Armband Praise Time
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Die, you weed-clearing veteran bastards! Die, fuck! Die, fuck!
The guy had completely blackened. He was literally wallpapering the entire community gallery, throwing every kind of meltdown he could muster.
Even while spamming those posts, he locked every single comment thread—a bizarre little flourish that left me completely unable to figure out what the hell was going through his head.
Watching that mess, though, my fingers started itching. I wanted to drop a few choice insults of my own.
Jessica, who had been watching me from the side the whole time, tilted her head and voiced her doubt.
“Commander, are you planning to write something on that community?”
“Hmm…”
She never usually said a word about this sort of thing, so the sudden question made me look at her with a question mark floating over my head.
“I haven’t decided yet, but is there some kind of problem?”
“No, it’s just… this is only my personal opinion.”
Jessica hesitated for a moment after my question, then nodded and spoke with the air of someone carefully offering counsel.
“In a situation like this, if you step in, wouldn’t that just make you their next target, Commander?”
“……Hmmm.”
Once I thought about what she said, she was right. If I stuck my nose in for no good reason, I’d only pour more fuel on his meltdown. Tossing extra firewood into a blazing furnace would just get me his full-blown tantrum—and somehow I’d end up the one getting cursed out for “making it worse,” even though I was the victim.
So I took a moment to carefully consider how best to respond.
That didn’t last long.
While I was still fretting over it with the community window open, Melon’s spam posts suddenly started vanishing in bulk.
More precisely, entire pages were getting wiped at once, so a few other users’ posts mixed in the middle got deleted right along with them.
The important part was that I was watching the mass deletion happen in real time, staring at it with a suspicious look, until—
Oh right. In times like this, you just check the chat.
The thought hit me, so I opened the chat window right away. Sure enough.
Watching the belated Armband’s full-spectrum community-wide purge, the chat erupted into an untimely storm of Armband praise.
Anyway, a full week had already passed since that little side event ended.
I wanted to check how far the upgrades, ship production, and fleet normalization had come in the meantime, so I opened the status window for the first time in a while to look over my fleet.
Hmm. Fleet status is decent enough.
Even though the smaller ships—frigates and below—had been completely shredded fighting that guy whose name I’d already forgotten, a week later their recovery rate was still pretty lackluster compared to their peak numbers.
Honestly, from here on out, anything corvette-class and smaller was… how should I put it?
When the fleet made a long-range warp, they were the ones that went ahead first to secure vision and set the warp point.
And they served as a kind of dodge-tank so the destroyers and above didn’t have to take the hits. Beyond that, they didn’t really have much value left.
Even that would eventually apply to destroyers too. The longer the game went on, the more users, pirates, and—though they hadn’t shown up yet—the Space Kaiju that were about to appear would start flooding the field with massive capital ships in the late game.
Like it or not, anyone who knew that had to start preparing for it soon.
Of course, there was a reason only eight small ships had been added over more than a week.
Thinking that, I turned my eyes to our shipyard lines.
> Shipyard 1: Cruiser construction complete in 14:00:12
> Shipyard 2: Cruiser construction complete in 15:21:07
> Shipyard 3: Cruiser construction complete in 07:39:15
> 1-Hour Acceleration Items Remaining: 15
Looking at my pretty little cruiser fleet still under construction in real time, I found myself nodding in satisfaction.
Preparation had to be hardcore from the very start.
Meanwhile, at the exact same moment our Icarus was building three cruisers at once…
There was a force everyone simply called the “Veteran Alliance,” even though no one actually knew exactly who was in it or how many.
…Or so they wrote.
In reality it was a massive coalition guild formed by over a hundred players.
And inside the command center of Arcadia—who had proposed creating that guild alliance and had been stuck as guild master for her trouble—
“Shall we start sending a request for this friend to join our side as well?”
“Hmmteresting.”
“Hmmteresting.”
“Hey, for fuck’s sake, speak properly for once.”
A commanders’ meeting of the guild’s main fleet was underway, discussing the recent community chaos.
Of course, the player base’s age range was all over the place, and—
“None of my business. I like this anyway, this is it.”
…their character customizations were completely different too.
There was a commander who looked like a seventy- or eighty-year-old admiral but spoke in school-lunch slang.
“Um, even so, that’s a bit…”
“Haaaah… I have no idea when that guy’s ever gonna get his head on straight.”
A muscle-monster commander packed with so much muscle it looked like she could smash everything herself, yet who spoke like a high-school girl.
And a 140-centimeter girl with demon horns who spoke in thick Busan ahjussi dialect.
“Everyone, please calm down.”
“We didn’t gather today just to fight, right?”
There was even a commander whose voice and face matched a beautiful woman… until you realized he was actually a man.
And an Argonian maid commander who kept swishing her own tail.
It was a gathering that had completely transcended every species. If Icarus—who had never seen any other commanders—had witnessed it, he would have been left speechless with shock.
Of course, they had all been just as stunned the first time they saw one another’s appearances.
But nearly a month had passed since then, and now everyone just took it in stride, continuing these meetings as if they were completely ordinary.
And that noisy chatter of theirs eventually quieted as attention turned to the highest seat—the base commander’s chair—where a woman with long, straight silver hair cascading down sat carefully studying the command console, head bowed.
Former rank 4. Currently rank unknown.