, an event-message-style breakdown popped up right in front of my eyes.
"Ah."
"See?"
The message might as well have said, Boss, this is impossible. Good luck. — and driven the nail in for good measure.
And if that was the internal shock, the external one hit just as hard.
Namely…
No long speech needed.
Central District players finally get a shot at a Level 7 base — so let's go milk it dry. Yeah.
<Temporary Clan Chat Link>
Wanna join, hop on that link and hit us up. Taking everyone.
We've got about 400 so far. Once we hit a thousand, we move.
Oh, and we made a temp clan so nobody teamkills mid-siege. If you're already in a clan, drop it temporarily before you come.
Out of nowhere, other players were gearing up to take the very Tannhauser I'd been eyeing for myself.
There was a whole mess of complicated stuff involved, but the short version: I got to watch them fail in real time, and fail spectacularly.
Their numbers had nearly tripled compared to the Tunguska run, and they still threw a fleet worth roughly a million Fleet Points at the place — and lost. Watching that happen, I had no choice but to throw out my old assumption.
You know, the one that went: Mercenary Corps times four plus all my fleets should put me at around 340–350k Fleet Points. That ought to be enough to crush it, right?
But contrary to what I'd been thinking, the situation was considerably more complicated than expected.
You had a hyper-elite small clan with 80+ top-1000 players, and while Magellan Clan's 300 bodies tanked as meat shields, Latten Water went absolutely feral.
Let's be real — even at Latten Water's absolute peak, they couldn't do the one-man zerg-rush thing the way Icarus can, and they still pulled off roughly 1:3 trades.
Fortress defense fleets can't concentrate firepower across the whole formation because of physical limits, so Latten Water just ran wild all over the map exploiting that.
So the formula was: hundreds of players deliberately sacrificing their fleets + dozens of top-tier players willing to take damage and dive in swinging. And even with that setup, by the time Tunguska's fleet was wiped, Latten Water had lost 90% of theirs.
Then the leftover defense installations and surviving ships came out, and Magellan Clan's main force — the ones who'd finished off Latten Water — took even more damage on top of that.
And now you're telling me a temporary clan with literally zero teamwork beyond a system-level friendly-fire block is just gonna throw itself at this and win?
Is the force trying to take Tannhauser actually comparable to the one that took Tunguska?
Sure, the fleet that shredded Tunguska's defenses was under 400 people if you're counting heads.
But trying to seize a Level 7 stronghold with barely a thousand randos still seems pretty damn risky, no?
You could tell just from the gallery reactions.
The prevailing take was that Tunguska only fell because Latten Water and Magellan didn't just join forces — Latten Water, a clan of absolute veterans, tore the NPC fleet apart, and Magellan, backstab or not, abandoned base defense entirely and committed their whole fleet for the finishing blow.
And separate from all of that…
Hmm.
Hmmm.
Suspicious.
The moment they announced they were forming a "temporary clan" to siege the stronghold, the gallery lit up with a wall of outrage: Then what the hell was the point of spending over a week wiping out an entire clan?
Of course, it didn't take long for that "temporary clan" to post a clarification of their own, insisting they were being unfairly accused.
Yep.
Rankers with at least some credibility are vouching. Deal with it.
Our goal is a stronghold any player can freely use — so everyone can suck the resources dry. Yeah.