Fifteen Gates
Meanwhile, some of them were already preparing to betray the arrangement entirely—snitching to Aurora and the clan in hopes of securing a seat for themselves later, substituting raw ambition for whatever loyalty they'd pretended to have.
It was, quite literally, a war of all against all.
Everyone had only one thought in their heads.
But for all their diligent preparations to stab each other in the back, there was one thing those players had failed to consider…
KRAAAAAAANG!!!
BOOM!
"Seraphias-class cruiser sunk!"
"Gae Bolg-class battlecruiser critically damaged! Enemy fleet is breaking through the defensive line!"
"Commander!"
"Oh, holy fucking shit!"
"Augustus-class battleship's magazine just cooked off! Damage control is impossible!"
"Goddammit."
One look at the player fleet getting blown to pieces right now made the problem obvious.
All that backstabbing talk only mattered if you could actually take the base in the first place.
To be fair, the temporary clan under Aurora hadn't skimped on preparation, and their operational plan was decent enough on paper.
They'd thoroughly studied every available guide from clans that had successfully taken bases with small forces.
In particular, they poured over Icarus's siege—famous enough that the galleries still had plenty of evidence footage—and reverse-engineered how to crack a city from his methods. Beyond that, they scoured galleries and chat logs for whatever fragmentary base-assault data the major clans had left behind.
And since these were, after all, players who'd kept their fleets alive this long, they at least understood that the backstabbing had to wait until after the siege was done…
…With that vaguely unsettling cheer, they threw themselves into the fight with everything they had.
And as mentioned earlier, their preparations weren't lacking, and the plan itself wasn't wrong.
True to the Central District players' PvP-specialized ethos—high-performance capital ships, elite few over massed many—they were critically short on small craft. But the trade-off was a swarm of cruisers and larger, so against the patrol fleets and defensive batteries alone, things looked reasonably solid.
No—more than reasonably solid. Roughly fifty patrol fleets with maybe ten battleships apiece didn't stand a chance against a player armada packing over ten thousand battleships alone. At that point, Aurora of the temporary clan and the would-be backstabbers all had rose-tinted futures dancing in their heads.
But…
Those fleets, built with blood and sweat and tears, had been under assault for barely a few hours before—
"Gryphon-class heavy battleship sunk! Sunk!"
"Commander! The supercarrier is shielding the flagship in its place!"
"Commander! We need orders, now!"
—they were getting blown apart just as thoroughly as they'd started.
Why? Part of it was the competitive psychopaths forgetting the difference between PvP and PvE. But more than that, the peculiar architecture of the Tannhäuser Gate Fortress was what left the attackers reeling.
That was it.
Setting aside every other problem, the critical failure was this: the operation to seal the gates that would spew out the main fleets had been a complete disaster from the opening move.
Take Avalon Fortress, which Icarus had captured. Or Tunguska Fortress City, taken through the joint efforts of Rotten Water Clan and Magellan Clan. Both were structures optimized for defense, with extremely powerful fortifications—but in exchange, the gates that disgorged their main fleets were concentrated in specific locations.
That was how Icarus had sealed them: using a Neranzara-class as the spearhead, he buried strategic missiles inside a massive missile spam and shoved the whole package into the gates. Tunguska, given its scale, had its gates somewhat more dispersed—but even then, only about three sites. Rotten Water Clan's hardcore veterans, grinding their control inputs to the bone, had locked them down fast.
But Tannhäuser, the target of this temporary clan, was a different beast entirely…
This wasn't a defense-specialized fortress. Its defensive installations were actually two levels weaker—comparable to Avalon. But in exchange, it had a staggering fifteen gates, more than Avalon and even more than Tunguska.
And unlike Tunguska's concentration of two or three clusters, these were scattered to every corner of the base—literally in every direction.
The temporary clan's suicide-squad players had ground their own ships to scrap, forcing gate after gate to collapse. One player even pulled off the spectacular stunt of ramming a battleship straight in and self-destructing to take a gate with him. But five remaining gates were more than enough for the main fleets to keep pouring out in a frenzy, and there was no stopping the tide from turning.
And beyond all of that, Tannhäuser had one more critical feature.
As a gate fortress by nature, it housed an enormous large-scale fleet-grade teleportation system deep inside. When the gates started falling and the internal fleets bottlenecked trying to escape through the five that remained—